A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to travel to Europe to visit our daughter in London and friends in Paris. Both cities are beautiful and steeped in history. We spent a day in Paris to adjust to the time change and took the train to London the next day. I am amazed at how efficiently this high-speed train moves. Real food on real china while traveling effortlessly at 180 mph.
It may have been on our fifth day in London that our daughter took us through one of her favorite little neighborhoods, Marylebone. If Walt Disney had designed a London neighborhood, I don’t think he could improve on the charm of this place.
The streets are very narrow with limited traffic. Shops and pubs are plentiful, and the whole place is bustling with activity. It reminded me of the Richard Scarry book Busy, Busy Town. A baker, a barber, a butcher, all within the same block, just like in the book. Conspicuous in their absence were Lowly Worm and Gold Bug, but other than that, it was almost identical.
My head was on a swivel as I was trying to take it all in. After a meat pie lunch at an upscale pub, we continued our walk to one of her favorite places, Daunt Book Shoppe. I’m sure it’s just Daunt Books, but I took a little literary license with the shoppe thing. It must be known that I love a good bookstore. In fact, Horizon Books in downtown Traverse City is one of my favorite places. I have been a customer for fifty years, which is crazy to think about.
I could spend loads of time in a good bookstore and walk out with an armful of books. There is nothing like holding a real book and smelling its pages. I do read a fair amount of them on my Kindle as well, for practical reasons, such as being able to read several books at a time without dragging them all around. It’s also perfect for travel.
We walked into this bookstore, and I was immediately in love. The scale is quite intimate, and the way the books are displayed is unlike that of most bookstores. The traditional bookstore displays all the bestsellers prominently up front to entice shoppers to start there. There will be sale books on tables, displayed so as to draw shoppers deeper into the store’s confines. Daunt Books was the exception. It was all business. In fact, I had to search deep into the bowels of the store to find the best sellers, and even then, they were tucked away, almost as an afterthought, “Oh yeah, people may also want to read these.” This is a proper bookshop, run by proper readers. I was at home.
I overheard one of the employees telling a customer about the place’s history, and I liked it even more. It began as a travel bookstore in the mid 1800’s. There are three floors of books, which are organized by country. This is how they are displayed as well, a century and a half later. I went to the Spain section to see what I could find about the Camino. There were hundreds of books in the Spanish section. They include travel, novels set in Spain, and non-fiction books related to Spain. I have been looking for this type of arrangement all my life. There have been times when we were traveling to a new country, and I have looked for novels set in that location. This is a great way to learn about a location’s history and sense of place. Google will sort them and give you lists, but it is primarily focused on the most popular books and links to places where it can make money. There is no diversity in what the search engines will reveal; it is monochromatic.
I found such a diverse palette of options that I kept grabbing books to load in my arms. I have seen all of the Camino books… until I stepped into Daunt Books. I found half a dozen that no search engine had revealed to me. I felt like I discovered the cave of wonders, and all of these books were jewels twinkling in the light of my presence. I grabbed more and took pictures of the covers of the others I left behind.
Next, I ventured to the section on Romania (the country of my father’s birth), which has always been mysterious to me. You see, my father’s family escaped just before the fall and never looked back for fear of having to return. My dad left when he was five and was adamant that he would never go back. I hope to travel there soon and retrace my family’s steps in their village. More on that in the future, I suppose.
Romania has had a challenging past, to put it mildly. Only in recent decades has it become safe for tourists. I am nostalgic for a place that I have never been. My grandma made me love the country through her cooking. To this day, I have never enjoyed food as delicious as hers. I perused the books on the shelf, and most were about their awful history and terrible leaders, but I did find a few that held my interest enough to buy.
Every country or region of the world had its own little alcove and its own collection of books. I wanted to spend several more hours traveling the world from these three historic floors of books, but couldn’t. I tried to capture the essence with a photo, but it doesn’t do it justice.
We headed to the front of the store to make our purchase, grabbing a few here and there as we went. Due to the quantity of books, they gave us a coveted Daunt Books tote bag. English celebrities such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Helena Bonham Carter, and Keira Knightley, and others have been spotted with their Daunt tote bag, so who am I to say no? Honestly, I wanted this memento to remind me of the pleasure I enjoyed at this very special shoppe in a quaint little neighborhood in central London.
We did a fair amount of museum visiting and garden walking, but this store was one of the highlights for me. If you ever find yourself in London, do yourself a favor and head to Marylebone and drop in on my friends at Daunt Books.