We speak to some of the most famous book shops in the capital, on a magical London street.
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00:00 This is Cecil Court, one of London's hidden gems. Its nickname is Booksellers Row,
00:06 with bookshops on the street that are over 100 years old.
00:11 I think it's a rather lovely thing, you know, there aren't that many bookshops
00:16 concentrated into one particular area in London anymore, and although Charing Cross
00:20 Road used to be full of the most exquisite bookshops all the way up and
00:25 down Charing Cross Road, this is now the one tiny area that's left, and we were
00:30 the original, this bookshop in particular, was the origins of Foyle's Bookshop,
00:34 which was the largest bookshop in the world at one point, but which is now a
00:39 little bit further up on Charing Cross Road, but it started in our shop.
00:43 So it was founded in 1989 by a man called Kenneth Fuller, and we've
00:49 specialised in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass ever since we
00:53 opened. We have an original Dalek from 1975, and we buy and sell all sorts of
01:01 different rare children's books dating back to the late 17th, early 18th
01:07 centuries right through to now. We have a lot of people who come in asking about
01:11 Harry Potter or Grimm's Fairy Tales or the Moomin books, and we have plenty of
01:17 those examples as well as many other things, so it's a lovely bookshop to work in.
01:22 At the moment we have a lot more people bringing books into the
01:26 shop to sell rather than the people want to buy. Well, we're in a
01:33 recession. It's the most exquisite book, it's Grey's Elegy, illustrated by a man
01:40 called Owen Jones, but it has the most exciting, most beautiful cover, which
01:47 looks like carved wood but it's actually leather, tooled leather, and it was
01:52 published in 1842, 1846, and it's just one of the most exquisite illuminated
01:58 manuscripts I've ever seen. It was published as an illuminated manuscript
02:02 but it is printed, but it has the most delightful work in it. I'd be heartbroken
02:08 if someone wanted to buy it. I love
02:12 sitting on some of the stock we have and I enjoy it. Yeah, so Watkins Bookshop
02:18 started 130 years ago down on the Strand near Trafalgar Square and moved to this
02:24 location about a hundred years ago basically, and they've been doing pretty
02:29 much the same sort of books which are esoteric, occult, comparative religion and
02:34 all the sort of connected subjects around those. People who love this type
02:40 of subject, they definitely know Watkins and we are one of
02:46 the three bookshops of London. Also Treadwells and Atlantis Bookshop are both
02:53 up by the British Museum, so we cover similar subjects, but we
02:58 very much are proud of the range of our material.