On the same afternoon as I wandered into Waterstones Piccadilly, I also had a very nice half hour wandering Hatchards down the street, and today I present to you the fruit of my trip. Hatchards has been a bookshop since the last years of the eighteenth century and is London’s oldest bookshop. If you’re a historical romance reader, you’ll be familiar with the name as bookish heroines are always dropping in there to buy books. Sadly it does not have a romance section, but it does have some other stuff going for it!
It won’t be there any more, because the auction is over but I couldn’t not mention the Freddie Mercury window that they had – as they were selling the auction catalogue book (and may well have been the only place to get it other than Sothebys). Other than that the downstairs is pretty much what you would expect from a long established bookshop – lots of serious fiction and non-fiction, which as you know is not my thing, so I’m not going to bother you with pictures of that. What I am going to show you is their crime section – which while not quite as big as the Waterstone’s Piccadilly one (which takes up the other half of the big front room that the romance section is in) but it is one of the biggest I’ve seen in central London (much bigger than Foyles Charing Cross Road) AND has the added bonus of also having some collectable second hand books as well as the new stuff.
I’m starting with this picture because I know most shops have tables of books, but most of them don’t have antique-looking dining tables full of books – if i was to guess how they were picking stuff to go on here I would say it’s the accessible end of detective, but with some wildcards thrown in . I was pretty pleased with how much of this I had read to be honest – including (but not limited to) The Christie Affair, The Maid, The Grantchester series, The Eyre Affair, The Mary Russell Mysteries, Death Goes on Skis, the Richard Coles and the Richard Osman.
This is the start of the alphabet – it goes around from your left as you walk in from the front – and as you can see it’s got a good selection of the classics you’ve heard of – like Margery Allingham’s Campion series, the long running cozy series like M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin and Hamish MacBeth, with the thrillers that are too scary for me and everything in between. And on the end you can see the expensive collectible stuff…
And you’ve got the same mix at the end of the alphabet – including the biggest selections of Maisie Dobbs paperbacks that I’ve recently seen, most of the Nicola Upson Josephine Tey mysteries, some Patricia Wentworths and The Three Dahlias along with a Jo Nesbo that’s clearlyin the wrong place!
As well as being in the right place in the alphabet so to speak in the crime room, there’s more British Library Crime Classics in the classic fiction section at the front of the first floor (you can see the Wodehouse and the Agatha Christie in the background) – including a whole bunch that I’ve written about – including Murder of a Lady, Death of a Bookseller, the Cheltenham Square Murder, These Names Mean Clues and more.
I just wanted to throw this in too – it’s the historical fiction selection – which has everything from Georgette Heyer, through the C J Sansom Tudor murder mysteries and the Andrew Taylor Restoration ones, with all the literary fiction bits in between!
And finally, they’ve also got a pretty good selection of the pretty Terry Pratchett Hardbacks that I’m not meant to be buying but find very hard to resist…
Have a great weekend everyone!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 