HERE BE BOOKS
From the
outside this looks more like an ordinary bookshop. Along with a selection of
books, there are faded maps on display in the small window, so you might expect
a healthy travel department within. But a closer look reveals the maps are of
imaginary places.
From the
counter, just inside the door, you can pick up a map of the shop itself. The
shop is only tiny but the map lovingly details where different genres and
writers can be found. Navigating the tightly packed shelves using the map gives
the illusion of holding the bookshop in your hands, or else of wandering around
inside a map.
Every book
in the shop, fiction and non-fiction, has a map in it. ‘If it doesn’t have a
map we don’t carry it,’ says owner Bill Rowley, who is also the author of the
hefty Mapping Fantasy: a Survey of Fictional
Cartography. This means there is a large stock of fantasy, a
good selection of science fiction, but also a decent crime section: ‘Golden Age
whodunits often include a map,’ notes Bill. Then there are all the history
books, geography books, astronomy books, sociology books. In some books the
maps are discreetly inked – they might be tucked in at the front or back – in
others they materialise unexpectedly on page 72, or they fold out from the
middle in Technicolor to many times the size of the book. Bill is fond of
saying ‘You can’t get lost in a book that has a map’. But I think I disagree.
THE BOOK GARDEN
You enter
the book garden through a wooden gate, set in a low stone wall. Even in winter
the garden is a tangle of plants and trees. A maze of paths leads you through
archways into the hush of an orchard, and then on to a bridge over a trickle of
a stream. At first it’s hard to see the books, but they’re there. Waiting on
shelves in the hollowed out trunks of trees, shielded from rain by glass
shutters with hinges buried deep in the wood; in small slate chests between
mossy stones; alphabetised in rows underneath benches. There’s a rusty
wheelbarrow full of books on the lawn. A bird table is packed on all four
sides, another nearby laden with nuts and crusts so as to keep on good terms
with the birds. When the weather is fine, piles of books are left out beside
the path.
The stream
dribbles into a pond, or it appears to. But if you look beneath the clouds
reflected on the glassy surface you’ll know to kneel, brush aside the
overhanging ferns, and lift the lid so you can dip into the basin of books
below.