Published: 01 July 2010

IN 1966 I was 18. I had just been fired from my first job in an advertising agency and was at a loose end. My stepfather had a warehouse in Parkway where he ran a magazine and book wholesaler. I had an idea, one that was to set the course of my life for the next 40 years. 

We would open a Bookshop. The Regent Bookshop. 

The book trade back then was a very different animal than it is now. While there were a few chains that were known for books, Smiths Menzies etc, there were no megastores other than Foyles and, more importantly, no discounting which meant that an independent bookshop could compete with large stores. 

We started very modestly, opening up the Edwardian shopfront and stocking up with Penguin classics and Pelican paperbacks which were the non-fiction side of paperback marketing. 

We must have been crazy. Camden Town in the middle Sixties was solidly working-class. There was no other bookshop for miles, and with good reason – no one read books. 

We opened to resounding indifference from all sides, so we sold sweets and cigarettes to get people through the doors and gradually things changed. Parkway was also changing. 

One Saturday morning my usual undisturbed peace was shattered by the sound of a West Indian kettle drum band. Carnival in Camden?  

A new boutique had opened at the top of Parkway. Dudu was to become the darling of Camden’s budding hippy culture and brought a new kind of customer to the street. 

My next-door neighbour was Robersons, a venerable art shop with mahogany fittings from 100 years before, and Rowney Easels. They were suddenly confronted by hippy chicks looking for face paints – culture shock!

The book business prospered, in a small way. The top end of Camden was gentrifying. Gloucester Crescent was already being parodied by its residents: Alan Bennett, George Melly and Jonathan Miller and, usefully, they were all buying books. 

There were times when I was given running examples of Beyond the Fringe sketches performed by Bennett and Miller with expletives and annotations – wonderful. 

While Miller would enjoy his celebrity and entertain fans in the shop, Alan would avoid coming in if his latest play was advertised and hide at the end of the building if there was a chance of recognition. He became a great champion of the shop in later years and spoke up for independent booksellers when we eventually closed.

Over the next four decades I was privileged to see the growth of some great writers, some of whom I had known before they were discovered.

Beryl Bainbridge used to work at Belloni’s bottle factory at the corner of Parkway and Albert Street. She also had a small job at Duckworth’s the publisher in Gloucester Crescent where she became friends with Anna Haycraft, the wife of the MD – the rest has been told many times, but out of the dusty drawer came the first novel and now, Dame Beryl!

In the first few years in Parkway I was lucky to meet some of the greatest writers of the 20th century, some who will be read forever; others who may come and go with fashion.

Sir Victor Pritchett was already quite old when we first met and was accepted as Britain’s foremost short story writer. He had a slightly worrying habit of talking to you while smoking his beloved pipe and then putting it in the pocket of his tweed jacket while still lit. 

I have a picture in my mind of him leaving the shop trailing smoke while Lady Pritchett battered his coat with a newspaper. She later had that pocket lined with asbestos, but unfortun­ately, and I suspect to be perverse, he changed pocket. I did have a waterspray handy but never had the nerve to use it. Lovely man.