Wednesday, 24 December 2014

Maggs Bros

Maggs Bros

This entry concerns my love of books.  Warning is hereby given.  If you're not a fan of literature then I'd say you'll want to skip ahead.  Alternatively, I hear that YouTube is fun, lots of videos.  Some of them have Monster Trucks!  Yeah Bro!  I know right.  Yeah those rims are. Tricked. Out.  Nah, it's all  good, I'll join you when I've finished bettering myself as a human being.

That paragrapgh does read as rude and dismissive, but I'm about to start being a massive fanboy, so its hardly an arrogance thing.  Anyway, for everyone else still here.  This place... I cannot even describe the wonder of this place.


Stepping away from the Berkely Square Gardens in Mayfair I made my way into Maggs Bros, a fine example of a mid-eighteenth century town house, and once upon a time the home of Britain's shortest-serving Prime Minister.  It was mid afternoon, and by means of an intercom system, I was welcomed by a young lady called Fuchsia into into my own vision of paradise.

I asked politely if I was able to look around and take some photographs, not expecting much in the way of hospitality.  Instead of being removed immediately, Fuchsia asked if there was anything in the catalogue that I'd like a closer look at while I waited for somebody to become free enough from doing a job that I would happily die fighting grizzly bears to have a chance of doing.  I attempted to peruse the catalogue she gave me calmly.  I would have stood a better chance with the bears.

Hundreds of manuscripts and novels, poetry and plays, in first edition, dedicated, signed and monographed by the very minds that brought them into being.  The most significant literary figures of the age, bound paper and ink, each with the touch of history upon them.



I have held the very same collection of atoms that Hemmingway once handled, if only for a moment.  I have seen the cursive signature of Miller.  I decided then and there that if I ever become a man of means, I would live the most frugal of lives, in the basest of homes, surrounded by the inventory of this place.

Fuschia, growing more radiant by the second, introduced me to George*, who was no less handsome and far more dashing (only considering that it's a gendered word nowadays), who took me upstairs to show me around more of the stores secrets.  The room was beautiful, and so were the manuscripts and gilded covers that it contained.  Much of the second floor's inventory was also presumably, double, triple or septuple the price.  He gestured to a set of large covers on a table next to the window,  and we discussed its contents as I took a close angle shot of the cover.



We were about to move on before my guide, after pausing thoughtfully for a moment, politely asked me to delete that particular shot.  The item in question was for a private buyer.  No mention was made of any monetary value of the set in question.  But we both knew what he meant by it.

Maggs Bros has an undeniably charming presence, but to think for a moment that it is a simply quaint bookstore would be to do it an injustice.  In 1932, they made history, purchasing a rare Gutenburg Bible and the famous Codex Sinaiticus (an utterly beautiful ancient handwritten copy of the Greek Bible) from the Soviet government, the latter for the highest price ever paid for a book at the time, 100,000 pounds.  In 1997 they aquired a copy of the first book ever published in England; The Canterbury Tales as imprinted by William Caxton for the substantially higher price of 4.2 million.



They also bought Napoleon's penis (yes, really), in 1916, and sold it on in 1924.  Which I find hilarious, it must have been a weird eight years.  Maybe I too should be watching Monster Truck Madness.

I do not believe that I have ever been happier in a given place.  It is entirely possible that due to the half hour I spent at Maggs Bros. the joy I may one day feel at the birth of my first-born will be notably diminished by comparison.  In conclusion, I would like to pay my sincerest thanks to all the members of staff who helped me along my way.  

And also to the bishop who exorcised the No. 50 of its ghost population in years past.  Yes, to add to everything else, this was once upon a time the most haunted house in London.


I can see why, I'd never want to leave either.



* I think it was George, but to be honest, I was too busy hyperventilating to take a lot in at this stage.

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