A Buzz in Bloomsbury

It was meant to be a Grand Day Out – a day of absolute indulgence, wandering around some of my old haunts from the days when I worked in WC1 and then on to do some credit card damage in Liberty’s.

Great Russell Street is in the heart of Bloomsbury and boasts a fair number of publishers. We were within a few brisk paces of the British Museum when Julie, my friend cried,
‘Oh! What a waste!’
She was pointing to a skip. It was a big, rusting hulk of a thing, piled high with stuffed, black bin liners and…….BOOKS. We both made a swift dive towards it. We could hardly believe what we were staring at. It was stacked with piles and piles of books! Brand New Books! WOW! We thought this cannot be true. We hauled out a few. They were large and glossy. Tomes, stuffed full of photographs on architecture, design, art deco, lofts, minimalism, staircases, typography. We glanced around us……where had it all come from?
Suddenly another bin bag was thrown onto the pile. The culprit looked a little….dusty!
‘Are these yours?’ we asked, indicating the books.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We are the publishers and we are moving offices. So we’re having a clear out. Help yourselves.’
OH BOY!
Well, whilst we were rummaging through one end of the skip, making a pile of ‘definites’ and ‘possibles’ and wondering which one of us would clamber into the middle of the skip to get at those books just out of reach, we noticed that someone else had paused beside us.
‘Are these…..?’
‘Yes,’ we said. ‘Help yourself’
Next several students were up to their elbows. They didn’t ask to join, they just threw themselves, heart and soul, into the skip. Then a cyclist stopped, pulled out a book on architecture, tucked it under his arm and cycled off. More passers-by stopped and joined in. They were like bees around a honeypot. The buzz had come to Bloomsbury…well a skip in Bloomsbury. Julie and I changed ends. Our piles had already reached an unmanageable weight. These were BIG books, remember.
One rather lovely guy said he had to come over to see what was going on because from across the road the sight was bizarre…..smartly dressed people rummaging in a skip. We thanked him for the compliment on our clothes. He said he was not wearing his spectacles. Hmmm…. Then another guy said he would enjoy reading these books, especially as so many of them were in German, his native language.
Ah, yes, that was a SLIGHT downside to our find. Many of these magnificent books were in French and German as well as English. But hey….we can still look at the pictures, can’t we!
Sated, we decided to continue on our way to Liberty’s.
Ah…..BIG PROBLEM. Heavy books and lots of them.
‘We’ll have to buy a trolley,’ suggested Julie. ‘A cheap one.’
Unfortunately we didn’t find one cheap enough by Julie’s definition until we were halfway along Oxford Street. By then our arms were about ten feet longer than they had been at the start of the day and we were struggling along the street like a couple of primates.
However, a trolley we found and bought and it did well to survive a gruelling day being hauled around Liberty’s.
Actually the trolley did verywell. By the end of the day it was an ex-trolley. Its wheels were no more. One was in shreds, the other too hot to touch. The weight it had managed to transport across London and back out to the sticks had been far beyond its capabilities. We will remember it fondly.

We also give our thanks to the publisher who gave so many people so much pleasure.
Laurence King, Publishers extraordinaire. Your books are wonderful! Thank you……And may our arms one day resume their normal length.