John Saumarez Smith
Guiding spirit for more than 30 years of Heywood Hill, the bibliophile’s favourite bookshop in Mayfair
JOHN SAUMAREZ SMITH, who has died aged 78, was for 34 years the managing director and presiding genius of Heywood Hill, the tiny bookshop in Curzon Street, Mayfair, which from its foundation in 1936 has been the favoured haunt of bibliophiles from across the Englishspeaking world.
In an age of mega-stores and Amazon, a bookshop in the chandeliered sitting room of a Georgian town house, stacked from floor to ceiling with a mix of new titles, out-of-print and antiquarian books, with no sales or discounts, might have seemed a lost cause – particularly as customers were more likely to find a collection of African short stories or a book on 19th-century French topiary than a TV spin-off or a blockbuster by Jackie Collins.
Nor did Saumarez Smith, who joined the enterprise in 1965 after graduating from Cambridge and took over as managing director in 1974, ever adapt to the digital age. By 1995, Heywood Hill boasted a microfiche reader and a fax machine, but bills remained handwritten, and it was only after the turn of the century that computers were admitted (for his assistants). Even then its notepaper gave no email address.
Under his benign stewardship, however, Heywood Hill remained a sanctuary for the book lover. The keys to his success were his scholar’s passion for books (he not only knew the books he sold, but their full publishing history), and his phenomenal memory for and interest in his customers and their likes and dislikes. “If some old bag he had never seen before asked, in Latin, for a rare gardening book, there are two certainties about John,” the publisher Michael Russell observed. “First, that it would take him about 40 seconds to identify the book correctly, and second, it would take him about two minutes to recognise the old bag as the Queen of Iceland.”
A Wykehamist, described in a profile as having “the reticent yet attentive ear of an old-school diplomat ... or perhaps one of le Carré’s more donnish spies” (though his serious expression would often break into a mischievous smile), Saumarez Smith saw his job as akin to that of an “old-fashioned family doctor” – counsellor rather than salesman. He would dissuade customers from buying books whose glowing reviews he considered undeserved, and would use his knowledge of their previous choices to steer them towards other volumes they might enjoy.
He would often put aside a copy of a book he thought might appeal to a particular customer, and those who lived abroad – or in rural seclusion – depended on him to send them the best of recent publications. “He possesses the uncanny ability,” observed a transatlantic admirer in The New York Times, “to send out of the blue the exact book one’s been wishing for, so closely does he follow his customers’ interests.”
His contacts enabled Saumarez Smith not only to locate out-of-print works, but also to purchase the contents of important libraries. These included that of the combative Tudor historian AL Rowse, whose books were enlivened by marginal exclamations of indignation and disgust. And such was the demand for his catalogue From the Library of Enoch Powell that he had to reprint; after nine days only one book (Asian Drama by Gunnar Myrdal) remained unsold.
He also sold a set of Winston Churchill’s four-volume life of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, written in the 1930s, that had once resided at Windsor Castle. The first volume was inscribed by Churchill to “the Prince of Wales”; the second to “HRH Prince of Wales”; the third to “King Edward”, and the fourth to “the Duke of Windsor”.
Saumarez Smith edited two collections of correspondence, which gave a fascinating glimpse into 20th-century literary London through the perspective of the distinguished, and sometimes dysfunctional, bookshop staff.
The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street
(2004), published in the centenary year of the birth of the shop’s most famous former employee, Nancy Mitford, who had worked there from 1942 to 1945, consisted of correspondence between her and the shop’s founder, George Heywood Hill, during the war – and afterwards, when she lived in France but maintained a close interest in the shop until her death in 1973.
This was followed by A Spy in the Bookshop: Letters between Heywood Hill and John Saumarez Smith 1966-74
(two volumes, 2007), which chronicled a ferocious battle for the soul and future of the bookshop which ended in victory for Saumarez Smith and for literature lovers everywhere.
John Hugh Saumarez Smith was born in the Indian hill station of Simla on May 23 1943, the oldest of four children of William Saumarez Smith, a senior official in the Indian Civil Service who would be involved in arrangements for Partition, and his wife Betty, née Raven. A younger brother is the art historian and museum director Sir Charles Saumarez Smith.
John’s paternal great-grandfather, William Saumarez Smith, was the Primate of Australia, while his great-great-great grandfather, Joseph Smith, was William Pitt’s private secretary. On his mother’s side his grandfather was the theologian Canon Charles Raven, who became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Master of Christ’s College and vicechancellor of the university.
In 1947 the family returned to Britain, William Saumarez Smith becoming involved in church administration, latterly as appointments secretary to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
From Winchester, where he was a scholar, John Saumarez Smith read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Before going up, thinking that he might like to go into publishing, he took a temporary job in the science department of the Cambridge bookshop Heffers.
One day a student rushed in and explained that he had just come from a wonderful lecture and urgently needed a copy of a book entitled The Phytosociology and Ecology of Cryptogamic Epiphytes. Saumarez Smith identified the publisher, established that the book cost 63 shillings, and said it would arrive in two weeks’ time. A few minutes later another equally breathless student came in, looking “for a book called …”
“Not The Phytosociology and Ecology of Cryptogamic Epiphytes, by any chance?”, Saumarez Smith ventured. The effect on the customer was so gratifying that he resolved to go into the book trade.
He joined Heywood Hill as an assistant to the splendidly named Handasyde (“Handy”) Buchanan, who had been taken on as a partner in 1945 by the shop’s founder, a gentle, bookish old Etonian. Buchanan had previously worked for another antiquarian bookshop in Curzon Street which had been bombed out; his wife
Mollie was already working in Heywood Hill in charge of accounts.
But Buchanan turned out to be a pompous and patronising figure, whom Evelyn Waugh once described as possessing all “the concealed malice of the underdog”. Before long he and the even more malicious Mollie had succeeded in alienating both staff and customers. Hill retired in 1966 and retreated to Suffolk rather than endure the couple any longer.
His main contact thereafter was his young “spy in the bookshop’’, Saumarez Smith (to whom, much to the Buchanans’ resentment, Hill was vaguely related by marriage). The Buchanans did all they could to make Saumarez Smith’s life a misery. Yet he determined to stick it out, letting off steam by sending front-line dispatches to Hill.
The Buchanans’ hegemony began to crumble after the arrival in 1971 of a new owner, David Bacon, an accountant and customer of the shop who quickly dispensed with the services of Mollie after a blazing row. When her husband retired in 1974, Saumarez Smith replaced him as
‘He possesses the uncanny ability to send out of the blue the exact book one’s been wishing for, so closely does he follow his customers’ interests’
manager. “It does make a difference,” he wrote to Hill, “when everyone in the shop is HAPPY.”
Hill had described the shop at its best and busiest times as “like an eight-hour cocktail party without any drink”, and so it became once again under Saumarez Smith. “There is something quite incestuous about it,” he observed. “If I read Anthony Powell’s memoirs, I will find a lot of our customers, including – rather embarrassingly – myself, misspelt throughout.”
Regulars during Saumarez Smith’s time included Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, John le Carré, whose character George Smiley sets off “for Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street … with a merry heart” in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Sir Osbert Lancaster, who caused a panic every Christmas when looking for a suitable present for the Queen Mother.
In fact the clientele was drawn from a wider social milieu than what Saumarez Smith referred to as the “carriage trade”. And in his later years he had to put up with City trader types who came “looking for something flash-looking that costs a lot”.
His literary tastes were wideranging. As well as promoting the works of such writers as Anthony Powell (he co-edited a collection of correspondence between Powell and Robert Vanderbilt) and Alice Thomas Ellis, he kept up healthy sales of shop favourites including Patrick Leigh Fermor, James Lees-milne and Anthony Trollope (he was honorary secretary of the Trollope Society). He also introduced British readers to the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, author of The Deptford Trilogy.
Over the years he took on a series of poorly remunerated but bookish assistants, many of whom, inspired by his traditional approach to bookselling, went on to make their own names in the independent book trade.
In 1995 Saumarez Smith came up with the idea of a prize for lifelong contributions to literature after a despairing telephone call in 1994 from Jock Campbell, one-time chairman of the Booker group, who had been instrumental in founding the Booker Prize. “James Kelman has just won the Booker Prize,” Campbell complained. “Am I mad or are they? Why do they keep giving this prize for books nobody wants to read?”
The Heywood Hill Literary prize, funded by the Duke of Devonshire, who had bought the bookshop in 1991, was presented for several years at an annual ceremony at Chatsworth, to which Saumarez Smith would shepherd a herd of London literati to mingle with local worthies at a splendid lunch in a marquee on the south lawn. Winners over the years have included Patrick O’brian, Penelope Fitzgerald, Michael Holroyd, Jane Gardam, Michael Frayn, Hilary Spurling and Mark Amory. (It is now the London Library Life in Literature Award, supported by Heywood Hill.)
Away from the shop, Saumarez Smith wrote reviews, served as literary editor of Country Life from 1990 to 1996 and, from 1991, as honorary librarian at Chequers. In 1996 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature, which meant a lot to him.
After standing down as managing director of Heywood Hill on his 65th birthday in 2008, he continued to sell books as an independent and even acquired a computer.
In 1969 he married Laura, daughter of the architect Raymond Erith, who survives him with their two sons.
John Saumarez Smith, born May 23 1943, died November 15 2021