FOR COMPLUSIVE COLLECTORS & THEIR FRIENDS: 2/4: Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller by Oliver Darkshire (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Misadventures-Rare-Bookseller/dp/1324092076/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Welcome to Sotheran’s, one of the oldest bookshops in the world, with its weird and wonderful clientele, suspicious cupboards, unlabeled keys, poisoned books, and some things that aren’t even books, presided over by one deeply eccentric apprentice.
Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd (est. 1761) to apply for a job. Allured by the smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap, Darkshire was soon unteetering stacks of first editions and placating the store’s resident ghost (the late Mr. Sotheran, hit by a tram).
A novice in this ancient, potentially haunted establishment, Darkshire describes Sotheran’s brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic), its joyous disorganization, and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old-fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause the computer to burst into flames. As Darkshire gains confidence and experience, he shares trivia about ancient editions and explores the strange space that books occupy in our lives―where old books often have strong sentimental value, but rarely a commercial one.
By turns unhinged and earnest, Once Upon a Tome is the colorful story of life in one of the world’s oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling, where to be uncommon or strange is the best possible compliment.
1872 Roughing It by Mark Twain
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I In The World. I'm John Bachelorette with Oliver Darkshire. He is the author |
| 0:10.3 | of a new book once upon a tome. It is extremely well written and it is charming, but at the |
| 0:15.0 | same time, it's a world that I did not know existed. That is, inside a rare booksellers |
| 0:22.2 | shop. You enter into this and I kept having moments thinking I was entering into a Twilight |
| 0:27.8 | Zone episode. That the 21st century would disappear and I would be in the 18th century |
| 0:33.8 | and all these books would be new. Oliver had a first day at Sutherans answering what |
| 0:40.1 | looked to be an opportunity for an apprentice. Oliver, can you take us to that moment that |
| 0:44.9 | you opened the door? Your experience is what you saw, what it felt like. Thank you. |
| 0:51.0 | Well, initially, I tried to open the wrong door. There are two, the double door coming |
| 0:55.2 | to Sutherans and they keep one locked at all times for literally no reason. So I opened |
| 1:00.1 | that one and I slammed into it and then I embarrassed, feeling embarrassed on myself, walked |
| 1:04.8 | into the second one. The atmosphere hits you like a wall as you come into an old book |
| 1:09.1 | still like that. The books muffled the sound. So you can hear the traffic, the noises |
| 1:14.4 | were screaming on Picadilly and then you enter this one. It's just silence and that smell |
| 1:18.1 | like that bellicore, the whistfulness of old books and they call it. It just hits you |
| 1:22.4 | like a physical object almost because you've stepped into a completely new or old environment. |
| 1:29.0 | But everyone is working quite studiously around you almost like you walked into an academic |
| 1:33.2 | environment or a museum or something. And you were there to be an apprentice. Now that is an |
| 1:40.6 | unusual occupation compared to what our system is here on the other side of the Atlantic. What does |
| 1:46.8 | it mean? What does it mean that some of your salary, which was Antiquarian, is going to be |
| 1:53.3 | picked up by the Antiquarian Association? How does it work for you? Gosh, so I've been to |
| 1:59.6 | shit really just means that you're expected to learn on the job and that you might go into it |
... |
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