Book Review: Once Upon a Tome
Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller by Oliver Darkshire (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023).
If you look upon rare books and rare bookshops with a sense of awe and reverence, Oliver Darkshire is here to put a stop to that.
Darkshire, as he recounts in his new book, Once Upon a Tome, stumbled into the rare book world when he was “young and adrift in London,” searching for a job. After answering an advertisement from Sotheran’s, he was taken on as an apprentice at the self-described “Oldest Bookshop in the World”—“which was almost (but not quite) the truth,” Darkshire clarifies. As we learn on the amusing journey he takes us on, there’s a lot about the world of books and bookselling that is not quite as it appears. But it’s a lot quirkier, stranger, and more fun than you’d ever expect.
“Fun,” let me emphasize, is my word, not Darkshire’s. I’m not sure he thought it was fun when he was sent to retrieve something from the Other Cellars, an underground storage space some distance from the actual bookshop, with a pervasive stench, a menacing spider, and a mysterious woman who had taken up residence in the middle of it all. I’m very sure he thought it was not fun when, while he was on a home visit to assess a book collection, his hostess expected him to launch himself to the top of her extremely high bookshelves, using only a tiny stepladder. “She had a stare,” he recalls of this woman, “that made you want to go home, head to bed early and wake up as a giant beetle, never again to be burdened with the responsibilities of polite society.”
These and other “misadventures” may not have been fun to experience, but thanks to Darkshire’s keen powers of observation and steady flow of wit, they’re great fun to read about. It seems that behind the scenes of even the most dignified and respectable old bookshop, life is an endless scramble by a quaint collection of characters to make some sort of profit off one-of-a-kind and often ill-conditioned items targeted to an eccentric crowd, using the most antiquated methods to keep track of it all. Bookselling, Darkshire explains, is not the career for anyone who really wants to make a splash in the world.
But as all of us book-lovers know, the business of books—anything having to do with books, really—is infinitely worthwhile. And Darkshire, for all his joking about the endeavor, wholeheartedly agrees. When people ask him if they should store an old and valuable book somewhere out of sight for preservation, he offers advice both philosophical and practical: “Why are they buying it? If the answer has anything to do with enjoying it, then no, I don’t recommend they stick it in a lightless cell never to be opened again, because books are a form of art, and art was made to be perceived. … Keep the books away from fire. Don’t throw them in a puddle. And remember to take delight in them.”
Readers will need no urging to take delight in Darkshire’s own book. It reminds us all over again—as if we needed to be reminded—just how fortunate we are to have these magical things called books in our lives.
(Image copyright W.W. Norton & Company. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced reading copy. The U.S. edition of Once Upon a Tome releases March 14. All quotations were checked in online versions of the book at Amazon’s British site and at Google Books.)
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