A BOOKSHOP OF ONE’S OWN : HOW A GROUP OF WOMEN SET OUT TO CHANGE THE WORLD
By Jane Cholmeley
Mudlark. 376 pages. Ł16.99. ISBN 978-0-00-856104-6
Reviewed by Jim Burns
I’ve always loved bookshops. Any kind of bookshops, ranging from those
belonging to a big chain such as Waterstone’s to independent shops, whether
selling new or second-hand books or a combination of both, and even those
back-street outlets which were frowned on by the respectable but which sold
often hard-to-get pulp crime novels and westerns alongside some dubious
magazines. Over the past seventy or so years I’ve prowled them all, hunting
for the obscure, occasionally finding it, and picking up other things along
the way. I once had a conversation with a man on a flight to Spain who said
he couldn’t understand my enthusiasm for bookshops and
wasn’t it easier to just order over the internet? He’d missed the
point. Browsing in shops means you sometimes come across the unknown, the
unusual or the unexpected, and it’s much more fun to do that than wait for
the post to arrive. Yes, we all now do order over the internet out of
necessity, the number of bookshops having declined in the past twenty years.
But you have to know what you want and there aren’t any surprises when it
turns up. As I write this review the latest
Times Literary Supplement has
been delivered and there’s a note lamenting “the depleted state of the
Charing Cross Road”, once a happy hunting ground for those who delighted in
descending into basements to see what they could discover.
One of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road in the 1980s and 1990s was Silver
Moon, proudly proclaiming itself as a feminist establishment and aiming to
cater primarily for what was becoming a developing readership for relevant
literature. The Women’s Movement had been growing in various ways since the
1960s, and the time seemed ripe to Jane Cholmeley and her partner Sue
Butterworth for a bookshop in Central London that would stock feminist and
lesbian literature and provide a place where women could meet and mingle
with the like-minded as they looked along the shelves for their favourite
authors or in anticipation of coming across writers they had only heard
about but wanted to read. There was an existing feminist bookshop,
Sisterwrite, but it was located in Islington. Charing Cross Road, still
noted in 1984 for its range of bookshops, seemed to be a better spot to
attract passing trade as well as those who would make a special journey to
find what they wanted.
For Jane Cholmeley, daughter of the “curate at St James’ in Weybridge” (her
mother was the daughter of the churchwarden), opening a bookshop was
something of a step into the unknown. She had been sent to boarding school
when she was seven, then to an Anglican convent school when she was
fourteen. University (not named) followed and a year’s scholarship at a
Methodist college in Lynchburg, Virginia. Cholmeley describes herself as, in
those days, “diligent, obedient, even timid”. Back in England she worked as
a secretary at Yale University Press, moved on to Macdonald Educational and
met Sue Butterworth, who became her partner.
When the pair decided to open a bookshop that would be largely dedicated to
selling books by women writers they knew that they would not only face
specific problems relating to their special interests.
There were
also more-general difficulties that
any new business has to deal with. Where could they acquire suitable
premises, how much would the rent be and the cost of conversion? On the
question of premises Cholmeley says, “Door after door was slammed in our
faces. Estate agents wouldn’t send us details or wouldn’t show us
properties, and it became increasingly clear that the fifty-ninth branch of
MacDonald’s was welcome but two middle-aged women with a business plan, a
dream and no track record were not”.
That they did eventually locate themselves at 68 Charing Cross Road was a
tribute to their perseverance, and also to the financial help they received
from friends and relatives. And sympathetic treatment by Greater London
Council (GLC), keen to retain Charing Cross Road as a centre for bookshops,
though that organisation was under threat from the right-wing government of
Mrs Thatcher. Cholmeley has interesting things to say about the battles with
bureaucracy and other matters of a similar nature. She also tells of the
problems encountered when taking over what she describes as “a hovel, a dark
and dingy hovel. It was full of encrusted dirt, which we convinced ourselves
was “character”. The wiring looked pre-war – Boer War – and the lighting was
rubbish. We crawled around with torches”. There were rickety stairs and no
heating. As a wanderer up and down Charing Cross Road from the late-1950s
onwards I must have been in that bookshop without taking too much notice of
its condition, but I was a veteran of dingy, badly-lit premises and climbing
over piles of old books. There was even a certain romanticism attached to
the experience, especially if I came across something of interest.
However, when Silver Moon
opened in 1984 it was clean, well-lit, and had its shelves stocked with
brand new books. Its next-door neighbour was Collet’s left-wing bookshop, a
regular calling-place for me whenever I was in London, so I was aware of
Silver Moon. I can remember going in to enquire about possible American
reprints of 1930s women radical writers like Tillie Olson, Tess Slesinger,
Josephine Herbst, Meridel le Sueur,
and Myra Page. The staff were friendly and helpful if usually a little
baffled by the names. But I was conscious of the fact that by devoting their
stock to mostly feminist and lesbian literature they were doing something
valuable. The 1980s were still a time of open misogyny and prejudice, as
Silver Moon was soon to experience.
There were obscene telephone calls, insults in the street and sometimes even
in the shop, and Cholmeley herself was the victim of a physical attack. The
police weren’t always helpful or sympathetic, though they were quick to
visit the shop when a poster attacking the notorious Section 28 of the Local
Government Act was displayed in the window. Briefly, Section 28 said that
local authorities should not “promote homosexuality or publish material with
the intention of promoting homosexuality”. I recall that it was a
contentious issue at the time, and aroused strong reactions among various
groups of people, not all of them necessarily right-wing in their general
political opinions.
As a way of attracting people to Silver Moon a series of readings was
organised, initially in the basement of the shop but, as audience numbers
grew, in outside centres. Cholmeley gives a long list of those who read,
including such well-known names as P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Adrienne Rich,
Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. What comes through in the
accounts of the readings is the way that both performers and audiences
responded in kind. The Women’s Movement had been expanding and people were
rightly becoming more supportive of each other, and more assertive in their
demands to be treated with respect. It
was still a struggle. Cholmeley
quotes from a report by the male chair of Westminster
City Council (Conservative controlled) Library Services
sub-committee, who objected to a publication “where emphasis was given to
books on feminism......it is felt that it is political to emphasise an area
of society which many people do not agree with and in many cases strongly
object to”. Cholmeley
comments “Haven’t you come
across it again and again? Challenging the status quo is ‘political’ but
maintaining it is not”.
Silver Moon built up a solid reputation as a major feminist bookshop, but
ran into the sort of problems that many independent shops came up against in
the 1990s. Orders from libraries, essential for shops lucky enough to have
them on a regular basis, declined as local authorities suffered cutbacks in
their funding. The abandonment
of the Net Book Agreement (with publishers and booksellers agreeing not to
sell below the fixed retail price) in 1994 opened the door for Amazon,
supermarkets, and large chains like Waterstone’s to cut prices. It was also
noticeable that Waterstone’s and other big shops had “jumped on the
bandwagon” and started to display special sections of radical and, feminist
writing. And the Internet was
beginning to impose itself on how people
bought books. Silver Moon, like other bookshops, had operated a
mail-order service, but couldn’t compete with the low prices that Amazon
offered. Add to the problems that
I’ve referred to a factor such as the steep rent increases imposed by the
Soho Housing Association, which had taken over when the GLC was abolished,
and the writing was on the wall.
Silver Moon closed its doors in November 2001. It was a time when other
independent outlets were giving up. Many of the “alternative” bookshops that
I used to visit as I travelled to various towns and cities were no longer
there. Even a major shop like Compendium in Camden Town threw in the towel.
I’m not sure that the changes outlined in the previous paragraph were
completely responsible for what happened. There had been a shift in how
people saw society. They were more individualistic and the dreams and hopes
of the 1960s and 1970s had dissipated to a large degree. There were still
struggles to be engaged in on behalf of particular groups but perhaps a
broader feeling of challenging the status quo no longer seemed worthwhile.
One simply looked after one’s
own interests.
A Bookshop of One’s Own
is an engaging book. Jane Cholmeley writes clearly and has a sense of
humour, but also a sense of anger at some of the situations she had to deal
with both as an individual and as the owner of a bookshop. Her life wasn’t
all smooth sailing, either from a personal or business point of view. That
she survived it all is a tribute to her belief in what she was doing when
she and Sue Butterworth took the decision to open Silver Moon.
.
. ,