Bookshops of Belfast pt 2

I can't quite remember whether the APCK bookshop on the corner of Howard Street and Donegall Square became Gardiners or vice versa, but I think it was the former. Whichever, it was the source of most of the Armada paperbacks that I collected from the age of around nine or ten: long series of Enid Blyton Famous Five and Mallory Towers books, followed by the more sophisticated adventure stories of Malcolm Saville, set in real locations around England, and the family sagas of Noel Streatfeild. I can recall calculating how many different titles it would be possible to squeeze out of a book token or a (rare) five pound note, then enjoying the crackle of the orange-and-white Penguin paper bags as two or three were wrapped up for me. Children's books were in the south-west corner of the shop, which was narrow but bright, with large plate glass windows down the length of its Wellington Place frontage. From time to time however it would be plunged in gloom when the windows were boarded up after bomb blasts.

Some time during my teenage years APCK moved to Callender Street, opposite the back door of Marks & Spencers. We used to trade off patient endurance as mum browsed the clothing counters for increased time in the APCK, but it's also the first bookshop I remember visiting on my own, without a clock-watching parent. It had the advantage of being next door to the Skandia, a Swedish coffee shop and bistro-style restaurant which with its brown decor and flowered pottery mugs was the height of 70s chic. hours of scanning the shelves of APCK or kneeling on the floor sampling blurbs, author biographies and first chapters took me through Puffins and Peacocks to the Penguin adult fiction list, laced with thrillers from Granada and with historical novels by Jean Plaidy, Georgette Heyer and Margaret Irwin.

Much less time was spent in either of Belfast's more traditional bookshops. School prizes came from Mullans in Donegall Place; we were allowed to make requests which were sometimes accurately fulfilled and sometimes not when the order arrived and the prize books were stacked in enticing piles on the table in front of whichever dignitary was presenting them in the Whitla Hall of Queen's University or, later, the lecture hall of our own new school building. But Mullans was a tall, narrow shop with very little space for browsing and the shelves reached far above my head. W. Erskine Mayne in Donegall Square was similar, but a little more spacious. It was the headquarters of the Northern Ireland branch of the Puffin Club, of which I was an enthusiastic member, so for a while I did feel an obligation to shop in Erskine Mayne's, especially after the managing director of the firm hosted a wonderful Puffin Club barbecue with lots of imaginative games on the beach and in the garden of his spectacular Elizabethan-revival house in Groomsport. But I don't really associate the shop with hours of browsing.

Many very happy hours, however, over very many years, were spent in the Church House Bookshop, run by the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in its grand headquarters building in Fisherwick Place. This was on the way back to the Great Northern Railway station in Great Victoria Street, so again it was a question of making sure we left enough time at the end of any shopping trip to do justice to its extensive stock before catching the train home. I remember carpets, good bright lighting and the fact that it stocked the seductive hard-backed volumes of the Oxford Children's Library, with their vivid cover illustrations, cellophane-coated dust-jackets and delicate b/w text illustrations that brought the characters so vividly to life. I knew I ought to admire the Rosemary Sutcliffs most, especially as I was interested in ancient history, but my favourites - books that inspired me to the point of shaping and influencing my life to this day - were Elfrida Vipont's Quaker family series beginning with The Lark in the Morn and The Lark on the Wing, featuring aspiring singer Kit Haverard; and William Mayne's tale of a group of cathedral choristers A Swarm in May. I discovered these in Finaghy Library, but bought my own copies in Church House.

Gill & Macmillan's History of Ireland in several paperback volumes was probably bought, one at a time, from the University Bookshop or from Gardiner's in Botanic Avenue, my bookshops of choice in my late teens and in university holidays, along with numerous other books about history or English literature to provide extra quotes in A-level essays. Even after I started working in Hatchards in Piccadilly no visit home was complete without a visit to one or other of these shops, usually both, to top up my growing library of Irish poetry, fiction, biography and history. A copy of Fortnight magazine and one or two more abstruse pamphlets would usually be added to my purchases in order to give me a feel for how the province's cultural life was developing in my absence.

And then there was Waterstone's, established and generously stocked in the mid-80s in a beautiful building in Royal Avenue, not far from Castle Junction. My brother was its first deputy manager and even had the first part of his wedding reception - champagne and cake - on the mezzanine floor.  He moved to England not long after; some years later fire destroyed the shop and now Waterstone's trades from much reduced premises in Fountain Street. But the Dublin-based Eason's, once in Ann Street, is now in a more prestigious site in Donegall Place and I'm relieved to find it carries a reasonable selection of Irish-interest books. This may prove to be a lifeline once the University Bookshsop really has closed its doors for the last time. And I can't finish without mentioning No Alibis in Botanic Avenue, which specialises in crime fiction. Its presence can't quite make up for the loss of Gardiner's on the opposite side of the road, which seems to have vanished without trace, but No Alibis is quirky and characterful with friendly, knowledgeable staff and a good range of books within its subject area, attractively displayed. That's what I'm looking for in a bookshop.

Bookshops of Belfast pt 1

The news that the Bookshop at Queens, Belfast, is to close at the end of this month shocked me beyond measure - both as a matter of principle, because a well-stocked academic bookshop with knowledgeable staff seems to me to be a prerequisite of any university campus, and at a personal level, because the University Bookshop, as I have never ceased to think of it, played a significant part in shaping my life.

I can vividly remember the summer afternoon when I overheard an exchange between a customer and a member of staff that inspired my ambition to become a bookseller. The customer asked for a copy of Daniel Deronda, but was offered Robinson  Crusoe (because it's by Daniel Defoe... ). The confusion was a rare lapse by a member of the University Bookshop's staff, but it was a light-bulb moment for me. I could do this, I thought. I had great difficulty in restraining myself from putting the correct book in the customer's hand. Half-way through my university course, I was unsure what I wanted to do when I graduated. Suddenly I realised that my love of bookshops, and my desire for a career that involved reading and writing could be combined.

The story of how I found myself behind the counter at Hatchards, Piccadilly, two years later deserves a post to itself,  but that moment of epiphany in Belfast was truly life-changing. So I owe the University Bookshop a lot. Returning this spring to spend an extended period in my home city for the first time since 1978, I was relieved to find the shop relatively unchanged, still stocking such a quantity of Irish fiction, history, poetry, biography and politics that on my first two-hour visit I didn't even get to the history and politics shelves, let alone beyond the Irish interest section. So it was a bitter blow to discover that my happy browsing and purchasing were about to be terminated.

The cirumstances of the closure have been reported in The Bookseller
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/belfast-university-bookshop-close.html
and its consequences thoroughly explored in a blog by Jenny Muir, a lecturer at Queen's, who also suggests an attractive model for the shop's possible future
http://eastbelfastdiary.blogspot.com/2011/06/do-we-need-to-lose-bookshop-at-queens.html
In a BBC interview, poet Michael Longley described it as 'the centre of cultural life at Queen's University and in Belfast... part of our literary heritage. It specialises in Irish literature, it supports small local presses and it promotes work by people from here. But it's not just literary, it has been an oasis of civilisation throughout the Troubles, a focus for our more generous instincts, a centre where books that analysed our troubled society were launched and highlighted.'

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 Having lived away from Northern Ireland for so long I can't claim intimate knowledge of Belfast's literary scene but its bookshops feature prominently in my memories of childhood and teenage years.The first to make an appearance is 'Mr Lyttle's' second-hand shop in Malone Place, a run-down Victorian terrace on the corner of Sandy Row and the Lisburn Road. The terrace has now been gentrified and the end block rebuilt as residential accommodation, but when I was a child Mr Lyttle's double-fronted shop with its old-fashioned jangling doorbell stood facing the tiny triangular park that divides University Road from the Lisburn Road. Visits with my dad when I was about ten were an occasional Saturday-morning treat, most often for some reason just the two of us. My future grammar school was just over the road,  but I don't recall after-school visits to the second-hand bookshop - perhaps it wasn't open on weekdays, or had closed down by then. It had just one narrow room, stuffed so full that even for a child it was difficult to squeeze between the shelves. The large windows caught the morning sun, so slow-moving stock was always faded. In my memory our visits were usually on sunny mornings, when the warmth would intensify the smells of dust and old paper. Mr Lyttle sat in a corner to the left of the door, rarely stirring other than to take our money, a gently benevolent man of relatively few words.

What did I buy? Hard-backed adventure stories usually, with titles like The Affair at Invergarroch, most of them dating from eras long before I was born, many of them printed on thin brownish wartime paper. Set in obscure Cornish or Scottish fishing villages, they whetted my appetite for travel, for derring-do, for solving mysteries and for the rituals of clubs and gangs. School stories, also dating from our parents' generation and earlier - the Abbey School books by Elsie J Oxenham were great favourites. And history textbooks, especially if laden with indented paragraphs, bold subheadings and engraved black-and-white illustrations, not to mention the pencilled annotations and underlinings of previous readers. The History of Northern Ireland by D. A. Chart fell delightfully into this category, and was carefully 'backed' with a cut-up plastic bag so that its scholarly cover remained visible before taking its place on my bookshelves.

Treasures of similar ilk were to be found in the War on Want bookshop on Rugby Road, behind the university, another shop that I associate with visits on autumn Saturday mornings with dad, partly because in those days before the reopening of the railway line through the university area it was a bit inaccessible, so we tended to go by car. It too has now vanished, the shop unit turned into a house.

To be continued