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| The Burntwood bookshop, as seen on Google Street View: these days, it's a B&B but still owned by the same guys. |
Memories of a bookshop…
In the collective
memory of those who were around to see it, the summer of 1976 was a
stunner, nay a ‘scorcher’ as the popular press of the day no
doubt assured its readers. What’s less well remembered is that 1975
ran it very close, with several unbroken weeks of hot, sunny weather.
But it’s to the summer of ’76 that I return this time,
specifically the last weekend in June.
My diary for that
year informs me that Sunday June 27th was the ‘2nd
after Trinity.’ That’s as maybe: for me, it was little short of
an epiphany. I’d been chasing old books for a couple of years by
this time – not great literature, you understand, but its
antithesis, ie. anything remotely connected with an old and, by
extension, good television programme. Anything pre-1970 was
automatically good, as far as I was concerned (although I wouldn’t
have extended that definition far beyond the somewhat narrow remit of
filmed adventure series and sitcoms).
The main problem
with collecting old books as a hobby was finding suitable sources of
supply. Jumble sales were a good bet, and in the mid-70s could
usually be relied upon to turn up one or other of the many Gerry
Anderson annual spin-offs. Book fairs offered occasional paperback
tie-ins of The Man from UNCLE and The Avengers amongst
others, but such affairs were few and far between. Around 1974 I’d
located a small secondhand bookshop in Wylde Green on the fringes of
Birmingham, which had proved an excellent source of vintage Giles
cartoon annuals, and I was constantly on the lookout for similar
establishments.
In the first few
months of 1976 I sent away for a catalogue of secondhand book
dealers: this proved to be a typewritten and mimeographed affair,
stapled together in the manner of a school magazine. Most of the
advertisers were too distant to be of any use, but there were a
couple close to home. On Saturday 12th June, a blandly
overcast day, I persuaded my dad to drive myself and my brother over
to Burton-On-Trent where there was not one but two old bookshops. One
of them was a ramshackle single-storey building, the other a more
conventional shop where modern ‘remaindered’ books were sold
alongside a selection of older items. Neither shop yielded much of
interest: I picked up a Bonanza annual (later discovering such
items to be ten-a-penny in the world of old books) but generally the
trip was a disappointment, a dull affair for a dull morning, and it
was a long time before we went back.
By Sunday 27th
June the weather had improved: we didn’t know it but we stood
poised at the brink of an oustanding summer. That morning, while the
Sunday dinner was cooking, we set off under cloudless blue skies to
investigate another bookshop not far from home. Royden Smith was an
antique dealer on the edge of Burntwood, near Lichfield, and his
shop, a converted cottage, comprised a small front room of vintage
nick-nacks, from which several other rooms opened out, these other
rooms being given over to shelf after shelf of secondhand books.
Having lived in Lichfield until the age of six, the trip had a
pleasingly nostalgic quality, and the roads are little changed even
today.
Perhaps the
greatest novelty of all was the fact of the shop’s opening hours.
In the mid-1970s, hardly any shops opened on a Sunday, barring petrol
stations and newsagents. Had I looked further afield, I might well
have discovered similar shops keeping similar hours, but to me, the
‘old bookshop in Burntwood’ was unique. Royden Smith, a character
straight out of Round the Horne, greeted us warmly, and on
learning of our quest to locate old childrens’ books, directed us
to investigate the stables to the rear of the premises.
Aside from
ourselves, the place was deserted. A back door led out into a cobbled
yard strewn with odd items of antique farm machinery, rust-pocked
garden furniture and chimneypots. Under the brilliant June sunshine,
a soporific silence held sway. The yard was surrounded by
outbuildings, the largest of which was a former stable of two
storeys. Dust motes swam in the sunbeams as we stepped inside. What I
saw in there stunned me (I was easily impressed at the age of
fifteen, but this was a genuinely remarkable moment). We found
ourselves in an Aladdin’s Cave – nay, a Tutenkhamen’s tomb –
of old books. Annuals dating back to the 1940s lay piled on every
hand, whilst the walls were lined with hardbacks and paperbacks of
unguessable antiquity, some of which had most likely lain unread
since before the war. Almost immediately, I picked up a near mint
copy of the first Man from UNCLE annual, an item I’d never
previously seen. Multiple copies of the 1969 Saint annual were
also available, and duly gathered up, along with Stingray, Z
Cars and a handful of paperbacks. We returned to the front
of the shop with our arms full. None of the annuals was priced at
much more than twenty or thirty pence, while paperbacks were to be
had for even less. In retrospect, I regret passing up a 1940s Beano
book (now worth several hundred pounds), but at the time it seemed a
strange, alien artefact from an era long before I was born. May dad
forked out for all the items, and Mr. Smith was pleased that we’d
had a fruitful trip, even though he can’t have made much more than
a couple of pounds on the deal. The next visit would not be long in
coming…
In the months to
come, Royden Smith’s shop (I only learned his name many years
later) would prove a rich source for Giles annuals, Gerry Anderson
items and untold other artefacts. The only time I ever raised an
eyebrow was when, in the 1990s, I asked if they had ‘anything on
Nöel Coward.’ Royden
and his partner were always charming, the former in a fairly
old-school camp manner, and are still going strong as far as I’m
aware, having converted their premises into a guest house. The
bookshop was still trading into the early part of this century, my
last visit coming around 2002, but it’s that first visit that
remains imprinted in the memory, coming as it did in the first weeks
of what would turn out to be a record-breaking summer. Nothing else
ever quite topped it: the sheer excitement of knowing we’d stumbled
upon such a treasure trove feels almost dreamlike in retrospect.
Clearly, no one had gone there before us in search of 1960s annuals,
allowing a huge stash to accumulate.
That whole weekend,
in fact, held something of an epic quality for me; and I don’t
think it would be overstating things to make the claim that this
specific moment in time was when nostalgia for old television series
really got started. On the Saturday evening, our local ITV station,
ATV, had embarked on a series of summer repeats of nostalgic old
television, in response to a lively discussion on the letters page of
the Birmingham Evening Mail. Suddenly, people were sharing
their memories of old telly and, instead of complaining about
repeats, wondering why we couldn’t have more of them. This kind of
thing had never happened before, certainly not in my experience, and
the resulting repeats of American series including 77 Sunset Strip
and Rawhide would lead directly to ATV’s most important
repeat broadcast, The Prisoner, at the end of August that same
year.
The simple reality
is that The Prisoner was one of the few British-made series of
the 1960s to which ATV still possessed broadcast rights. Such titles
were generally made available for three screenings, under terms
negotiated with Equity, and by 1976 most of the classic ITC series
had enjoyed their full quota, Strange Report, broadcast from
March of that year, being one of the last available to ATV in the
Midlands. Responding to the deluge of letters requesting old
programmes, ATV announced, via the pages of the Evening Mail,
that The Prisoner would be making a comeback later in the
year. For all that it was on its third outing, that repeat run would
ultimately prove to be more important and influential than the
original 1967 broadcast.
I think it’s fair
to argue that it was this single repeat screening which kickstarted
the whole TV nostalgia industry as we know it today, and which
continues to keep me in gainful employment. Fans who came together as
a result of that Prisoner repeat would discover a shared
interest in similar items from the back pages of television, film,
comics, you name it. Many of them would go on to become the creators
of new generations of entertainment, others the custodians of the
past (I’m aware that I may be starting to sound rather like Tom
Baker’s Doctor arguing the case for not destroying the Daleks...
which, if you think about it, is exactly what the BBC ended up
doing.)
For me, then, it
feels significant that, in the space of a single weekend, ATV kicked
off their Play it Again series of old telly while, some twelve
hours later, I opened the door on a goldmine of nostagic
publications, all of them relating to old television programmes.
That peerless
summer of 1976 was about to enter the record books, but for me, it
will always be topped and tailed in the memory by old telly…
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