The sad end to a bibliophile's dream

Brighton’s last secondhand bookshop has gone. Colin Page in Duke Street follows Brighton Books in Kensington Gardens and the Studio Bookshop in St James’s Street into the land of fond memory – all gone this year.

“I suppose in future we’ll have to buy online,” said Dave, kicking his toe forlornly against the shopfront. “Which isn’t the same.”

It isn’t anything like the same. If I think of all the books I’ve bought in this shop over the years, I can safely say that hardly any were books I was actually looking for at that moment. Take, for example, this little vellum-bound 1892 edition of Horace’s poems in Latin, Horati Opera, with frontispiece drawn by Alma Tadema, tissue guard, top edges gilt, that I found downstairs last year for £5; or this leatherbound two-volume first of Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850) that I found, also last year, in an obscure nook and paid £10 for; or this first edition of Max Beerbohm’s first book, the ludically titled The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896), which had once belonged to Christopher Isherwood’s grandfather, which cost me all of £3.50. (Check out, if you like, on Abe, Amazon or other of the digital portals that masquerade as shops, what these items normally fetch.) I would never have bought any of these online, as I wasn’t looking for them. But when I saw them I knew I had to have them.

Colin Page was so delightfully cheap, especially downstairs (but even the expensive books upstairs were often cheaper than one might have expected), that it was a mystery why the shop wasn’t packed out with eager purchasers. And, like all good secondhand bookshops, it had its touch of quirky idiosyncrasy. The shelves seemed to extend beyond human reach, and I suspect there were tomes on the tenth or eleventh shelf up that had been there for decades. Again, you had to negotiate a steep corkscrew stair to access the basement, and if you turned right at the bottom there was a curious cupboard or closet or cubbyhole in which, years ago, you could climb (it required some agility). In that cupboard in 1998 I found my first edition of Graham Greene’s The Lost Childhood (1951); it cost £1. Latterly that cupboard was kept locked (probably for safety reasons), but on a recent visit I found the door ajar and, peeping in, found it still lined with books, probably the same as in 1998, and probably at the same prices.

In Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt (1969), Henry and his aunt drink at the Cricketers and nearly opposite he spots “a second-hand bookseller, where I saw a complete set of Thackeray for sale at a very reasonable price.” I guess this was K.J.Bredon’s antiquarian department in Prince Albert Street. Long gone, of course, like William J.Smith’s emporium in North Street (“150,000 volumes in stock”), where John Cowper Powys in the 1890s bought leatherbound classical folios; like Combridge’s in Hove, with its mauve wrapping paper and hand-cranked telephone; like Holleyman and Treacher in Duke Street, where the bibliophilic Denis Healey liked to browse; like Noel Brookes’s chaotic shops in Queen’s Road; like Tall Storeys and Brimstone’s in St James’s Street, and innumerable others. All gone, never to return.

Clarification: Readers have pointed out a number of second-hand bookshops in Brighton and Hove are still going strong. These include: Brighton Books in Kensington Gardens; Raining Books and Wax Factor in Trafalgar Street; Invisible Books in Snoopers Paradise, Kensington Gardens; bookstalls in the Upper Gardner Street market; the Amnesty and Oxfam bookshops; Ubu Books in the Open Market; the Smallest Bookshop in Brighton; and Savery Books at Fiveways. We are happy to clarify this.