One of Britain’s largest stocks of second-hand books ever amassed can be found in the unlikeliest of locations: a vast former youth hostel in a pretty corner of the Yorkshire Dales. Meticulously sorted into subject areas, from naval history to 19th-century literature, architecture to zoology, over 150,000 volumes fill some 25 high-ceilinged rooms spread over four floors. To withstand the sheer weight of all those hardbacks, the building, which began life as a prep school in c1878, must surely be as strong as a Romanesque church.
Certainly the collection has been assembled with an almost religious zeal by sole trader Richard Axe, a spry 70-something who spoke to me from the Philippines, where he lives with his wife roughly half the year. Unlike the more commercially oriented of his peers, he has sold books primarily so that he could acquire more for himself. Of the Harrogate shop he owned prior to his move here he says: ‘Its main purpose was not to sell at all, but rather to buy and increase my buying profile.’
That’s why I would make an awful book store owner. I would keep all the good stuff for myself, and then I would not read it. And when I passed on, the shrinking circle of book dealers would buy my estate and my shop by the truckload without ever thinking of poor, poor Brian who really should have at least tried to keep pace on the Story of Civilization and his plans to finish it by 2029.
(Link via Pixy at Ace of Spades HQ.)
