Sunday, April 22, 2012

A Bookstore Devoted Solely to Winston Churchill?


Yes.

From a story in the Paris Review...

But 55 East Fifty-second’s marble lobby, inside the triangle-shaped office building with a Gotham-style green-glass facade, conceals an equitably valuable treasure in the world’s only standing bookstore dedicated to the works of England’s former prime minister, Winston Churchill—Chartwell Booksellers. And while the tiny bookstore might seem at odds with its location, it actually makes perfect sense that one of history’s best-dressed leaders would have a store in one of the world’s most upscale shopping districts.

“He’s more highly regarded in America than he is in England, even today,” Barry Singer, the proprietor of Chartwell, tells me as we sit on a wooden bench surrounded by the spines of hardcover books—some encased behind glass, others invitingly out in the open. There are new editions of Wodehouse and Borges, a first-edition copy of Wilde’s The Sphinx from 1894, some books of photography featuring shots of famous race cars and jazz musicians, but mostly there’s Churchill—lots and lots of ephemeral odes to and by Winston Churchill.


No comments: