Roaming London's Bookshops

At the beginning of this month, I spent a week in London. I’d been planning the trip since the fall, and in the midst of sketching out my itinerary, I made sure to pick out several bookshops to browse over the course of my stay. I rented a flat around the corner from the British Museum in the neighborhood of Holborn, in the borough of Camden, which put me within a four-block walking radius of several booksellers.

First was The London Review of Books shop, right on my corner, complete with its own tea shop and outdoor seating area, and home to a vast range of genres and book review quarterlies. (The London Review of Books is published fortnightly). I popped in three times over the course of the week.

In the opposite direction was the Atlantis Bookshop, an independent shop specializing in magic and the occult, tarot cards, incense, and various other related accoutrements. The shopkeeper, dressed in silky garb, with purple hair and a row of stars tattooed over her left eye, was having a conversation on the phone, and I happened to over hear a snippet: “If they had any sense at all they’d bask in your reflected glory and get on with it!”

Bookmarks, another shop in the immediate vicinity, specializes in left-leaning, social issue-focused, and occasionally radical texts. I noticed there were flyers posted in the windows for various social causes, and books by and for every racial minority, women’s issues, and so much more.

Venturing further out into London, I made a special trip west to Marylebone to find Daunt Books, perfectly catered to my taste for travel writing. If the collection alone wasn’t enough, the space itself boasts gorgeous oak architecture and an enormous vaulted skylight, making browsing their extensive selection of writing from and for every place imaginable even more cathartic with the sunlight streaming through. [Note: I experienced surprisingly good weather in London.]

On Sunday, in the midst of a trek around the East London neighborhoods of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and Spitalfields, in the boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, I sought out and stumbled upon a few more shops. Making my way southwest from the Columbia Road Flower Market, I wandered down a neat little side street covered in murals and found Artwords Bookshop. With books and magazines on contemporary visual culture, fine art, graphic design, and fashion, I felt as though I discovered a treasure trove. I slowly perused their selection, pouring over books about keeping things fresh as a graphic designer and how “selfie culture” and the infiltration of photography into our everyday lives has reshaped our perception of the world around us.

Later, I found Brick Lane Bookshop, which was unfortunately much less interesting than I’d expected, amplified thanks to the crush of crowds swirling around the market tents up and down the street outside. Down the block, I checked out Rough Trade East’s selection of pop culture related titles, and a table of casual reader’s staples inside Old Spitalfields Market.

One of my last stops was the famous Notting Hill Book Shop. Never having seen the namesake movie myself (I know, I know), I at first found it odd that a small group of tourists were taking turns snapping selfies in front of the shop, but soon realized what I was I missing when I spied a wall of film paraphernalia inside. The selection was fairly ordinary, and I was soon pushed out of the way by a delivery service dropping off a dozen boxes of books.

Honorable Mentions:

The massive Forbidden Planet London Megastore had the most extensive sci-fi/fantasy/manga section I have ever witnessed. I even made a video of it for Frank so he could witness the magnitude.

The last stop on my Muggle’s Tour of London (of course I booked that!) was in the middle of Cecil Court, the inspiration for Diagon Alley. Famous on its own for book shops, I counted seven: a few antique and rare book sellers, a children’s shop with a poster of the illustrated version of Harry Potter right in the window, and Watkin’s Books, longtime seller of spell books, among other things.

McSorely's Wonderful Saloon

In sporadic moments of interest over the last year, I have been chipping away at Joseph Mitchell’s collection of New Yorker essays Up in The Old Hotel. The first in the anthology is McSorely’s Wonderful Saloon, Mitchell’s character study of McSorley's Old Ale House, the oldest Irish pub in New York City, and its patrons. This past weekend, I finally sought out the bar for myself and wrote of my experience:

April 6, 2019

Javier has been slinging two-for-two darks and lights here for twenty-five years. The two legendary brews, made in the basement during prohibition, supposedly taste exactly the same now, even after being passed around through half a dozen breweries in the city.

The group portrait on the wall behind me includes two men with notably fake mustaches; there are playing cards pinned to the ceiling. There are endless things to look at on the walls in here: The décor is exactly the same way Bill McSorley left it, the memorabilia bolted in place to preserve his father’s bar. Newspaper articles and awards and military caps and helmets and buttons above the center archway and Native American faces peering out from behind the bar and wishbones from decades of Thanksgiving turkeys hung over the center of the chandelier. Relics from the long, storied history of the Bowery.

I feel as though I stepped both back into the past and into an alternate universe. Time passed strangely as Frank and I sat there in the corner of the front room, ordering round after round and making friends with the visitors from San Diego and Los Angeles seated across from us; Mike and Chris, brothers. The cheese plate is comprised of thin slices of probably Monterrey Jack and a sleeve of saltine crackers. I like the continuous clink of glasses as the tenders of the rooms constantly collect empties and return them to the bar.

The woman with grey hair and dark eyebrows and a white collared shirt is forever cleaning glasses behind the counter and then setting them out to dry. She looks immaculate in such a time-worn establishment. Forty years ago, neither she nor I would have been allowed in here; now she’s permitted to work the counter and I’m permitted to drink and wait in line for the ladies’ room. The sawdust on the floor keeps me from slipping up after seven half-pints.

Andy Warhol: By Hand

On Sunday, January 27, I attended the opening of New York Academy of Art’s Andy Warhol: By Hand. I was surprised and delighted to find that I was the only patron in the main gallery of this tiny, out-of-the-way art school in Tribeca – of which Warhol was a founding board member – and I relished in the absolute silence as I took my time absorbing each and every drawing on display. I have never before, and likely will never again, experience an empty gallery in New York City.

I have paid Andy Warhol a great deal of attention over the course of my life as an artist. I have written research papers and book reports about him, read about his life, work, and social scene (and hangers on) in New York, and always keep an eye on the Decker building in Union Square, the last site of his Factory. I have watched documentaries, attended exhibitions, and carry his more famous works around in the form of several canvas tote bags. You could say I’m a fan; inexplicably drawn to anything Warhol.

However, in all my research, his drawings, some of his earliest works, rarely come up. The exhibition featured still lifes; sketches of hands, feet, and genitalia; portraits; landscapes from travels; animals; and various commissioned works for advertisements. Apart from the artist’s self-portrait, all of these drawings were new to me. The current Warhol retrospective at the Whitney (for which NYAA’s show was planned to compliment) also features some lesser-known works, but not to the magnitude of this much smaller exhibition.



Monday, February 11, I attended NYAA’s panel discussion hosted by David Kratz, President of the Academy, speaking with Vincent Fremont, curator of the exhibition and former executive studio manager of the Factory, and John Giorno, performance artist, former Warhol model, and star of Warhol’s film “Sleep.”

From left: NYAA President David Kratz, Vincent Fremont, and John Giorno 

 During the discussion, I gained an insight into Andy Warhol that only those who had known him could have provided:

Vincent met Andy at Woodstock in 1969. He and a group of friends came to the city soon after and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. He interviewed with Andy the next day and was appointed executive studio manager of the Factory. Vincent relayed that Andy was a different person to everyone he knew, with many different layers, and that Andy was an “energy gatherer,” exuding a magnetic pull that drew so many different types of people to him. Accessible to the press, Andy understood commerce but never “sold out,” making the claim that “business is the best art.” Andy preferred to listen and record others speaking rather than speaking himself. Vincent met Andy after Valerie Solanas’ assassination attempt and noted that this event was catastrophic to the artist, affecting Andy psychologically and stifling his work for a long time afterward: he no longer went to Max’s Kansas City, a favorite haunt; he photographed his scarred body, over which he wore a corset for the rest of his life; and as death was an abstraction to Andy, the trauma caused confusion of what was real and what was not.

As for Andy’s drawings, Vincent explained that some of the pieces, especially those done while travelling the world were created as visual journals. A small heart drawn on a portrait was an indication that Andy cared for the person he was illustrating, and he referred to nude portraits as “landscapes,” a fact I really enjoy. A majority of the drawings on display were done from life, with the exception of several illustrations of children copied from photographs in LIFE Magazine. In Vincent’s words, Andy looked at the world more differently than anyone else.

John met Andy in 1962, and described the artist as kind, gentle, simple, and brilliant; a force in the art world because the things he was doing were being done for the first time. John enjoyed Andy’s mind: any time Andy said something interesting, John would write it down and make up a question for it, like a backward interview, and called the series, “Andy Warhol Interviewed by a Poet.” John, a gay rights activist, mentioned that the abstract art scene in the 1950’s was extremely homophobic, and Andy was rejected from the Tanger gallery for being gay, but as Vincent said, Andy soon became a force in the gay art scene. John believes the self-portrait on display, made toward the end of Andy’s life, may have been precognition, and anticipation of his own death, and that the hair of his legendary wig sticking up may be symbolic of Andy’s belief that the “best way to leave your body is through the top of your head.”

John said, “Andy’s art is autobiographical and a reflection of his mind,” and also, “Artists talk to you, but they’re really talking to themselves about what they’re [creating].” I am always hungry for new insights and perspectives, especially if they can impact any preconceived notions I’ve developed. Listening to these two men expound upon a man both so public yet shrouded in mystery, explaining not only his work but his carefully curated self-image, was a great privilege.

© 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Artwork courtesy Private Collection