The name ‘Candle Lane’ harkens back to the days
before a certain Princess Victoria visited Shrewsbury, upgrading the street where candles had been made to the more upmarket 'Princess Street'. Next year will be the fortieth anniversary of Candle Lane Books. Its proprietor, John Thornhill, was a collector long before he opened the shop. Yesterday morning I
met John with his son and business partner, Edward. Over coffee in Renaissance, they outlined the shop’s
history, their lives as hands-on farmers, their years as collectors and their
mutual love of books.
For John’s son, Edward, the family’s book business was
always a factor in his young life.
At an early age he learned pricing and handling from his dad. Helping
out in the shop was a regular occurence. A Shrewsbury schoolboy, Edward was one
of a handful who left before their ‘A’ levels - an unusual step, but one that
certainly paid off. ‘I always knew I’d be going into the family business,’
Edward said. ‘I also worked on the
farm, and I still do. I did some travelling, visiting almost forty countries,
and I worked in the shop.’
For John himself, a long life of collecting began aged
eight with ‘The Book of the Farm’. Bought for him by his mother to encourage
his love of reading, she could have had no idea that she’d started something
that would be part of family life until the present day. ‘It’s a good job we’re
farmers too,’ said Edward, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t have the space to keep all
Dad’s books.’ ‘We always say no collection too large, no parcel too small,’ added John. ‘Once we purchased 10,000 books
in one day. The staff on the farm
became good at handling books.’
Amongst John’s own personal library is the twelve
volume classic, Eyton’s History of Shropshire. Only three hundred copies of
this book were ever printed, as well as three large paper copies – and at one
time John owned all three of them [he now owns only one].
Another treasure is George Garrard’s ‘History of British
Livestock’. Edward said it was the only book of which he’d been unable to find
another copy on the open market, which, given his contacts, makes it most
likely the only of its kind still in existence. The problem for Garrard’s, he explained, was its fifty-two
fantastic hand-colour plates, which over the years had leant themselves to
being extracted from the book, which is why a complete copy is now so very
rare. ‘When my father acquired the
book,’ Edward said, ‘an article and photograph went up in the Farmers’ Weekly.
A lady phoned in wanting to buy it for her husband. We named a ridiculous sum, saying even if the offering price
was that, we wouldn’t part with it.
The lady offered more - but we still said no.’
Candle Lane Books started out as an offshoot of John’s
massive collection. ‘I’d bought so many books,’ he said, ‘that I thought I’d
better start a shop’. The shop in
question was an old butcher’s shop half the size of the current premises. John
filled it with books from country house sales - whole tea-chests full at a
time. A book binder, Mr James, was
employed, coming in Saturdays, taking a couple of boxes of books and returning
with them bound the following week. For thirty-two years he worked for Candle
Lane Books. Even in his eighties
he was still coming in. ‘It was with his help that we saved many of our books,’
John said. ‘The Parish Registers for example – by buying and binding them they
were preserved. We have registers for most of Shropshire in the shop. They’re of particular use to people
looking up their family history.’
It didn’t take long for the shop to be in need of
expansion. The family bought the shop next door and went up three floors. Now
even the furthest corner of Candle Lane Books is stuffed to the gunwales with
good reads. ‘We’ll buy anything we
think will sell,’ Edward said. ‘I
tend to focus more on modern publications and my father on the older books. But Candle Lane Books has no
specialism, except of course for local books. We’ll take on any topic, buying
what we can sell.’
Over the years, I’ve spent a prince’s ransom on local
publications in Candle Lane Books.
I’ve also bought my share of other books that have caught my eye,
including a first edition Graham Greene, a signed Malcolm Saville and several
books by one of my favourite authors, A.G. Bradley. Candle Lane Books always
has something that I want – and more often than not that something is in the
window, pleading to be taken away.
John, Edward and Maureen [who’s been employed in the
shop for the last twenty-six years, having worked previously at the family’s
reproduction furniture shop in what is now Poppy’s tea room] have
window-dressing down to a fine art.
They know that showing the right thing, whether or not it’s valuable,
will bring in the customers. They
have their regulars, those who come at certain times on certain days of the
week. Many of these aren’t looking
for anything other than a good read, but there are others on the lookout for
certain books, who are prepared to pay for them, and to pay well.
Candle Lane Books has a ‘Wants List’. If you’re looking for something
special, then John and Edward will look for it too. And once a book’s on the
list it doesn’t come off, even years later, if it hasn’t yet been found.
Nowadays John and Edward mostly buy from private
collections. Very often people
will come in to them with something they wish to sell. ‘We never buy from
auctions for resale in the shop,’ said Edward, ‘but we sometimes do for
ourselves. We keep an eye on the auction houses, and if there’s something that
we really want going at the right price then we’ll buy.’
‘How do you decide which books are for the shop, and
which for your private library?’ I wanted to know. Edward and his father looked
at each other. Plainly this wasn’t a simple question to answer. If a book was rare, or it had a certain
something about it, a uniqueness of some sort, they would keep it, they
said. Once they bought seventy
tea-chests full of books from a known collector in Japan, mostly books dated
before the 1850s. Every single
book was good enough to buy in its own right. They kept three hundred, but sold the rest in the shop. It didn’t take long for the word to get
round, then they had dealers beating a path to their door.
Another book, too, is worthy of a mention. ‘Shall I tell her about the…’ said
Edward. The word hung in the air.
Again the two of them looked at each other. It was the Vaughan book they were
talking about – a book that brings new meaning to the word unique. Starting with Adam and Eve, the writer
of this book had traced his family’s history from the beginning of humankind to
his own times in the 19th century. Every word of this massive tome
has been written by hand. To begin with the hand was steady. By the end of the
book, though, it was shaky and plainly old.
As soon as I heard about this book, I wanted to see
it. For twenty-six years I’d lived out at Worthen in a farmhouse bought from
the Vaughan family, for whom it had been home for over a century. They’d even
left their names etched in its window glass and graffitied in the soft plaster
between its old beams. ‘Doris
Vaughan – a goodish girl’, ‘Maureen Vaughan – a devil’, and so on and so
forth.
Kindly, John and Edward agreed to bring in the book
for me to see from John’s library, where it’s one of his treasures. We arranged
to meet next day, ie. today. Then
I started asking John about his life as a publisher, which we hadn’t yet talked
about. Three books came out under
the imprint ‘John Thornhill, Candle Lane Books’ - Georgina Jackson’s
‘Shropshire Word-Book’, Garbett’s ‘History of Wem’ and ‘Shrewsbury Street
Names’. John would have published
Charlotte Burne’s ‘Shropshire Folk-Lore’ too, but his printer in Yorkshire went
out of business and it never happened, which John regrets.
It’s hard to imagine how John has found time for it
all, especially with a full-time other business to run as well. His love of
books may have been inherited from his mother, but from his father he inherited
the family farm. ‘My farm is my life,’ said John. ‘This other thing, books,
well it just developed. There was one time, you know, when I worked for three
whole years on the farm without coming into town once.’
John left school at thirteen. He broke up for the Christmas holidays,
had his thirteenth birthday and never went back. That was a long time ago now. Extraordinary changes in farming have happened in John’s
lifetime. He farmed through the
Depression and the Second World War, and now his son, Edward, runs the farm.
‘We’re hands-on farmers,’ Edward said.
‘Everything we have in town, this shop and other properties we own, come
from the farm.’
The Thornhills have 260 acres and a herd of Pedigree
Herefords. Theirs is an old family
farm with a big old manor house and its own church. John remembers a time when all their staff lived on the
farm, but things are different now. A few years ago when two of their workers -
John Lewis and Michael Lewis [not related] - retired, the two of them clocked
up between them a massive one hundred and five years. For a while Edward was
left working the farm alone, but now - eighty-six interviews later – he’s found
a replacement in Benjamin Fleming, whom he describes as ‘an old head on young
shoulders’, exactly the right person for the job.
‘They’re a wonderful family to work for,’ Maureen told
me later, when John and Edward weren’t around. I’ve got the best job in town. I
suppose that one day I’ll retire, but definitely not yet.’
The key, Edward told me, was that they as a family had
always got on with each other. ‘In
the shop as well,’ he said. ‘There’s been Margaret, my mum, Jane, my sister,
Dad and me, all involved in the family businesses.’ I asked John what stood out most in his long life. I expected the answer to be a book, but
I was wrong. ‘It’s the people who’ve worked for us,’ John replied. ‘We’ve had
wonderful staff, right down through the years. That’s what stands out. Without
them, we couldn’t have done what we’ve done.’
POSTSCRIPT
I wrote that yesterday. This morning I went back to
Candle Lane Books to see John’s Vaughan Family History. The shop had only just opened, lights
on and bolts drawn back but no time yet for its table of discount books to go
outside. [‘When we close for lunch
we leave it out,’ Edward said. ‘Shrewsbury people can be trusted to pay for
their books. It’s nothing to come back and find ten or fifty pence pieces
wedged under the door.’]
The Vaughan Family History is the other end of the
spectrum to a fifty pence book. It’s folio sized, several inches thick, with
craftsman-like penmanship and beautifully bound in leather. Here, see what I mean. This is the page that links the Vaughans to Brutus, and King Locrinus of Sabrina-spirit-of-the-River-Severn fame. My jaw dropped when Edward opened it up. I can’t imagine what it’s
like to own such a thing, let alone to have written it. What a treasure it must have been to
its family in its day.
I left Candle Lane Books in a bit of a blur, though
not without spotting something in the window [well, several somethings
actually] and coming back. Then I
headed off across the Square, where the stage was going up for carols tonight. The first of the new shop fronts for
Princess House jutted out into the space where, other years, the crowd would
have stood. You’d have thought the
least the Princess House people could have done was make their shop fronts
blend in with the colours of the Square’s stone flagstones and the Old Market
Hall. But oh no. Had they received
planning permission for that clash of colours, I wondered. But that’s another
subject. I mustn’t digress.
I went into Starbuck’s for a coffee, paper and
cinnamon bun and found it half-empty for a change. The girl sitting opposite me said she’d got to get home to
Montgomery before bad weather broke this afternoon. Storms were on the way, she
said. We talked about Montgomery. I’d never met her before, but Shrewsbury’s a
town where even strangers will talk to each other.
The girl left, gathering up her bags. I finished my
coffee and left too, carrying my brown-paper Candle Lane parcel. Only eleven
o’clock. A good start to the day.
