Anne Scott - 18 Bookshops

In the summer of 1968 in an Edinburgh bookshop I discovered a guidebook by a born Londoner and new spy storywriter, Len Deighton. This was London Dossier , designed for someone who needed to know how to have a week in London on very little money, culturally well and as safely as possible. Me.

I wintered it into my head and in 1969, about the time the Woodstock Festival was tuning up, set off south with my ten-year-old son in a two-berth sleeper from Waverley Station. I booked us into The Mount Pleasant Hotel and we took London into our lives.

Map in hand, he mastered the Tube system and we rode south to the River, circled to the centre for music magazines and records, and one day followed Len Deighton on the Northern Line to Marine Ices in Chalk Farm I still feel the thrill in the words and that evening we crossed the road from there to see Nicol Williamson as Hamlet at The Roundhouse.

The Dossier became a second adult in our plans and if it had been written a year later, it would surely have shown us the way to Compendium Books, a new, unique, and never-matched marvel of shelves and titles, opened first in 1968 at 240 Camden High Street, extended in 1972 to include number 281, and then consolidated at 234 where I found it at last in the summer of 1975.

It had been open only some weeks. Work to do with wood was still in progress. The shop smelt of its pine shelves shining white. The books were fat and thin, bright-sleeved, very tempting to touch. I thought I knew books but there were so many strangers here, whole streets of foreign covers and names, philosophers I had never read, Portuguese poets, African novelists. As the Franco dictatorship drew to a close, Miguel Hernandez poetry was here on the shelves and Federico Garcia Lorcas Blood Wedding , The House of Bernarda Alba : Latin Americans Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges whom I knew only as an inspiration to James Kennaway writing novels in Scotland a decade before. The aisles were lined with esoteric books and Ann Shepherd was assembling what was the first big collection of Mind and Spirit books in Britain.

I wish I had been in at the start back in 1968 when Nick Kimberley was building the poetry sections with authors far and far beyond the reach of other bookshops. Now in 1975 he was bringing them here: the New York poets Frank OHara (whom somehow I missed until I found his poems much later in New York), John Ashbery, Charles Olsen: San Francisco editions from the City Lights Bookshop, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsbergs Howl , Jack Kerouacs On the Road , of course, but also his poetry and a copy of Trip-Trap , the book of Haiku he wrote at Thanksgiving in 1959 on another road journey, from San Francisco to Long Island to visit his mother.