A bookporn entry in commemoration of my return to England — I present a bookshop in Cambridge that should have ascended its luscious throne a long time ago: Heffers. Heffers began as a family business, and continues to lay claim to over a hundred continuous years of Cambridge bookselling, since 1876
even though it was bought over by Oxford’s Blackwell’s in 1999. (growl)
What I love about Heffers is the impossible cunning of its architecture. It takes its two floors of allocated building space and somehow, by some astonishing & satanic feat of interior design, engineering and L-dimensional skulduggery, somehow pulls four floors out of the rabbit’s hat. In all the following photos you will be able to discern, among those stern concrete pillars, four levels of gorgeous bookery. (Click through to Flickr for exposition).
The skulduggery continues. We have here a space deceptively masquerading as a cafe from the top of the stairs, until you move closer, and lo! a hitherto hidden Book Cranny balloons into sight.
Heffers also has nested nooks — crannies within crannies;
its History section curls away into two cosy corners in the basement, segueing into Classics and Philosophy at its fringes;
and, right at the back — no doubt situated according to some greater, inscrutable design between Politics and Medicine — a resident skeleton.
Love Heffers! it’s one of a kind. If you can stagger past the Cambridge kitsch out front, creep past the alleged bestsellers and resist the stationery sirens, the lower mezzanine floor now features a brand new secondhand books section. And from past experience, a secondhand bookstore in a town stuffed with owlish academics is Not To Be Sniffed At.
October 6th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Maybe I’m just overreacting to the return of bookporn, but I think this is my favorite one. The complicated space & the crannies-within-crannies really do it for me.
October 6th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I hadn’t been in Heffers for ages and ages until very recently and the well in the middle, suitably like Dante’s descent, is now a second-hand section (possibly because Galloway & Porters now have an antiquarian section). It’s really dangerous. I left with three more books than I intended and others call to me still.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I started my undergraduate degree at Cambridge in 1998 and spent a happy first year spending too much money at Heffers and learning the idiosyncracies of how its history section was categorised. Then Blackwells bought it and made it all sensibly categorised – much more convenient, but some of the magic was lost!
October 19th, 2009 at 11:47 am
For your bibliophilic gaze: http://vervephoto.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/mike-tsang/
Also, you may want to check out the full series on London book dealers at http://www.miketsangphotography.com/
October 21st, 2009 at 9:59 pm
@Buster my god, that photo takes my breath away.
March 28th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
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