Dear reader...

I CANNOT remember when I first discovered Cecil Court, WC2, which runs or, more properly, strolls, between St Martin’s Lane and the Charing Cross Road, but I was not long out of short trousers. There are antiquarian and second-hand bookshops and dealers throughout the country, but, even if there are few now in the court, for many people what was once known as ‘Booksellers’ Row’ represents the soul of the trade.

Cecil Court’s first recorded bookseller in 1704, and there have been bookshops there, as well as publishers, printsellers and antique dealers, ever since. Among my favourite school-holiday haunts were Fletcher, Storey, Seligmann and Suckling, together with Wheeler and Meier’s antique shops. I’d enjoy illicit cigarettes in Meier’s back room with his assistants, one of whom, Elsie Batten, was murdered by a customer, who became the second-last man to be hanged in London. Luckily for me, it was during term time.