This part of the bookshop was busy, too, though the active shoppers were outnumbered by browsers and a few dedicated readers who were obviously intent on reading entire books in the shop. The right-handed bookseller here raised his eyebrows and mouthed something to Vivien that Susan couldn’t catch as they breezed past, towards a door at the rear of the shop marked “Strictly Staff Only.”
“My favorite part of the store,” said Vivien with satisfaction. “Very advanced. Every night we ring the Penguin warehouse in Harmondsworth with a list of the ISBNs of the books sold that day and we get replacement stock within two or three days, instead of the paper order forms and the weeks the other publishers take. Very efficient.”
“Unpacking new releases is the best,” said Merlin. “Particularly when you don’t know what’s been ordered, so it’s a surprise what’s in the box.”
“It is very therapeutic,” agreed Vivien.
Merlin looked at Susan. “That’s one of the other reasons the St. Jacques are booksellers. Or mostly booksellers. Books help us anchor our souls. Or re-anchor them. Particularly for us, the left-handed, given the things we have to do.”
“Writing helps, too,” said Vivien. “Poetry in particular. We are all poets, after a fashion.”
She knocked on the door at the back with her right hand. It opened without apparent human intervention, revealing a long, dimly lit corridor that was half closed off with stacked cardboard book boxes emblazoned with the logos and names of various publishers: Penguin, William Collins, Hodder & Stoughton, Pan Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Victor Gollancz Ltd, and others.
Vivien led them along the corridor to a steel door that had an additional “Strictly Staff Only!” sign. She knocked again. A judas window slid open so an unseen viewer could check who it was, followed a moment later by the sound of a heavy bolt being withdrawn, and the door was swung open by Darren, one of the left-handed bikers who’d been with Una’s response team.
The steel door led to a large open warehouse area dominated by high metal shelves stacked with boxes of books and a long sorting desk piled high with books, and beyond that a sunken receiving dock and ramp lined on one side with half a dozen motorbikes and a blue Jensen Interceptor leading up to a lorry-sized roller door that was closed. A smaller metal gate next to it was open. One of Una’s bikers stood by it, a slung L1A1 SLR on his back, the kind of rifle Susan recognized as being the same as the ones used by UNIT in Doctor Who.
The other bikers from the response team were at work at the sorting table, along with four more young left- and right-handed booksellers. They were opening boxes, checking off stock, and putting books in shopping baskets ready to be carried to the appropriate part of the store, or wrapping orders to be dispatched outwards to mail order or phone customers.
Una herself was sitting in a folding aluminum deck chair on the side of the loading dock, reading Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and drinking tea from a large blue mug. She had a sword similar to Merlin’s on the floor next to her, alongside a sawn-off double-barreled shotgun. She looked up from the book at the new arrivals, sniffed, and went back to her reading.
“I didn’t realize how big this bookshop is,” said Susan. “It must be even bigger than Foyles.”
“And it is much better,” said Vivien. “We are all professional booksellers. Come on.”
“Foyles has a charm that Vivien does not perceive,” said Merlin. “I like all kinds of bookshops myself, not just ours.”
Vivien looked at him scornfully and turned left, and they crossed the warehouse to yet another door, marked “Fire Exit,” and then up five flights of fire stairs to what Susan warily thought was the top of the building, though if it was like the New Bookshop, possibly not. The fire door here opened into a charming atelier, under a Victorian iron-and-glass roof. It was still raining in a desultory fashion, drops plinking on the glass and sliding down in slow rivulets. On a sunny day it would be beautifully bright, but today the natural illumination was assisted by a line of very large and unusual art deco light bulbs that ran along under the peak of the ceiling.
The floor was of warm, old oak planks, many of the individual planks extraordinarily long, as if sawn from the mast of a tall ship. There were two working tables in the middle of the room, and around the walls were located a binder’s press, with its tall screw; a camera stand; an industrial sewing machine; a gluing cabinet with exhaust hood; a guillotine table and cutting board; a TRS-80 computer and dot matrix printer on a narrow mahogany desk that might have come from a boat; a partner’s table topped in green leather and gilt edging on which resided no fewer than six typewriters, ranging from a 1920s Underwood to a very recent all-plastic Brother machine; a mid-eighteenth-century highly polished flame mahogany map cabinet of twelve drawers; and a French Second Empire grandfather clock with an intricately carved headpiece. There were also several other small worktables of less obvious purpose, complete with racks of tools and shelves of papyrus, vellum, paper and cardboard, and other writing materials.
At the closest table, a fiftyish woman with dark curly hair tinged with silver was examining a page in a giant medieval Bible bound in leather and iron, complete with chain. She wasn’t wearing gloves, and both her hands shone with the silver luminosity Susan had seen in the New Bookshop, with Cousin Sam.
The woman at the next table was perhaps a decade older than the first. She sat in a lightweight wheelchair with chromed rims.
