Neil Adams

 

As I have lived in Cambridge all my life, I sometimes come across old school friends, and they’re never surprised to hear that I became a bookseller. I was born a mile away from David’s bookshop, where I’ve spent my working life.  My Welsh father was a research scientist at the Institute of Animal Physiology, and my Swedish mother ran a language school in the town. My father was a great collector of everything from books to early computers. His ambition was to open a museum in Wrexham, his home town, devoted to his collections, but sadly he died young and nothing came of it. As a young boy, I connected with him over our love of books. In his spare time, he would drive around East Anglia, visiting bookshops and take me with him.

I was eleven years old when I bought my first book. It was a copy of The Boy’s Own Book of Natural History by the Revd J. G. Wood, and I have it to this day.  My father was very encouraging and never criticised what I bought. As my collection began to grow, I became more selective but natural history remained my favourite subject. I was particularly attracted to Victorian illustrated books in fine decorative cloth bindings. It was the visual aspect that appealed first to me. By the time I was in my teens, I considered myself a bit of an expert on Charles Darwin. My father had a big collection of his work, and it was useful to have had that early training.  David’s has always sold a lot of Darwin books, not least because he and his family were intimately connected with Cambridge.

Book collecting was an unusual hobby amongst my friends, and so I was invited to give a talk by my school. I was thirteen at the time, and decided to talk about a battered odd volume from a book published in 1570 that I had bought for £1. The whole class fell asleep, including the teacher. It could have been an unsettling experience, but it didn’t dent my confidence. The school recognised that books were my passion, and I was given permission to spend lunch breaks visiting local bookshops. If I wasn’t looking at books, I was kicking a football.

By the age of fourteen, I had my own stall on Parker’s Piece, the large open space in Cambridge, where I sold books from my own collection. At one point I was taking so much money - it was all coins and notes in those days - that my father had to come every few hours to collect the cash and look after it for me. When I reached sixteen, my father found me a Saturday job at David’s, where he was a long-standing customer. By the time I had finished my A-levels in 1982, I was working in the shop every Saturday and during the holidays.

It had crossed my mind to study librarianship at Loughborough, which was a great centre for library education at the time. Before doing so, I decided to work full-time for a year at David’s just to see how things went. I had a wonderful time, and the decision was made for me. At the age of thirty in 1993, I was made a business partner with David Asplin, G.David’s great grandson, and Brian Collings. Brian retired a few years ago, and David and I run the business with the help of four part-time members of staff.

Although there is no full-length biography of Gustave David, the eponymous David of the stall in Market Square and the shop in St Edward’s Passage, a collection of obituaries written by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and other illustrious customers appeared in 1937, entitled David of Cambridge: Some Appreciations. Not much is known about Gustave’s early life, except that he was born in Paris in 1860, and that his father was a jeweller and his mother was Swiss. The family moved to Switzerland when he was a child, and he was educated in three languages.

According to Quiller-Couch’s obituary, ‘under what mysterious direction is not known’, Gustave migrated to England to start a bookshop in Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk before moving to London. ‘Let us believe urged by the daemon of his genius’, continued Quiller-Couch, ‘one day he put up his shutters, headed for Cambridge and erected a stall’. That was in 1896, and  David’s stall was a familiar sight in Market Square until 1981. Gustave’s son Hubert joined the business at the beginning of the First World War, followed by Charlie Stocker in the 1920s. Charlie was responsible for many of the firm’s catalogues.

Incredible books passed through Gustave’s hands on the stall, and later in the shop, which opened in St Edward’s Passage early in the 1900s. It became a meeting place for many of the University’s and other great book collectors. John Maynard Keynes was an undergraduate at King’s College when he bought a first edition of Newton’s Principia from David for four shillings.  Although the mark-up was twelve times what David had paid for it on the barrows in Farringdon Road earlier that day, it was still an incredible bargain. His son Hubert had to cope with the fact that Gustave never charged enough for his books, and died in 1936 with unpaid bills.

There has been a daily market in Cambridge since Saxon times, but the site on which Gustave set up his famous bookstall is currently under threat from the developers. Centuries of secondhand bookstalls in Market Square may soon come to an end. Bookselling in general has changed so much since my youth.  In the centre of Cambridge today, you will only find David’s and Sarah Key of The Haunted Bookshop and they’re both in St Edward’s Passage. Gone are the days of Galloway & Porter, Deighton, Bell, and Heffers, which were the largest bookshops in town. Heffers tried to adapt to the times by selling mainly new books, but it was still acquired by Blackwells in 1999. 

I believe David’s has survived because we’re a small business, off the main street, and able to keep our expenses down. We also benefit from being so different from most of the shops in the centre of town, which tend to be fast food restaurants, hairdressers, tattoo parlours, nail bars and so on. A few antique shops have survived, but they are mostly outside the centre.

Cambridge is no exception as the world of provincial bookselling has changed. The two bookshops I miss the most are Colin Page in Brighton and Andy Cumming in Lewes.  In the old days I would set off on a Saturday, and have a great time visiting their wonderful shops. John Loska of Colin Page was always so generous with his knowledge, but the shop closed in 2018, and John now works from home in West Sussex.  Holleyman & Treacher was another great shop in Brighton, but has long since gone.

The Haunted Bookshop and David’s are probably the only shops in Cambridge, where you can find something from the nineteenth century or earlier for the price of a pint of beer. You don’t have to buy anything, but you can look and touch books, and nurture your interest in them. Shops are so important to the future of our trade - you can’t feel a book on the internet - and less intimidating for newcomers than visiting a private premises. We try to cater for all tastes and pockets, with a wide general stock from paperbacks priced at 50p to five-figure items. Books don’t need to be expensive to be collectable. You could start with Penguins, Collins’s series of ‘Britain in Pictures’, or Batsford books with their colourful dust-jackets.

‘Trophy’ books continue to sell well, and the Penguins in the boxes outside the shop.  It’s the books in the middle that have become more difficult. German and Swiss plate-books and natural history were very popular thirty years ago, but steel-engraved books in general seem to have lost ground. Many of the great Victorian novelists are giving way in popularity to Steinbeck, Hemingway, Orwell and other twentieth-century authors. We can of course still sell any number of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and there’s inexhaustible demand for Pride and Prejudice and The Hobbit.

We see a lot of tourists in the shop, no doubt attracted by the fact that we look different. They wander into the back room, where we keep the older material, and you can sense the ‘wow’ factor. American high school kids sometimes visit the shop in large groups, and it’s wonderful to see their excitement. They often ask if the old books are for sale, and then they like to know which is the oldest book in the shop, and if I’ve read them all. It’s a great opportunity to introduce the younger generation to the world of rare books. Actually I’ve noticed a huge increase in interest amongst young people – and not only amongst visitors to the shop. Tom Ayling has over half a million followers on social media for his videos explaining the stories behind some of the world’s rarest and most sought-after books. By attracting such a large audience, Tom’s activities can only be good for all of us. Our youngest member of staff, Kerry Shanahan, looks after our Instagram account.

For anyone interested in becoming a bookseller, I would say that a good memory is vital. You need to remember all the copies that you’ve handled of a particular book, and how the one in your hand compares with them so that you can price it. When you have a few copies of the same book on the shelf, you realise that the subject is not as popular as it once was. Local topography is less in demand these days, at least, in Cambridge, which has become such a melting pot. People come from all over the world to work in Silicon Fen, and so they have far fewer connections to their surroundings.

During the pandemic, we had to close the shop for the first time, having managed to stay open during the First and Second World Wars. I was actually quite worried about catching Covid, having read somewhere that middle-aged men were the most likely to snuff it. I went into the shop on my own every day, cycling there and back without a car passing me.  The lockdowns gave me the opportunity to do various jobs for which I normally never have time and, I must say, that it was really quite pleasant. I experimented with putting a few books online, which we don’t usually do as they tend to sell quickly enough in the shop. Many booksellers have said that they found Covid a good time for online sales, and we were no exception.

As soon as we were able to re-open to the public, our regular customers’ desperation to get back into the shop was noticeable. In fact a member of the Royal family wrote a message saying how much he had missed it. I no longer need to sell books online as the shop is busy again. In fact I can hardly keep up with the amount of books coming into the shop. It’s partly a result of people ‘downsizing’ and, because of the shortage of bookshops, they tend to give us first pick.

A few months ago I was on a house visit and came across Charles Waterton’s Essays on Natural History. It was the very copy that I had bought on a school trip to Lavenham the day before my twelfth birthday. The teacher had let me go to a bookshop in the village, which I already knew from visits with my father. There I spotted a copy of Waterton in a lovely binding, and borrowed £1 from my teacher to buy it.  When I saw it again recently, I knew it was my copy as it had a loose frontispiece, the Cambridge poet Clive Wilmer’s signature - and mine in the back of the book. It was a wonderful moment after all those years.

At some point the shop will be taken over by somebody younger and fitter than me, but I hope that’s a few years in the future. I look at some of my friends who are coming up for retirement and they’re counting down the days. I have no wish to retire; I enjoy my work too much.    The wonderful thing about bookselling is that you learn something every day. You see a book that you haven’t had before, and you learn from each copy that you handle. As one of my customers said, ‘every day is a school day’.

Interviewed for The Book Collector in Summer 2026