Letter from Wales

There was a time when, on Saturday mornings, with no pressing business to detain us, we would go to Bristol, normally little more than a half-hour over the Severn Bridge by car, with the simple plan of walking the steepish hill of Park Street, spending some time viewing the packed shelves of George’s, that great bookshop at the top of the hill, before a snack lunch and coffee at ‘The Bristol Guild’, a commercially entrancing offspring of William Morris’s Applied Arts and Craft Movement, dating from 1908. George’s was a good deal older. The shop had been founded by a youthful William George in 1847, and nothing like it existed anywhere in Wales – then or now. In the extensive corner premises there was invariably a goodly crowd viewing contemporary fiction and, up a short flight of stairs, children’s books, but the antiquarian section was always quiet. This meant that it was possible to converse with the staff and, over time, become well enough known as a fairly frequent, lengthy browser, and occasional buyer. On one such visit I expressed a longing for a fascinating volume, but had to admit I couldn’t afford it. Could I, I wondered, pay for it over some weeks. There was hardly a pause: yes, that would be acceptable. I should add here that I caught the illness which, at the risk of bankruptcy, drives people to possess old books from Professor Gwyn Jones, whose round room in one of the towers of ‘Hen Coleg’, the Old College building on the seafront at Aberystwyth, was lined with shelves packed ...