Shop of the month
Heywood Hill, No 10, Curzon Street, W1
NINETY years ago, on a quiet street in Mayfair, Heywood Hill bookshop opened for the first time. ‘Our shop is tiny, but, I hope, influential,’ says Nicky Dunne, the bookseller-in-chief. ‘We don’t have room for many books, or customers for that matter, which is perhaps part of its charm. Nancy Mitford, who worked here back in the 1940s, joked that our customers “love being pressed bosom to bosom”.’
The shop comprises two neat rooms, one for new books and a second for antiquarian titles, with about 5,000 volumes on the shelves. Yet the bookseller punches above its square footage thanks to two sidelines: the curation of private libraries (find them everywhere from boats to country houses to London members’…
