Very Hampstead, very Kingsley Amis

“Hello. I’ve been meaning to come in here. I live just down the road.”

I HEARD THESE WORDS in the Flask Bookshop in Flask Walk, Hampstead — which I owned and ran from 1975 until 1988 — while slumped in the back room on my leather swivel chair, quite as usual, smoking a pipe and reading: I was always reading. It was a unique and much-loved old bookshop, specialising in second-hand and antiquarian literature and art, as well as my own special interest, modern first editions. Hampstead was still Hampstead in those days — there were seven bookshops in the Village of various sorts, one of them selling only books in French.

This was 1978, before the wholesale takeover by video rental stores and purveyors of expensive dresses, and I had recently published my first book, Collecting Modern First Editions — something of a pioneering work in that it included “popular” authors such as P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, all of whom hitherto had been entirely ignored by collectors. What I really wanted to be was a novelist — but no sane publisher was about to spring for an advance on a novel by an unknown, and so therefore I couldn’t really afford to write one.

Now here before me — the chap who had spoken those unremarkable words above — was my absolute literary hero: Kingsley Amis. And within a surprisingly short time this splendid fellow, who died 25 years ago in October 1995, became something of a chum. In one way, the odds were against it: he was on record as disliking men with long hair (and particularly beards) and here was me to a T. Anyone gushing or