Gyles Brandreth in Barnes Bookshop

Gyles Brandreth has been entertaining Brits for decades - charming multiple generations on shows such as Just A Minute, The One Show, Celebrity Gogglebox and Countdown. 

His many books include a series of novels featuring his fellow wit Oscar Wilde and a recent best-selling celebration of good punctuation, spelling and grammar, Have you Eaten Grandma? 

His latest offering is the anthology Dancing by the Light of the Moon, which celebrates the magic of learning poetry by heart.

‘Words have been my life,’ Gyles says during this episode’s conversation. He also describes bookshops as ‘safe havens in an uncivilised world’ and talks of his time in government, during the 1990s, when his remit at the Department of Culture included crafting policy for libraries.

Gyles lives in West London and selected Barnes Bookshop, run by Venetia Vyvyan, as his home-from-home venue for Ex Libris.

It is a beautiful local bookshop of more than 30 years’ standing. When making that choice, Gyles described Venetia as ‘a model of everything a brilliant independent bookseller should be.’

...

A full transcript of this episode of Ex Libris, featuring Gyles Brandreth, runs below:

Gyles Brandreth has been entertaining Brits for decades and his broadcasting brilliance continues to charm multiple generations, be it on ‘Just a Minute’, ‘The One Show’, ‘Celebrity Gogglebox’ or his regular appearances on the likes of ‘QI’ and ‘Have I Got News for you’.  Gyles is also an actor and Chancellor of the University of Chester.  He served in government as Lord Commissioner of the Treasury.  It is primarily his writer hat, though, that I want him to don today.  Charles’s many books include a series of novels about his fellow wit, Oscar Wilde, and a recent best-selling celebration of good punctuation, spelling and grammar, ‘Have you eaten grandma’?  His latest offering is the anthology ‘Dancing by the Light of the Moon’, which celebrates the magic of learning poetry by heart.  Gyles lives in West London and has selected Barnes bookshop run by Venetia Vyvyan as his home from home for today.  When making the choice, Gyles described Venetia to me as:  “a model of everything a brilliant independent bookseller should be”. 

So here's a really bad, unwitty, little poem for you: 

“lest there be repetition, or repetition

or dread deviation, oh, and by the way, we happen to be recording this on Valentine's Day,

let alone hesitation,

let's commence this very minute... the conversation."

Interview

Ben Holden:

Gyles, Venetia, thank you so much for seeing us here in beautiful Barnes bookshop today.   Gyles, question number one, obviously, is why Barnes bookshop, it was the first place you wanted to come to today?

Gyles Brandreth:

Because I love a bookshop, anyway.  A bookshop for me is one of the safe havens in an uncivilised world.  If one is feeling low, you've got to walk down the high street or side street, or whatever, and find a bookshop.  And suddenly, as you go through the door, you'll feel less low.  As you begin to browse the shelves, your spirits lift.  As you come down into the basement of this bookshop, you think, “Oh, the world's a good place.  After all, everything's all right”.  And that's been part and parcel of my life, all my life. 

As a child, I was brought up in London, and Barnes is in south-west London, and it's south of the river.  And, of course, until I was an adult, I'd never been south of the river, didn't think one dared go south of the river; and I was brought up really in the West End; my parents lived in a block of flats, Victorian mansion flats, in Baker Street.  Near us there was a bookshop called ‘Bumpus’, older listeners will remember Bumpus, but almost all your listeners really, whatever vintage, will remember ‘Foyles’.  ‘Foyles’ bookshop still exists on the Charing Cross road, they now have other branches, but when I was a boy, going back a long way now, in the 1950s, as a child, I discovered Foyles bookshop.  It was heaven on earth, because it was chaotic, it was completely chaotic.  Did you go to Foyles in the old days?

Venetia Vyvyan:

I did, but I was more of a John Sandoe person, I'm afraid.

Gyles Brandreth:

That's good.  We have got middlebrow, I represent middlebrow, and we have highbrow.  Let me tell you what the middlebrow child did, the middlebrow child went to Foyles.  Now, Foyles bookshop was run then by a lady called Miss Foyle, Christina Foyle, who lived to a great age, and she ran this chaotic bookshop, I say chaotic, it truly was.  Books were never properly unpacked, never properly put on the shelf; there were boxes everywhere, books, trailing everywhere, and to get a book was quite a complicated process - you chose your book, you then took your book to one counter where you got a receipt for the book, you took that receipt to a till, you paid at the till, your money was then sent in a tube around the shop, you got another receipt back, you took that receipt back to the person to get your book, but by then the person will have often put your book back on the shelf or sold it to somebody else; it was complete chaos!  And sadly, it was discovered, one of the reasons it was chaos, was that ultimately Miss Foyle did not have her..., ultimately she was being taken advantage of, in fact, I think some of the staff eventually had their hands in the till and it all became a little bit, anyway...

Fortunately, her nephew, Christpher Foyle, came on board and put the whole thing pointing in the right direction.  But I loved going there, and what was wonderful about it was, on many floors, you could spend a whole day in the bookshop, and I realised my parents didn't really like me very much, because I was sent out every day after breakfast, I was sent out, on Sundays it was alright, because I could go to church, and I would go to several churches, I would sing in two choirs, I was the server at St Stephen’s, Gloucester road, - when we come to dropping literary names, that was when I met T.S. Eliot, but we'll come on to that -, because she's got better names to drop than me, because of her John Sandoe years; but, eventually, I discovered Foyles on a weekday, and I could go in there literally at ten in the morning, and be there at five - so many departments, so much to discover, coffee shops nearby.  There's nothing more fun than going into a bookshop.  And you meet lovely people, the other customers by definition, and the staff.  Tell us about your childhood in bookshops.

Venetia Vyvyan:

Well, I was brought up in Chelsea, my parents built their own house just off Cheyne Walk, and so, I had John Sandoe near Sloane Square.

Gyles Brandreth:

What kind of bookshop was it?

Venetia Vyvyan:

That was shambolic in the days of John Sandoe himself.  Now it's much cleaner, but I remember going in there, and I preferred it to WH Smith, which was in Sloane Square, and in those days, WH Smith were proper book shops.  And I suppose, we also had a place in the country, and in Wantage, there was also a wonderful bookshop, and it was there first that I really found a bookseller who understood me, and he would always put things on one side and say, “I have this, it's just come in”, and my father would raise his eyes to the heavens, because it meant another book being brought into the house.

Ben Holden:

And your fate was sealed.  You've since become a great bookseller yourself, was that where it all started?

Venetia Vyvyan:

It was, but actually I couldn't read by the age of nine, because I had dyslexia, and nobody knew and it wasn't really very well known in those days.  And so I memorised things at school, and that's how I got away with not being able to read until I was nine. 

Gyles Brandreth:

I’m surprised you weren't sent to my mother.  My mother was a pioneer teacher of people with dyslexia.  She worked with a man called MacDonald Critchley in the 1950s, and through the sixties and seventies, she was one of the leading people in London helping children with dyslexia.

Venetia Vyvyan:

Was she at the Helen Arkell Centre?

Gyles Brandreth:

She was indeed!

Venetia Vyvyan:

I went to the Helen Arkell Centre.

Gyles Brandreth:

Well, I'm surprised you weren't put under her charge.

Venetia Vyvyan:

I might have been.

Gyles Brandreth:

You would have remembered, people did remember my mother.  My parents did, of course, like me, but when I was sent away to boarding school, I started a school bookshop.  And the mistake I made, bless my heart, was, because I could order all the books, you see, to sell in the school bookshop, so I ordered the books I wanted, I couldn't understand why none of them were selling, because I was just ordering the books I liked.  And I quickly learned that you actually have got to choose books that the customers want.  How did you learn about book selling?

Venetia Vyvyan:

Well, I learned from the greatest bookseller I've known, which was John Saumarez Smith at Heywood Hill books (in Mayfair), and he was very generous with his knowledge.

Gyles Brandreth:

How do you stock a bookshop?  How do you choose what to have?

Venetia Vyvyan:

Well, he would say you start with the things that you enjoy, because those are the things you can recommend, but then you learn from other