The bookshop around the corner: For when you need to escape everything

Trigger warning: while this is an uplifting bookshopping experience, it does discuss grieving, cancer and the death of a parent. I considered not telling the full story, but I cannot separate the bookshop from its first encounter and I will be forever grateful for this experience and the way it innocently helped me to begin to rejoin the real world.

It's taken me a while to write about this bookshop visit. Not quite so long as it took me to get to the bookshop itself (yes, this is another from my initial must-visit list back in 2013), but the words have needed a lot of thought.

The visit this blog covers took place in early May, 2024. We've since returned, stayed in the same hotel and spent almost exactly the same amount of time and money, but I couldn't tell you much about subsequent visits (other than that they were as wonderful as you'd imagine). This visit, however, this visit is etched into my mind. It's one of the few clear memories I have from an approximately month-long period which I think of as a void.

The void began in April, when after a mercifully short battle with cancer my elderly father died. Having lost Mum to a prolonged battle with cancer 40 years previously, I was relieved Dad's suffering was limited, while devastated to have lost my remaining parent, the biggest constant in my life. Various family losses meant I'd thought I was used to death, but this one shook me to my core.

Sure, life goes on and I had commitments to distract me, but the absence of a man who lived hundreds of miles away still hit whenever 4pm came and the phone failed to ring to discuss his day. I was a mess and I'm grateful to The Boy for the way he looked after me at that time.

It was The Boy who suggested that after the funeral, instead of going home, we stay somewhere else. Not too far away, just a short trip to escape everything. He suggested Oxford. He found us a sweet, old-fashioned hotel with parking and – most importantly – within easy walking distance of Blackwell's, which is exactly where we headed the very next morning.

To say I had no idea what I was letting myself in for is an understatement.

I knew this was the flagship Blackwell's. I knew it had a lot of books. But when we'd walked past the night before – even taking into account the neighbouring Blackwell's Music – it hadn't looked particularly big.

A photograph of a row of shop fronts. From right, we have numbers 48 and 50, which are quite long and clearly show they are the deep blue front of the main Blackwell's Bookshop. Then there's a small pub called The White Horse. Then there's another blue Blackwell's front, for the music shop.

We entered by the door on the right of the above photograph, finding ourselves in an averagely-sized shop area with a till. It clearly stretched further back, and to the side into the neighbouring shop, which I wandered into next, but nothing struck me as particularly unusual.

I enjoyed browsing the recommendations and we gradually made our way further in, thoroughly immersing ourselves in the translated fiction area. It wasn't long before I picked up The details by Ia Genberg, and I believe this is where The Boy found Time shelter by Georgi Gospodinov.

A wall of books, front forward, each with a piece of paper underneath, filled with hand-written recommendations. To the right, in the background, we have a glimpse of The Boy looking at books in a different area.

At about this point, The Boy decided he needed a toilet break. As we'd agreed to explore the shop together, I waited near the stairs while he followed the sign up for the toilets – with strict instructions that he wasn't to look around any of the other levels until we'd completed the ground floor. While I waited, I browsed the shelves nearby, soon finding myself engrossed in Breathe: Tackling the climate emergency, by Sadiq Khan. Then I realised I'd read far more of the book than was acceptable while loitering in a bookshop, I began to worry. What was wrong with The Boy that was keeping him so long?

In case you haven't guessed, it turns out The Boy can't follow instructions. He eventually appeared, enthusiastically bounding down the stairs, telling me I *must* follow him back up at once. Fiction could wait, he said, I needed to see what he'd found. I looked longingly towards the back of the shop, then followed him upstairs.

To be fair, he was right, the upstairs non-fiction floors are brilliant. Their layout helped me to get a better idea of the size of the bookshop, and we happily roamed the different themes, pausing to look at certain books before landing back at the sale corner at the top of the stairs. The Boy had found a reduced art book he was particularly excited about, and so Le Corbusier's Precisions: On the present state of architecture and city planning was added to our pile of four. The weight of the pile suddenly doubled, but the discount made the load feel lighter and this has become a must-visit section for all our return trips.

Finally, we made it back downstairs to fiction, and a step closer to The Norrington Room, which I'd noticed a sign for but didn't know much about. Assuming it was another secondhand or antiquarian area, we agreed we'd pop into it quickly at the end of our visit.

A view into the fiction area of Blackwell's Oxford. We see walls covered in floor to ceiling bookcases and several tables of neatly stacked books, including one front right, covered in blue covered paperbacks. Just behind that table is a barely visible till area.

Fiction was worth the wait. All those walls and tables of books, best sellers, classics, authors I'd long sought and rarely found. I was fully immersed in the here and now, with any lingering thoughts of life outside the bookshop completely banished. I briefly agonised over the fact I'd already got two books in my hands, then I found almost a whole shelf of Nevil Shute books and wondered if I could justify buying the lot. I ended up settling on Trustee from the toolroom – which turned out to be the perfect book for me to start reading as soon as we got home – and I now make a pilgrimage to this shelf every time we visit Oxford.

I lost track of The Boy, who planted himself firmly next to the table of blue Fitzcarraldos in the picture above, adding Owlish by Dorothy Tse to the pile.

Six books in hand, we decided that was probably a sensible time to stop. Then we remembered the sign for The Norrington Room, that we'd passed underneath on our way to fiction. We thought we'd better stick our heads in for completeness.

Looking down a long room, with the previous photo's fiction section visible at the back. The main purpose of this picture is to show a long, black beam bearing the words "THROUGH TO THE NORRINGTON ROOM".

Oh.

Oh my goodness.

What?

Reader, I had no idea.

For those – probably rare – ignorant few, who like me also had no idea, this photograph does not do justice to the sight we beheld as we walked into the room, which is better described as a cavern.

A view of books. It is overwhelming. Immediately in front of us is a probably about waist height room of book cases. Then behind it a huge room stretches wider than you would imagine, with what appears to be two floor levels of books. It is immense.

The Norrington Room is extraordinary. We began by taking a walk around the edge, and we discovered another level.

Somewhere along the way, we inevitably lost each other as we each found our individual niches to explore. I don't have the words for both how lost and how found I felt while exploring the myriad topics and enjoying their breadth of coverage. This truly was a different world, a world where time and loss and grief were forgotten.

Then I walked around another bookcase, probably my hundredth of the day, and found The Boy. My smile – my first in weeks – grew even wider at the sight of him, sat on the floor with books scattered close by.

On our right, a wall of bookcases stretches ahead. On our left, a series of thick, round columns to support the ceiling. On the floor, between the two, a man – otherwise known as The Boy – sits looking at a book, other books are piled up on the floor next to him.

There were plenty of chairs within this cavernous room, but why walk to a chair when you can comfortably plonk yourself on the ground next to a whole bookcase of treats? And how could I not giggle with delight at the sight of him?

Somehow, in our time apart, we'd added a few more books to our pile. I picked up Pathogenesis: How germs made history by Jonathan Kennedy, while he had found Japanese by Christopher Harding, and Regenesis by George Monbiot.

Now loaded up with nine books, we spotted the underground entrance to Blackwell's Music Shop, but decided we really had to pay for our books before continuing into there.

We could have paid in The Norrington Room, but all those hours ago among the fiction we'd spotted an old-fasioned bell, which was where we'd intended to pay, so we made our way back to the table of blue Fitzcarraldos and gleefully rang for attention. Its jingle prompted a child-like joy in the both of us, and a bookseller instantly appeared. Along with our books we bought a sturdy new tote bag, because by now we realised how unprepared we'd been.

Overloaded and elated, it was time to face the music.

We opted to arrive underground, so back we went into the book cavern, and up into the music shop.

This time The Boy can be seen looking at bookshelves filled with CDs. There are also DVDs and a wall of vinyl, plus a spinner stand of music books.

I love music but admit to being almost completely ignorant about most of the music in this shop, so it was here that The Boy was in his element. It was lovely watching his delight as he found unexpected treats, and we both enjoyed talking to the man behind the counter (the music seller?) but I have to confess that as I was so wrapped up in my own world before and after this visit, I somehow forgot to include the CDs purchased in my end of day photo. I know he bought at least three, but his music collection is vast and trying to identify those initial purchases has proved impossible. You'll just have to trust us: it's an important part of our repeat Blackwell's visits and I always make purchases in the places I write about.

But we're not done yet.

Our re-emergence into the outside world was fleeting, as we crossed the road to ensure true completeness with an exploration of the Blackwell's science fiction bookshop.

A shop front in a modern building. This time we see Blackwell's booksellers in dark letters on modern stone. The windows are large panes of floor to ceiling glass, and yellow letters on those windows declare: Posters, Manga, SF & Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Games.

Where we'd chosen to browse the main bookshop on our own, here I politely pounced on the first bookseller I found and asked for advice. I love science fiction, but it was my first encounter with so much of it in once place. I was overwhelmed and had no idea where to start with finding something completely new to me.

Within a few minutes of conversation the bookseller realised our tastes were very different. To her credit she admitted this and, rather attempt to soldier on, she asked me to wait a moment and came back with a different bookseller, who I think may have been the manager. He immediately stepped up to the challenge of finding me a book, and was naturally incredibly successful at it.

I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 (I cannot say this enough: read it), and following the bookseller's conversation The Boy chose to buy me City of Lost Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky, then I also ended up with N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season. And the purchases didn't stop there.

Following the above successes, the bookseller and I had a long conversation about Mordew by Alex Pheby, which ended up added to my pile along with a promise to return to discuss it, no matter how far into the future that visit might be (the book has been read, the conversation is still waiting, as he's not been around on the days we've been back).

We really should have been done by now, but while I was chatting, The Boy wandered off, and so he added Showa: 1939-1944, a history of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki to the pile, along with a small box game, Town 66.

By now, our minds, bodies and bank balances were completely spent. We had been in the various establishments for more hours than I could count and during that time I'd been completely immersed.

I'd forgotten the grief I'd parked on the doorstep and now we were re-entering the world there wasn't quite room for all of it to fit into the tote bag I carried. Some of the sadness had begun to evaporate. My journey to healing had begun.