NONSUCH BOOKS

All Volumes Bought & Sold

Isaac Inchbold, Proprietor

I am Isaac Inchbold, Proprietor. By the summer of 1660 I had owned Nonsuch Books for some eighteen years. The bookshop itself, with its copiously furnished shelves on the ground floor and its cramped lodgings one twist of a turnpike stair above those, had resided on London Bridge-and in a corner of Nonsuch House, the most handsome of its buildings-for much longer: almost forty years. I had been apprenticed there in 1635, at the age of fourteen, after my father died during an outburst of plague and my mother, confronted shortly afterwards with his debts, helped herself to a cup of poison. The death of Mr. Smallpace, my master-also from the plague-coincided with the end of my apprenticeship and my entry as a freeman into the Company of Stationers. And so on that momentous day I became proprietor of Nonsuch Books, where I have lived ever since in the disorder of several thousand morocco- and buckram-bound companions.

Mine was a quiet and contemplative life among my walnut shelves. It was made up of a series of undisturbed routines modestly pursued. I was a man of wisdom and learning-or so I liked to think-but of dwarfish worldly experience. I knew everything about books, but little, I admit, of the world that bustled past outside my green door. I ventured into this alien sphere of churning wheels and puffing smoke and scurrying feet as seldom as circumstances permitted. By 1660 I had travelled barely more than two dozen leagues beyond the gates of London, and I rarely travelled much within London either, not if I could avoid it. While running simple errands I often became hopelessly confused in the maze of crowded, filthy streets that began twenty paces beyond the north gate of the bridge, and as I limped back to my shelves of books I would feel as if I were returning from exile. All of which-combined with nearsightedness, asthma and a club foot that lent me a lopsided gait-makes me, I suppose, an improbable agent in the events that are to follow.