Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
I was flipping through the most recent issue of BookPage when I ran across an introductory full-page piece by Oliver Darkshire, the author of Once Upon a Tome. The article’s title is “From Antiquarian Bookseller to Author: Oliver Darkshire’s memoir about working at a 262-year-old bookshop has a surprisingly modern origin story.”
While I had heard of Henry Sotheran Ltd before, I had never heard of Darkshire. But chances are you have heard of him, as his Twitter account has been going gangbusters since he started it in 2018. He must be pretty good, as his personal Twitter account has 24k followers, and the Sotherans account he manages has almost 42k followers. That’s impressive for a bookshop.
According to the BookPage piece, Darkshire landed his Once Upon a Tome book deal because of Twitter attention. So I expect this one to have a very modern take on a very old business. It looks like Sotheran Ltd has been in business since the mid-1700s.
I am pretty excited to get my hands on this one. It’s classified as a memoir, but it seems to drip with details about antique books, the trade, the shops, and all the quirky clients.
You can read the full jacket copy for yourself, but the highlights for me are:
- Sotheran’s, one of the oldest bookshops in the world,
- poisoned books
- Sotheran’s brushes with history (Dickens, the Titanic),
- its joyous disorganization,
- and it’s a love letter to the unruly world of antiquarian bookselling
Plus, it opens with “A Note from the Author’s Supervisor”, which just makes it all feel very charming!
One of the benefits of this being published ‘across the pond’ is that there is a U.K.-first cover. I love comparing U.S. and U.K. covers. It’s always so telling. You can see exactly how the publisher sees the book and the market they are going after. Once Upon a Tome is no exception.
Here is the U.K. cover next to the U.S. cover:
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Aren’t the differences striking? The U.S. cover is designed by Paul Buckley. I haven’t been able to find the name of the U.K. designer. Definitely is going after two different groups and types of readers. I hope this does well in both countries.
I’ve read quite a few bookseller memoirs, and I enjoy them. The most recent was The Last Bookseller by Gary Goodman, who sold used and rare books in Minnesota, and I have Confessions of a Bookseller by Saun Bythell, inching its way to the top of my TBR pile. I’ll have to blog about those later.
Have you read Once Upon a Tome? Do you enjoy memoirs by booksellers?
Thanks for reading!
