#magicallondon

Step into the magic of London 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 at Christmas ✨🎅

There is a door in the lower basement of a London bookshop that I frequent that has long perplexed any of the handful of astute observers who linger in the musty depths of that bibliographic cavern.

The bookshop itself is of the typical central London lot, haphazard bare wooden shelves cover all of the walls of the tiny cramped rooms. Each room leading onward into another, a maze of gravity defying structures burdened with far more than their fare share of aged paper. Tiled floors and low ceilings that creak with the footfalls of customers above who have yet to dare the half curved illformed lump of twisted wood that calls itself a staircase.

Such a descent, though not for the temeritous, is rewarded with considerable treasures, should a sprained ankle not inhibit the would be book hunter.

It is in these depths that I can often be found on those rare occasions that I venture out into the world. The triangle of London with Bloomsbury, Soho, and Leicester Square as its corners is the circumference of my interests in the world of humanity, excursions to the British Library notwithstanding.

Yet my frequency in this subterranean space has not yet solved the question of the door. For set at the very bottom of the last room, beyond rows of shelves bowed under the weight of sci-fi and discount volumes, there is a door.

The door is an aged emerald green, of a wooden type typical of the early 20th century, its paint layered with many years of re-coating though fading in areas to a patina. It fits in its frame at a slight angle, where either the door or the frame has shifted in the many years it has stood. It has a brass handle of the type that matches its rectangular escutcheon, a pattern around its edges worn from many years of use. The handle shines just slightly under the dim basement light.

Once, some years ago, in the first year or so of frequenting the bookshop, I witnessed a gentleman emerge from the door. It was a swift action, simply appearing and closing the door behind himself, turning and locking the door with a key. I first assumed it was the loo, but then the gentleman's appearance seemed out of the ordinary. A well cut suit of wool, a book tucked under his arm. He lingered for just a few moments before he turned and wend his way to the treacherous staircase and I could hear his footfall as he bee-lined for the shop door.

I stared at the door, wondering of what lie behind it. Yet when I inquired with the young girl who works behind the counter I was told that it was a storage closet and nothing more. I clarified where the door was, pointing to the spot on the shop's floor above where the door is in the layout of the space. It was then that I realized the door faced toward the high street in front of the shop. If what lie behind the door was more than a meter at most deep it would be under the street itself.

This perplexing event of the man leaving the storage closet would be repeated just over a year later. Again I was on my knees in that last room, digging through boxes of unsorted books, and behind me I heard the door open and close. This time an older man with a tweed jacket was standing there, having locked the door behind himself already, I caught him putting the key in his pocket and saw that it was of a brass colour.

As the tweed jacketed man made for the stairs I turned to a fellow customer who was standing nearby perusing the natural history selection and asked if he had "seen that?" To which he replied that he had no idea where the gentleman had come from as he himself had been there an hour. He then laughed in that uncomfortable British way that secretly pleads that the subject be changed and never, ever thought of, let alone spoken of, again.

The thing about this bookshop is that it has an incredible amount of volumes that seem to center around an endless supply of a single collector's habits. Either through years of their own customers dying and reselling their estate collections or of some more obscure modern source the bookstore is always able to cough up a copy of some G.K. Chesterton you have never yet read, perhaps and essay on Faust, or a consideration of anarchist societies. As well P.G. Wodehouse, William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod), rare sci-fi first editions by Clifford Simak, Ursula Le Guin, Theodore Sturgeon, and more obscure authors are tucked continually onto the shelves. A Richard Jefferies, T.H White and the occasional more occultish volume might be misplaced in the poetry section for a tenth of its actual value. As if the ghost of A.H. Mayhew still lingers just around the next corner.

As one would then imagine it is a place for the most insular hermits and bookish recluse to be found. Ill kept academics, sharp suited magicians, and the gamut of motley eccentrics find themselves in familiar territory.

On the third occasion I happened to see something all the more surreal. It was a kind of winter evening that is rare in London, bitter cold and windy. The basement was, on the other hand, cozy from the perspective below street level. I had just happened onto some volume that excited me in the way that they sometimes do. A quickening of the pulse as you realize what it is you've just pulled off of the shelf. A quick scan of the title page and dates and a flip back to the price; checked twice to make sure you aren't imagining things.

As I was catching my breath over some obscure volume I noticed a woman walk by behind me. She had the air of someone who didn't frequent bookshop basements often, but her step was rather confident that it knew where it was headed. She walked right up to the door without hesitation, and as it took me several seconds to shift focus from the glee of the book to the event unfolding, in a flash she open the door and closed it behind her as she stepped beyond its threshold. I caught just a glimpse of brick or stone wall behind her and nothing more, and the door clicked locked from the other side.

As I paid that day I inquired again about the green door at the end of the rooms, this time to the older woman who seems to be the shops manager. She repeated that it was a storage room and added that they had lost the key to it years ago.

There are a handful of other instances of my seeing people come out of the door and once a gentleman just disappearing behind the closing door when I turned the basement corner. And while each of these seems to happen at precisely the moment I am otherwise distracted I have spent the remainder of several of these afternoons dwelling on some mentally re enacted plan of action where I intercede and demand to know what is the story of the green door.

Alas each of these visions of bravado are stultified by each successive instance of the door. I have on two occasions had short and awkward conversations with regular customers I see now and again in the shop. Like myself though, these are not people accustom to social exchanges beyond the niceties of British colloquy. Never the less I sense in each who understood my inquiry a hesitation to speak of what they themselves know.

The green door thus remains a mystery, and while the events of this short essay may be overly condensed, giving the impression that movement to and from the door is common, please understand that can not be further from the case. For in my several hundreds of visits to the shop over the decade past only 5 or 6 of these have I experience the door enigma.