John had a huge acquaintance and many customers became friends, including Andrew, 11th Duke of Devonshire. Their shared bookish adventures included a decade of annual pilgrimages to Chatsworth to award the Heywood Hill Literary Prize.

In fact the clientele was drawn from a wider social milieu than what Saumarez Smith referred to as the “carriage trade”. And in his later years he had to put up with a new breed of City trader who came “looking for something flash-looking that costs a lot”. They bring a focus not only to love of the canon, but also cherishing the feel of a book as a wonderful object. While the specific titles are subject to availability, the majority are available to gift to yourself or others and bring an elegant literary flair to any home. These days, it is globally renowned for its library building services and highly personal yearly subscription. Holding a Royal Warrant, it is also beloved by the Queen, has an entire bookshelf dedicated to PG Wodehouse and in John Le Carre’s novels is George Smiley’s bookshop of choice. First edition inscribed by John Muir, “To Mrs Lester S Abberley with compliments of John Muir Dec 23rd 1927.”For London’s Artemis Fund Managers, chair John Dodd wanted a library that would inspire his partners and associates in freedom of thought. “Thinking independently is a defining strand of the DNA of the partnership,” Dunne explains. Heywood Hill’s concept was simple and yet provocative, what Dunne describes as “a readers’ library that captures capitalism in all its layers and colors: the heroes, the villains, the groundbreakers, the headbangers, people with good ideas and bad, those who innovated and those whose ideas were in fact dead ends, people who moved markets in the past and who are moving them in the present.” When Heywood Hill opened his eponymous bookshop, Nancy Mitford was not known for her writing but for her eccentric family – a cause célèbre as a result of their fevered embracing of all things Hitler, with sister Diana marrying fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosely (and later imprisoned alongside him as a danger to the king's realm). The Thirties had been difficult for Nancy. She had released a number of books that received neither acclaim nor sales, but caused much controversy within her inner circle, particularly Wigs on the Green – a savage satire of her family’s enthusiasm for fascism. Elaine Padmore (19 November 2014). "Elizabeth Forbes: Musicologist and critic who translated librettos and wrote nearly 100 obituaries for 'The Independent' ". The Independent. For the last three years of the Second World War, while George Heywood Hill was in the Army, Lady Anne ran the shop with the assistance of the novelist Nancy Mitford. [4] In 1949 Elizabeth Forbes, the daughter of Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, joined the staff of the store where she worked prior to her career as a journalist, music critic, and musicologist. [5] John Saumarez Smith who had joined the staff straight from Cambridge in 1965, took up the reigns as manager in 1974, a position he held for over thirty years. [6] In 1991, the shop was bought by Nancy Mitford's brother-in-law, Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire. [7] Alison Flood (30 September 2016). "Prize of a lifetime: London bookshop offers free books for the rest of your life | Books". The Guardian . Retrieved 11 July 2017.

Several tomes later, and with due deference to Stoppard and Wilde, Algy has taken the suggestion on board. Here you will discover why Ian Fleming never achieved his heart's desire, delve into the Guinness Affair, marvel at the fast and louche life of the ‘Peter Pan of Mayfair’ and accompany the author to - and then swiftly away from - a disastrous dinner with Princess Margaret. Alongside come despatches from the gold mining and oil industries and a reflection on the parlous state of humour in the modern world, among other eclectic gems from the pen of a true character. John’s paternal great-grandfather, William Saumarez Smith, was the Primate of Australia, while his great-great-great grandfather, Joseph Smith, was William Pitt’s private secretary. On his mother’s side his grandfather was the theologian Canon Charles Raven, who became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, Master of Christ’s College and vice-chancellor of the university. When the spring of 1945 came around, almost three years to the day since Nancy started work at the shop, she was granted three months leave to bunker down and finish the book. She disappeared to the estate of Lord Berners (played in the BBC series by Andrew Scott), not leaving her room until her daily word count was completed. By the time the three months was up, the book was finished and the war in Europe had been won. Mitford returned to the shop that summer and sold the book (against her expectations) to publishing house Hamish Hamilton. She was finally able to leave the daily grind of bookselling behind. In 1947 the family returned to Britain, William Saumarez Smith becoming involved in church administration, latterly as appointments secretary to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.On reading Algy Cluff's first volume, Get On With It, Tom Stoppard remarked that the author's subsequent book should be titled ‘The Importance of Being Algy’

The year is 1936: Jesse Owens embarrasses the Third Reich at its own Olympics, Edward VIII ascends the throne and Heywood Hill, a little bookshop on Curzon Street in Mayfair, opens its doors for the first time. Named after the proprietor George Heywood Hill, an Old Etonian who married the daughter of the Earl of Cranbrook, the bookshop initially specialised in first and limited editions as well as Victorian toys, with most of its clientele aristocrats due to its affluent location.He also sold a set of Winston Churchill’s four-volume life of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, written in the 1930s, that had once resided at Windsor Castle. The first volume was inscribed by Churchill to “the Prince of Wales”; the second to “HRH Prince of Wales”; the third to “King Edward”, and the fourth to “the Duke of Windsor”. handsomely bound in full red crushed morocco, boards with 5 gilt line panels, spine richly panelled and lettered in gilt.

Follow Alan into Chatsworth's irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains and English eccentrics, and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks. After he left Heywood Hill, John continued to deal in books from John Sandoe and Maggs Bros. He was a natural writer who reviewed books widely and provided always considered advice to librarians and their patrons. Many across the book world will mourn him. The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street (2004), published in the centenary year of the birth of the shop’s most famous former employee, Nancy Mitford, who had worked there from 1942 to 1945, consisted of correspondence between her and the shop’s founder, George Heywood Hill, during the war – and afterwards, when she lived in France but maintained a close interest in the shop until her death in 1973.Throughout his lifetime John devoted his considerable intellectual energies to sifting the literary wheat from the chaff, in search of the beautiful, the important or the plain enjoyable. Under his benign stewardship, however, Heywood Hill remained a sanctuary for the book lover. The keys to his success were his scholar’s passion for books (he not only knew the books he sold, but their full publishing history), and his phenomenal memory for and interest in his customers and their likes and dislikes. In 1969 he married Laura, daughter of the architect Raymond Erith, who survives him with their two sons. John Saumarez Smith, who has died aged 78, was for 34 years the managing director and presiding genius of Heywood Hill, the tiny bookshop in Curzon Street, Mayfair, which from its foundation in 1936 has been the favoured haunt of bibliophiles from across the English-speaking world. He would often put aside a copy of a book he thought might appeal to a particular customer, and those who lived abroad – or in rural seclusion – depended on him to send them the best of recently publications. “He possesses the uncanny ability,” observed a transatlantic admirer in The New York Times, “to send out of the blue the exact book one’s been wishing for, so closely does he follow his customers’ interests and development.”