John Saumarez Smith at 65

‘Might it amuse you to see (and perhaps even buy) Gibbon’s spectacles?’ John Saumarez Smith made Bevis Hillier a once-in-a-lifetime offer. It was 1976 and Hillier dithered. He neither saw nor bought Gibbon’s spectacles, but he did make a Saturday column out of it for the Times — characterising Saumarez Smith as ‘perhaps the most know- ledgeable of the younger generation of London booksellers’. Saumarez Smith, then 33, had been running Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street for two years, having joined it in 1965 straight from Cambridge. Now, as his 65th birthday turns, and after purveying knowledge and amusement to Heywood Hill’s worldwide clientele for more than four decades, he is standing down as managing director. It is an unusual record of service in any occupation.

First there was Heywood Hill, who founded the shop in 1936 (Saumarez Smith started the Monday after he left). He created the atmosphere, set the scene, enlisted his friends as customers, a fertile mix of writers, artists and gentry.