Oliver Darkshire.
Once Upon a Tome: the misadventures of a rare bookseller.
Penguin. 2022
rating : 3.5 : worth reading
review : 26 May 2025
Darkshire came to love Sotheran’s, not just for its illustrious history (or for producing the most cursed book of all time), but also its joyous disorganization and the unspoken rules of its gleefully old fashioned staff, whose mere glance may cause a computer to burst into flames.
By turns unhinged and earnestly dog-eared, Once Upon a Tome is the rather colourful story of life in one of the world’s oldest bookshops and a love letter to the benign, unruly world of antiquarian bookselling.
Oliver Darkshire hadn’t succeeded at his previous attempts at a career, but when offered an apprenticeship at the antiquarian bookseller Southran’s, he found his home. This book recounts some of his adventures in the rare book trade (some certainly exaggerated for humorous effect, but probably not as much as all that).
I found this a curiously mixed bag. Each vignette starts with the beginning of a specific anecdote, spirals amusingly into other cases, but then rarely returns to give closure on the original event. So this felt a little frustrating. However, the anecdotes themselves are interesting and amusing, display a deep love of books (and I definitely appreciate that!), and show how a gentler work lifestyle, and educational style, can allow people who don’t fit, for whatever reason, into the mainstream world, to flourish nevertheless.