Any Amount Of Books

Banana box full of old books in a seaside bookshop, spotted yesterday. All £10. Apparently selling like hot cakes. An ingenious marketing ploy for books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. A few had brass clasps, many were odd volumes with loose boards, some quite interesting but none worth much more than £10, the bookseller made fairly sure of that. An interesting and creative idea. Must find a banana box...

Bought a lot of books in foreign languages. We have a tame polymath to help us with Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Greek but can usually make out the alphabet languages in a fairly basic way. Many go in the basement, mostly underpriced, some seriously so- a few overpriced through ignorance. One tiny book in French and English emerged and goes in the rare book section: "Cent Pensées d'une Jeune Anglaise / Published in French and English in Paris in 1800 It has a very attractive allegorical map of the '...Journey of the young in the land of happiness."

STOP PRESS. Basement sale has finished. Serious restocking in progress-- we reopen TONIGHT (Tues 16) at 6 PM with fresh books priced to sell fast (we need the space). Find us right in the centre of London, the smoke, the great wen etc., Leics Square tube. 10.30-9.30 everyday inc Sunday. 56 Charing Cross Rd, WC2

Last few days of the big basement sell off. ALL BOOKS NOW £1. The sale must end in three days. Sunday 14 Oct. Bulk deals. 7 books for £5! Leicester Square tube. 10.30-9.30 everyday inc Sunday. 56 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0QA -- followed by a high grade re-stock, we will be closed on Monday and most of Tuesday...

Basement bookshop SALE continues. ALL BOOKS NOW £1. The sale must end Sunday 14 Oct. Legendary bargains! Silly prices etc., Bulk deals. Right in the centre of London, the smoke, the great wen etc., Leicester Square tube. 10.30-9.30 everyday inc Sunday. 56 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0QA (image of London by Monet, smog has now cleared!)

Basement sale has finished. We have been restocking all week but this week it gets serious with an enormous delivery today. In the meantime we have asked around staff in our shop and a few other bookshops, including some in the sticks and come up with a list of authors most in demand. It divides into 3 tiers 1. Asked for a lot 2 Quite a lot 3. Fairly often. The third category is very large but here are the first two. There may be some serious omissions and some unworthy autho...rs may have crept in. I can think of at least one!
Jane Austen, Beckett,The Bible, Brontes, Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter, Agatha Christie, Churchill, Aleister Crowley, Roald Dahl, Conan Doyle, Darwin, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Heaney, Joyce, Kafka, Kerouac, Stephen King, CS Lewis, AA Milne, Orwell, Beatrix Potter, Pratchett, Rackham, Ayn Rand, JK Rowling, JD Salinger, Shakespeare, Bram Stoker,Tolkien, V Woolf, Waugh,Wilde, Wodehouse
2 Quite a lot
Jeffrey Archer, Marcus Aurelius, L Frank Baum, Enid Blyton, William Burroughs, Byron, Cervantes, Baron Corvo, T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, Neil Gaiman, Kenneth Grahame, Graham Greene, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, I Ching, Keats, Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, HP Lovecraft, Milton, Nabokov, Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Anthony Powell, Rilke, Seneca, G B Shaw, Dr Seuss, Mary Shelley (and P B), Tao Te Ching, Dylan Thomas, John Wyndham
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Bought so many magic books that we have, for now, a Conjuring window. Magic! Lots of sleight of hand, handkerchiefs, hats and doves. Oddly we bought two collections at the same time 4000 books, a lot are pamphlets on things like tricks with cigarettes, silk, slates, slim biographies of forgotten magicians and magic magazines. Pop by to amaze your friends and confound your enemies..

Half-price basement bookshop SALE starts today at 10.30 A.M. Friday 28TH September. All books in basement half marked price. Legendary bargains! Leicester Square tube. 10.30-9.30 everyday inc Sunday. 56 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0QA

Exquisite Jessie M King illustration published in The Studio 1913 from 'Seven Happy Days.' One of the treasures you find browsing through bound volumes of journals and magazines. Some of the Jessie images appear to be highlighted with a gold effect and as the title suggests there are seven pages of them. Of the oft requested list of illustrators- Rackham, Dulac, Neilsen, Pogany, Heath Robinson, Harry Clarke -- Jessie is our favorite just ahead of Harry.

‘This is the night mail crossing the border /bringing the cheque and the postal order /letters for the rich letters for the poor...’ Rare booklet designed by Pat Keeley 1939. John Grierson film, Auden poem. A classic. Auden used a stopwatch to time the poem to the film. Rap and slam poetry 'avant le lettre'. Now a DVD with extras and also on youtube..The booklet was a lucky find among some old postal ephemera (it was published by the GPO). The film was 3 years earlier.

Taking a short break in California, the world's 5th largest economy, I spotted this sign in a gift and clothes shop in downtown Santa Cruz. If we had such a sign we would surely add "All Browsers from anywhere in the Universe." While here I saw the film 'The Bookshop' (Billy Nighy, Emily Mortimer). Enjoyable and beautifully shot--but not set in East Anglia as stated (filmed in Ireland) + some of the books were from this decade and not 1959 and Emily was continually dusting the shelves with a feather duster, something you very rarely see ever in a bookshop...

We found a drawing over at Twitter done by customer Swetha - she wrote ‘London is filled with charming buildings and Any Amount of Books is easily one of my favourite secondhand bookstores in the universe. I love it to the moon and back.’ Praise indeed and a very sweet drawing of the shop. Not the first art work by a customer, a while back we were presented with a little model of the shop by a faithful regular. Warms the cockles of your heart!

A swanker. 1920s guide to hustling, grifting and fooling people. Smart trousers - in fact ‘Bags of swank’. Part of a very large magic related collection bought in Eastern Regions including magazines with names like The Gimmick, The Jinx, Magicol, Mahatma, Pentagram, Sorcerer etc., Lots of good stuff for the shop and a few for online. Part of a collection so large that it may be weeks before it appears (like magic) in Charing Cross...

Bought another 13 volume Yellow Book. The last one came out of Paris via the late, great Martin Stone (who was latterly a great Facebooker). That one was from the library of Arnold Bennett who contributed one piece. This set is from the library of James Joyce's lawyer John Quinn (well, one volume has his Jack B Yeats bookplate.) He was an incredible collector - at one point he owned the manuscript of The Waste Land and Ulysses. A good start to a modern first edition collection. Our Yellow Book is a clean set, it is not a scarce item but often in compromised condition...

Still going through a lot of ephemera, although a lot of it got carted off to auction as being too small and thin for a West End shop. Found this Esso ad from a vanished world when they had gas stations in Oxford Street (or near) and all shoppers were happy and you could park anywhere. Early 1950's I guess..Meanwhile at the shop still putting out file copies from Dent, Gollancz and Weidenfeld plus modern first editions (which sell fast)

Buying books from a house in the country. Spotted this collection leaning against a Coronation mug on shelf- Dr Who, Hermione, Rupert, TinTin’s dog (HMV?) Chap with trolly (for removing books)..a mixed collection and oddly no Dr Who or Harry P actual books. A few Rupert, but he is not the man he was..

Frontispiece of the Complete Lawn Tennis player 1908. The Nadal and Federer of their time. Echoes of Fry & Laurie.. Chap on right looks like Hugh Grant in his Jeremy Thorpe persona. Part of a large and seemingly endless sports collection bought in outer Ruislip. Big emphasis on the Olympics. To lighten the load we are still going through many boxes of books by European intellos-- Derrida, Barthes, Lukacs, Kristeva, Foucault, Jung, Bataille and last but not least Lyotard..

Still going through this fascinating bookseller’s book archive that we bought. Found – a receipt from the late booksellers Eric and Joan Stevens for books sold to the novelist Iris Murdoch in 1966. There is also a request in her hand for anything by, or on, Pushkin. Iris Murdoch was very keen on Russian literature, especially Dostoyevsky, but she did not write about Pushkin – although her husband John Bayley wrote 'Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary' which was published in 19...71. This request may have been for him. Her order is eclectic- some religious, even mystical work, (Radhakrishnan and Swedenborg), a laddish prison memoir, not at all her style – Frank Norman’s 'Bang to Rights' and a book on the Samurai (‘Bushido’). Peter’s 'My Sister, My Spouse' is about Lou Andreas Salome ‘A Biography of the Woman Who Inspired Freud’ (also Nietzsche and Rilke) – an important and much loved woman writer and psychiatrist. The two failed orders for Nietzsche and Freud probably fitted in with that..Penn’s 'No Cross, No Crown' is William Penn’s work on Primitive Christianity from 1669, probably not a first edition at 10 shillings, although the Stevens were always very reasonable in their pricing. Other works ordered include a Baedeker for the Rhine, possibly for a holiday. It its still fun to visit Europe with an old Baedeker. Schopenhauer is dealt with fairly well in her later work 'Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals'. Kropotkin fits in with her interest in Russian life and literature. Hale’s 'Famous Sea Fights' is a mystery, possibly light reading or a present for a friend. The Stevens’ had other famous writers as clients, including Anita Brookner and Geoffrey Hill, from whom they also bought many books. Iris Murdoch’s considerable library eventually went into the book trade, but not to Eric and Joan. And not to us, dammit..
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Bookshop basement SALE Has FINISHED. We reopen with stunning stock fresh from London mansions, country piles and suburban semis and storage units-- on TUESDAY (today!) 6pm. Open 10.30-9.30 everyday Leicester Sq tube. 56 Charing Cross Pic below is not our basement, our basement is currently only half full as a dedicated gang shelve books from endless boxes...and our basement has even better books than this chap (whoever he was) with file copies from Gollancz and Dent, bits of billionaire Felix Dennis's interesting library, folklore, proof copies,religion, poetry, sport, vintage magazines, foreign literature... the whole 9 yards..

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The ONE place I have to visit every time I go to London. The used bookshop of my dreams.

Simply my favourite second hand book shop in London!

Probably the best second hand bookshop in Britain, followed closely by Voltaire and Rousseau in Glasgow.

It is probably the best bookshop � in London, with a good vibe, friendly staff, and always helpful...and I've been going for years !!! Highly recommended and you may even find a great bargain or two that's slipped through their net...�

I have never visited a bookshop like this - in a good way, of course. Try it, you'll like it, then you'll need it.... heh, heh...

I have been able to purchase some rare titles by ECR Lorac and Carol Carnac from Any Amount of Books, and the service has always been fast, friendly and efficient. Thanks.

I had a great time at Any Amount of Books�

Fab cannot wait to go again ill need to save though as their reasonable prices but I buy a lot

an intriguing secondhand book store. there's two levels with downstairs having cheap multi-buy deals. books are sorted into categories to make things a little easier but you'll definitely have to rummage. it's worth checking out.