How sad it is to see that Candle Lane Books in Shrewsbury has now, after many years of being an unaltered presence in the town centre, finally closed its doors. I’ve always known that this day would come eventually, and each time I’ve seen the shop still open I’ve felt a small sense of relief that it had hung on for just a little while longer. The business closed in early March, and I was too late to pay it one last visit by way of goodbye.
It was an antiquarian bookshop of a dying kind, a venerable old building with uneven, creaking floorboards and dormer windows looking out across the narrow street onto ugly 1970’s buildings. I do love books, but any visit I made there would be as much to soak up the unique atmosphere of such a characterful place as to consider a prospective purchase. The rooms looked practically unaltered, reached by a vertiginous winding set of stairs with narrow treads that alarmed me with every uneven step whether ascending, or even more frightening, descending. At the very top of these perilous stairs, tucked beneath the eaves, was a small room with a distinct sense of atmosphere, by which I do not mean supernatural, just a feeling which seemed to hang in the air along with the dust motes and the inimitable smell of old books and gently disintegrating print on loosening pages. It was a pleasant, familiar feeling, if anything.
I didn’t often buy anything : the books I really liked were usually beyond my budget, and this was a place owned by a collector with decades of knowledge and experience who knew the proper value of old books, from the days before Amazon and Ebay, both of which no doubt helped hasten the demise of places such as this.
There are still piles of books in the empty shop, although now the shelves are largely bare, despite there having been a day when the remaining stock was given away for free. It looks desperately sad.
I await the next role of this handsome building with trepidation ; although Shrewsbury is lucky enough to have more independent businesses than most in this day and age, there will, I imagine, have to be considerable renovation undertaken. I hope that this will be carried out with sympathy and consideration for the age of the premises, but whatever happens, it won’t be the same, that much is certain. The character and atmosphere contained within the ancient walls of Candle Lane Books will be gone forever.