The Face Pressed Against a Window: A Memoir
TIM WATERSTONE
(Atlantic Books, 336 PP, £17.99)
Tablet bookshop price £16.19 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Tim Waterstone was a champion bookseller. His idea for a bookshop was traditional, a model of local service, but where most booksellers would have been content with a single site, he applied his principle countrywide, developing a chain of “local” shops that was, in the words of one of his star employees, John Mitchinson, ­“radically decentralised”. It was astonishingly successful. Yet his own independent career was brief.

In 1982, when the first branch of Waterstone’s opened in Old Brompton Road, London, bookshops in the capital city were few and far between. Hatchards dominated Piccadilly, Dillon’s was the “University Bookshop”, Foyle’s was huge but eccentric; small boutique shops such as John Sandoe and Heywood Hill had their earnest devotees; the heydays of Claude Gill, Bumpus and the Times Bookshop were hazy in the memory.