About Us

A Surreal Escapade.

I am Bob Jackson. I am in no way qualified to do this job. I do not have the knowledge, temperament or aptitude to spend all my time mooching around books. Nevertheless, this is what I find myself doing, like a permanent holiday.

My mother bought this building for me in 1977 when property here was cheap. I had been a recluse for some years, painting and writing and living on welfare ('the dole'). I had no money and no idea how I might earn a living. For a few years I put on art exhibitions here until 1982, when I started to sell books in a small way.

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Interlude

Then it was main life. The business grew, and the painter Tessa Newcomb and I had children.

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The Southwold Episode

In 2001, my friend Richard Hamburger decided to give up his Drunken Boat bookshop in a small road near the sea front at Southwold: I took it on, calling it the Pinkney's Lane Bookshop. It was fun, but it meant I had to employ people all the time to keep both places running, and I found I was neglecting the Chapel. As the Chapel was also my home, this was not good. In 2003 Marion Vandome took on the Southwold shop (calling it Southwold Books), and I reverted to being in one place.

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The Smartness Comes

With a certain detachment due to the Southwold shop not being my home, I had enjoyed playing a different part there, being a neat person and making structural changes to it and keeping it trim. So that, when I found myself back in the Chapel with it's famously organic welter of disarray now feeling run down, I was no longer prepared to re-enmesh myself in the substance of it, and felt that I could not proceed without acting upon it with some of this detachment. This led to big rationalisations, and the building of rooms and a floor, so that domestic storage and unpriced books could be separated from the public shelves, and the books could be better cared for.

I knew that this was dangerous: people had often said 'don't ever change'. The Chapel in its former state was valued as a refuge from all the nightmarish rationalising tidiers-up of life and of people's worlds: it was a sacred area for many, like a rain forest, and I have been taken to task for letting this go. The passing of that era is a loss to the spiritual ecology, but worse would have been for it to become sterile and deliberately maintained as an imitation of itself, with my heart no longer in it.

I remain engaged, and the place changes with me, direction unknown: but it remains remarkably benign.

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Improbable Respectability

Many people have helped in the shop over the years, ranging from unknown customers who have minded it at a moment's notice, to Harry Tatham, who assisted me almost regularly and in a variety of capacities for over a decade. Among the varied crew who have worked here briefly in their youth were the late, gifted, Nick Heiney, and the 'weird fiction' writer, China Miéville.

And now, in Juliet Bullimore, I have a helpmeet.

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[the striking mixed media photocollage on the home page is by my daughter, Tiggy Gabrielle Jackson Newcomb]