THE YELLOW PAGES advertisement may be 20 years old but people still walk into the bookshop that featured in it for a brief second and ask for a copy of Fly Fishing, by J. R. Hartley.

“The other common opening gambit is, ‘I emigrated to New Zealand in 1940, and the shop’s still exactly the same’, ” Sabrina Izzard, the owner of Hall’s Bookshop since 1983, says. “Tunbridge Wells natives have long memories.”

Hall’s Bookshop opened in 1898 and remains resolutely low-tech. Books cover almost every available surface over two floors; dust hovers in shafts of sunlight. Locals have their daily nose around the shelves, sipping tea and chewing over the news of the day. A woman walks in, gulps a big lungful of bookish air, and says it smells exactly right.

“Even letters just addressed to ‘The bookshop on the corner, Tunbridge Wells’ manage to reach us,” Izzard says. “It’s a local institution; people would be up in arms if anything changed.”

As indeed they were. In 1989 Lloyds Bank, which owned the premises, decided to expand its neighbouring branch into the bookshop. Hall’s appeared doomed, but its customers would not let it go without a fight and the chairman of Lloyds found himself bombarded with thousands of letters of protest from all around the world. When the national press got hold of the story, Lloyds relented and the bookshop was saved.

“It’s a provincial bookshop, reflecting the tastes of its customers,” Izzard says. “We rely upon local connections for our stock. We never buy books to order, only what we’re offered.

“It’s this randomness that makes the shop exciting. It encourages those moments of serendipitous discovery when browsing — you wouldn’t know you wanted something like Round England on My Knees — a Brass-Rubbing Odyssey or 7,000 Words Often Mispronounced until you stumbled across it.”

The racks of 50p and 10p books are also a crowd-pleaser. “You’d be an idiot to get into second-hand books for the money,” Izzard says.

HELEN ZALTZMAN

Contact 20-22 Chapel Place, Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN1 1YQ (01892 527842)

Specialises in literature, art, poetry, history, topography, antiquarian.

Prize exhibit original 17-volume set of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, published 1895 by Osgood, M’Ilvaine, £1,250

Hard to shift “A set of church histories. The layer of dust on top is very thick indeed.”

Best customer story “A customer got locked in. He didn’t come when we shouted that we were closing because he thought that when the lights dimmed, they would come back on like in the theatre. He browsed around the shop then called the police to let him out. He bought a stack of books.”

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