It is a snug, busy-looking place, Alpha Books is – ‘the size of three broom cupboards’, as its owner, Simon, fondly describes it. Tottering, teetering stacks of books vie with one another for space: fact elbows fiction, novels jostle against fat economic theory textbooks. Outside, three sturdy carts of paperbacks seem to keep watch over the flurry of student activity in the Quad.
‘Before we put those trolleys out there, people would nervously stick their heads in and ask what this place was,’ says Simon wryly, ‘And I’d reply ‘Oh, we’re the grocer’s. Look, there’s a leg of ham’.’
In many ways, the history of Alpha Books is the history of the refurbishment of the Quad. The shop came into being 14 years ago; prior to this, for some four and a half years, it existed as an ‘anarchic series of sagging tables’, the books lugged out each day, packed back into trunks every night. ‘At the end of it, I’d begun to feel a bit like a donkey, with four legs and a tail,’ jokes Simon. When the Students’ Union decided to renovate the Quad and offered him and his coterie of books a permanent home, he jumped at the idea.
That’s one aspect of the LSE that continues to intrigue him: its unceasing architectural ‘restlessness’. At some point, he tells me, albeit well before his time, the Quad didn’t have a roof: it was like ‘an Athenian open courtyard.’ Something or the other, he notes, is constantly being built, or refurbished. ‘It’s like the concrete that never set.’
But how have the students changed over the years?
‘They now have wires in their ears,’ he quips, chuckling. ‘All these distractions, this technology – it splits their concentration, entrances them. It makes for many an interesting exchange at the till, though, to be fair.’
‘The students, they don’t change, not really. Just the other day, I was listening to the election hustings going on in the quad below – that’s one other thing about the LSE, it always seems to be in some sort of turmoil over elections – and I thought to myself, this sounds familiar, where have I heard this before? And then I realized – aha! – last year. The faces change, but the students, they tend to remain the same.’
‘Rumour has it,’ says Simon, cupping his hands around a squishy Styrofoam cup containing coffee from Wright’s Bar (small, white, one spoonful of sugar), ‘that my memory is infallible. But the truth is: just the other day a student asked me for a book that I thought we didn’t stock.’ He leans forward, lowers his voice as if divulging a fiercely-kept secret. ‘But we did. He found it on one of the trolleys.’
Infallible though it perhaps might not be, Simon’s memory is nonetheless pretty darn good. There is much that he remembers: the girl who felt compelled to purchase every single P.G. Wodehouse novel in the store to keep her going during her visit to Darfur – ‘which, I suppose, was hardly going to be a barrel of laughs.’ The bookshop romances, so many of them, all doomed the minute the lady in question realized that her gentleman friend had not in fact read the book he’d so eloquently been expounding upon – just its back cover.
‘We have a game that we play here,’ he says, ‘ Former students drop by and ask: ‘Simon, do you remember me?’ And I reply: ‘Yes, yes, of course I do!’ And the game that we play is: they ask me, do you remember how long it’s been since I graduated? And the challenge is to get the number of years right.’
We are sitting just outside the bookshop, perched awkwardly on the outlandish black and white seats (blobs, really) that the Union introduced in the Quad this year. The wall next to us is speckled with speech bubbles, containing quotes from LSE students, past and present. He peers at this wall, his glasses misted over by the steaming coffee, and periodically issues a harrumph of recognition: ‘I remember this one. And this one. And that chap? I just met him a few weeks ago.’
In the finance-centric world of the LSE, what place does a shop like Alpha Books occupy? Is there really a demand among the students milling about on Houghton Street for Forster and Eliot and for Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky?
‘We do stock textbooks but the fiction – the fiction is necessary,’ stresses Simon, ‘It’s where the rest of life is. And the demand for fiction at the LSE has actually increased: there are reading groups now and literature courses – three of them, in fact.’
‘People wander into the store looking for a particular book but end up buying other books. It’s a bit like a journey, this book-finding business, we come across other things along the way.’ He pauses, ‘In a sense, we’re all looking.’
‘You have so many sorts at the LSE: the undergraduates, the single-year General Course students, those on the long, rocky, lonely, road to a PhD. In a place like a bookshop, everyone seems to come together.’
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