Pickerings Books
Scotland's newest secondhand bookshop, Pickering's Books, opened in the premises at the corner of Buccleuch Street and Buccleuch Place that were formerly McFeely's Bookstore. JENNIE RENTON wrote about the event.
Stephanie Pickering will be known to many older book collectors for her association with West Port Books, which she founded with Marcus Patton in 1976. The following year Patton returned to Belfast, where he is an architect, artist and writer on architecture and conservation.
Pickering took the helm. She ran a bookshop that was full of character, full of interesting books brought together by an enquiring mind. What more could you ask for?
She brought to bear her previous experience: following a degree in French and European Literature from Warwick University (Germaine Greer was one of her tutors) she had worked in London in Foyle's bookshop and with the distinguished academic publishers, Routledge & Kegan Paul. After a time travelling in North Africa and Europe she had settled in Edinburgh where she took jobs in Bauermeister's and at Edinburgh University Library, then completed an MA in Librarianship at Sheffield University. It was on her return to Edinburgh in 1976 that she and Patton started West Port Books. However, her husband worked in the oil industry and in 1980 she sold the shop to Bert Barrott.
Over the next twelve years her husband's work took the family to the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and the USA. She finally returned to Edinburgh at the start of the 1990s and became a freelance editor with publishers including Churchill Livingstone, Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press, Chambers, NMS and HMSO. For the last six years she has been involved as a copy editor and proof reader on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a huge project for what is effectively the second edition of the great DNB edited by Leslie Stephen. Soon after this work was completed in 2003, she read in Scottish Book Collector that Gerry McFeely was interested in selling on his lease and she took the decision to plunge back into bookselling. This is a brave move, given that secondhand booksellers across Britain are reporting that trade is not as reliably rosy-cheeked as it once was. However, she has already founded one first-rate bookshop, and her extraordinary range of knowledge and flair for bookselling will stand her in good stead, while the café provides a refreshing new challenge.
Copyright Jennie Renton 2005.