Calming influence

THE 9.58 is approaching Alnmouth railway station, a place where the notion of integrated transport has hitherto seemed as helplessly lost in the translation as the north Northumberland accent, when the guard announces that there is a connecting service to Alnwick.

Incredulity is stillborn. “You’ll see the horse and cart at the end of the platform,” the man adds.

While there is no sign of horse and cart, bus, taxi or even the station master’s bike, sundry platform notices advise that Alnmouth station is 39 miles and 69 chains north of Newcastle, that it is “the threshold of the panoply of Northumberland’s nature”

and that Barter Books is three miles away.

It’s Barter Books to which we headed north last Saturday – that and the match, though Alnwick Town’s chances are submerged by mid-morning and Barter Books offers more prospect of a paragraph, anyway.

It’s a truly remarkable place, described by New Statesman magazine as: “The British Library of second hand bookshops,” and by Bishop Auckland author Wendy Robertson as: “A sweetie shop for bookaholics.”

It’s also the place where the “Keep Calm” cliche lay long cocooned, before, with inverse irritation, becoming a byword for banality on every silly souvenir in the land. We must forgive them that, no doubt.

IF Barter Books is extraordinary, then so is the former Alnwick railway station in which for mile after mile it is shelved. Closed in 1968, terminus of the shufflebottom service to the main line at Alnmouth, it might reasonably have been supposed to comprise a hut, a hat and a saucer of milk for the cat.

That it was almost impossibly grand was because the Duke of Northumberland – master then as now of much that thereabouts he surveys – didn’t want his noble 19th Century visitors thinking that he had nowt.

The books business was started in 1991 by Stuart Manley, said variously to come from County Durham and from Teesside – make that Stockton, then – and by his wife Mary, a cotton farmer’s daughter from Missouri.

They met on a trans-Atlantic jet, when Stuart – “transfixed,” he admits – threw Mary a note inviting her to raise her hand if she wanted to speak to him.

Opposites attracted, love at first flight. He’d been a toy salesman and was a model maker, she was an academic who’d quite fancied being an actress. Their website lists his hobbies as (English) football, cricket, heritage railways and cash flows, hers as “everything but football, cricket, heritage railways and cash flows”.

Barter Books was her wheeze.

“There’s nothing more inspiring than an overdraft,” she once said, though a friend supposed that she’d be found dead beneath a pile of ideas in any case.

Initially, it was a swap shop in the former station ticket office, next to the model making business. Now there are 200,000 visitors a year, an estimated half a million books, 40 staff, 32,000sq ft and, inevitably, a worldwide webbery, too.

It seemed prudent to arrange a chat. They said he’d ring back.

That he didn’t was probably because he thought we were trying to flog him a page of advertising.

Blow that, we went anyway. There are enough Manley pursuits around here.

HONEST, it’s amazing, relaxed but semi-studious, the gentle susurration of an overhead model railway accompanying more recondite trains of thought.

Coal fires blaze in the intimately inviting former first class waiting rooms, ladies’ and gentlemen’s, wellordered rows sometimes identified by quotations from literature. Did Frank Lloyd Wright really say that it was as well to build a chicken house as a cathedral and, if he did, what on earth was he on about?

The books bind, boundless.

Among the first is a copy for £86 of the History and Antiquities of Darlington which I am tempted to buy as a present for the incomparable Mr Chris Lloyd until realising that (a) he probably has three or four already and (b) he may well have sold them that one in the first place.

There are vintage volumes, such as British Forces Motor Cycles 1925- 45, The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Knots and Ropework – £40, money for old rope work – and like Spike Milligan’s Bald Twit Lion, £170. Really there is no point in listing further, because you couldn’t make it up.

There’s Beano, Beezer, Broons and Biggles, Bionic Woman annual and Beverley Hillbillies Annual. Well thumbed copies of the Topsy and Tim children’s stories, inevitably known in our house as Flops and Jim, fetch up to £12.60.

The only incongruity, perhaps, is in the rapturously cosy old waiting room where a man might fall asleep and wake, van-Winkled, 100 years later. Amid the books lies a copy of The Punter, that day’s. It’s an improbable bet.

Customers seem to leave contentedly, rucksacks replete, secretly smiling. It is as if they’ve lost a Penny Dreadful and found an Ezra Pound.

STUART found the Keep Calm poster folded in four at the bottom of a box of books, liked it and put it on the wall. It was the Calm before the storm. When others shared his enthusiasm, he wanted to have 50 printed. “I thought I’d sell them eventually,” he said.

The Ministry of Information had prepared three similar posters in 1939. The first, red and white, proclaimed “Your courage, your resolution, will bring us victory.”

The second said “Freedom is in peril.”

Two and half million copies of the third, Keep Calm, were printed for distribution in the event of dire emergency, an event which – though opinions might have differed – seemed not to have come about.

The Imperial War Museum kept a copy, another was in a box of Barter books, the rest were pulped.

In 2005, though they didn’t have the copyright, the Manleys sold 9,000 in a month.

These days they make little of it.

There’s a copy near the entrance, the symbol on two or three quietas- a-mouse mats, but little other obvious display. “It’s no longer cool,” Stuart told the Telegraph in 2011. “They have it in our local Lidl now.”

THOUGH it will never again steam in beneath the doublearched grandeur that is Alnwick station – the Great North Road has come between them and, besides, it has other platforms now – there are plans to reopen the branch from Alnmouth.

A short shuttle began last year at Alnmouth, much fundraising is under way, a group has recorded a song about the Aln Valley Railway to the tune of Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Stuart Manley, if not his wife, is much involved.

For the moment, there’s a bus from outside the bookshop – the timetable resolutely listed Berwick-on-Twee – and with barely an hour to wait before the one o’clock train back south.

There’s still a Northern League need to visit Alnwick Town before the end of the season, but this was a thoroughly enjoyable morning – perhaps, as they may say in those parts, the cart before the horse.