Mayfair bookshop Heywood Hill has asked 100 customers — from Anna Wintour to Stephen Fry — to nominate a book which has meant the most to them since the shop opened in 1936.
“The Heywood Hill 100 is a stimulating list,” says Nicky Dunne, chairman of Heywood Hill. “Our mission is to revive the art of personalised bookselling in the digital age.”
The list makes good reading. Michael Gove chose Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch 22; Stephen Fry picked Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry while Rory Stewart MP chose J M Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarian. And there’s no dry endogenous growth theory for Sir Mervyn King — the Bank of England Governor picked E H Gombrich’s The Story of Art for “making the reader accessible to art, rather than art accessible to the reader”.
