MOVING CHURCHILL #15: Packed

"Give Us The Tools And We Will Finish The Job."

We are overdue for an update.

Chartwell Booksellers is now all packed. It has taken more than a month, and so much time and muscle that we haven’t had a moment (or the strength) to write. The shelves are empty; in fact, they are leaning against the bare walls. Chartwell Booksellers, as we have known it, is just a mass of liberated bookcases and a massive heap of boxes. 

The good news? The bookcases have been surgically salvaged and will survive. Two master carpenters have done a miraculous job of rescuing our fixtures, intact and ready for more service. The teeming  boxes — over 3,000 books — are on their way out, along with the shelves those books have called home for 43 years. It’s a hell of sight; a kind of biblio-Normandy invasion.

Do we have a final destination yet? Uh, nope. Negotiations… well, you  know.

For the moment, we are only available to you online. As ever, your orders will be filled with alacrity. Every box of books has been filed by shelf number and location; we can find anything. Order one our Moving SALE Books, if you haven’t already. We dare you.

And if you’d like to follow us in real time, our Instagram page has been newly revved up. It features lots of ongoing info, photos, videos and a swell new graphic design. Our Facebook page is also keeping our followers apprised and apace.

We offer ongoing inspiration from Winston Churchill’s words in PAINTING AS A PASTIME on the sacrosanct subject of book shelving:

“If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are.

“Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”