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It’s a brief however steep set of stairs all the way down to the basement. I cling to the handrail as I descend, turning a decent angle to duck underneath the low doorway. The area inside is as slim because the store ground above, however extends significantly additional. It’s as equally stacked excessive with inventory, and area is tight.
It’s a situation acutely acquainted to used ebook patrons like myself: cramped abundance. I’m informed we must perch on stools. So I discover a close by shelf area for my laptop computer to file us, above a pile of Purcell scores.
I can’t keep in mind after I first chanced upon Travis & Emery, a enterprise specialising in outdated music books and sheet music within the coronary heart of London’s West Finish. It’s a brief stroll from among the capital’s prime cultural and vacationer property. The Coliseum – residence (for now no less than) to English Nationwide Opera – is actually across the nook.
However even for the seasoned Londoner, Travis & Emery is simple to overlook. It’s a part of Cecil Court docket, which runs between the busy Charing Cross Street and St. Martin’s Lane. Sooner or later I will need to have made a detour down right here whereas killing time. In spite of everything, it’s usually on the side-streets the place you discover essentially the most attention-grabbing issues.
This was a truth understood by J.Ok. Rowling, who set the key Wizard retail vacation spot of Diagon Alley simply off the Charing Cross Street. At this time, tour guides will stand on the mouth of Cecil Court docket and declare this avenue was its inspiration. The presence of occult bookshop Watkins actually lends credence to the speculation, however its different shops showcase vintage specialisms with their very own sorts of magic – from outdated maps to editions of Alice in Wonderland.
A blue plaque notes that the Mozarts lodged in Cecil Court docket in 1764. An auspicious signal, maybe.
Your first sight of Travis & Emery may be the crates of discounted scores positioned exterior, however a well organized window show guarantees better items inside. Inside, numerous classes of sheet music run excessive up the fitting wall, and books about music populate the left, whereas an island unit is replete with additional choices. Room to manoeuvre just isn’t ample.
Becoming a member of me within the subterranean gathering is Giles, whose aunt based Travis & Emery in 1960, and from whom he inherited it after her dying within the Nineteen Nineties. Alongside him sits Charlie, a younger choral conductor who’s additionally the store supervisor.
The store’s wood, cupboardly attraction is the kind of retail expertise that’s not presupposed to exist in central London anymore – tales of beloved unbiased companies closing have develop into axiomatic lately. So I needed to know the way a enterprise like this could nonetheless function within the stomach of the capitalist beast. I ask, is Cecil Court docket protected in some way?
Giles recollects his lease circumstances. ‘I’m not allowed to promote meals, run a betting store…or run an immoral home’, he laughs. ‘It tends in direction of being bookshops, however as a result of bookshops usually are not notably worthwhile, it doesn’t at all times find yourself being bookshops’.
There’s extra to Travis and Emery than instantly meets the attention. Their commerce spans a large gamut. At one finish, an inexpensive rating is picked up by a cash-strapped music pupil, a passing operagoer buys a biography. However on the different are the intense collectables: antiquarian music books, scores and ephemera, the rarest of which might promote for lots of and even 1000’s of kilos.
‘Somebody got here in on Valentine’s Day in search of one thing for his spouse, and he says she likes Benjamin Britten’, Charlie tells me. ‘I believed to myself: we’ve got a ebook signed by Britten and Peter Pears. That was an prompt sale of one thing that was two or 300 kilos. In order that’s a pleasant feeling.’
I ask Giles to elucidate how the store happened, and he begins in an sudden place. His grandfather, Sir Edward Travis, was the director of the Authorities Code and Cypher College at Bletchley Park, the well-known Wartime codebreaking centre, after which at GCHQ. His daughter and Giles’s aunt, Valérie Travis, labored at Bletchley too earlier than going into the ebook commerce.
She labored in Cecil Court docket for Alec Clunes – father of tv actor Martin Clunes – however when she married the organist and Bach scholar Walter Emery, the identify for her personal enterprise was born. ‘She had managed to get a typewriter from a U-Boat, which her husband then used to sort up his musicology notes’, Giles provides.
After Valérie’s dying, he inherited a enterprise in unhealthy form. ‘We’d received about three years left on the fag-end of a 100-year lease. There had been water coming down…’, he gestures on the wall. The store nonetheless had an archaic rotary phone, and a forbiddingly inscrutable pc. It additionally had debt. That downside was solved by the invention of a uncommon manuscript, underneath an outdated field of tissues.
At this time, Travis & Emery does plenty of enterprise on-line, though a print catalogue of current acquisitions nonetheless goes out by mail. I’m handed the newest version, with Saint Cecilia on the duvet. Mail orders make up about half of the commerce, and through lockdown it naturally turned a lifeline. However about half of those orders are worldwide, and Britain’s exit from the EU Customs Union has added a bureaucratic burden. ‘We’ve in all probability misplaced a few prospects that means, individuals who simply don’t need to cope with the effort’, Charlie says.
Giles’s personal musical training didn’t lengthen past enjoying horn at college and faculty, however now many of the store workers have music levels. Its common shifts are helpful for these working in an all-too-precarious music business, and a few jobbing actors generally fill in too.
Downsizing establishments are a technique they purchase inventory. Auctions are one other, and generally the property of a deceased musician will get in contact immediately. In the event that they’re well-known, it may be a promoting level – a observe goes on the door about their scores. ‘We catalogue each attention-grabbing ebook that passes by means of the entrance desk, telling you about its situation’, Charlie provides.
However one factor turns into clear: what you see within the store is simply the tip of the iceberg. Giles’s residence is usually the primary port of name for acquisitions – a kind of home-counties Ellis Island for the huddled plenty of music publishing, craving to breathe free.
The private collections that the store acquires can also include sudden objects. {A photograph} may want returning to kinfolk, or an embarrassing letter stored underneath wraps. Giles recollects a quantity lined in brown newspaper with ‘Beethoven’ written down the backbone. Inside was a compilation of sentimental pornography. To every their very own Immortal Beloved, I suppose.
However for me no less than, that lingering sense of historical past is exactly what makes second-hand books so interesting – a private inscription, a curiously dated model. So usually they appear lived in, cherished, and have a narrative to inform.
I ask Giles and Charlie what they consider the current information that Hal Leonard have closed seven MusicRoom retailers, leaving solely the flagship retailer on Denmark Avenue. Is the state of the music market a priority for them? Would possibly they even profit from much less competitors?
‘We thrive collectively as music retailers’, Charlie says. However he notes an important distinction: the bread-and-butter of these shops, comparable to the newest ABRSM syllabus, is identical whether or not you purchase it in-store or on-line. ‘It’s not the identical expertise as coming right here and having full serendipity of what you may discover – lots of of years value of sheet music’. Giles provides that there’s plenty of mutual goodwill amongst sellers of their musical area of interest.
The rise of pill scores is one thing they each see as a possible problem for the 63-year-old enterprise. I level out that whereas e-readers have been round for some time, the paper novel nonetheless appears to be going robust.
‘The differentiation is the wonder and physicality’, Charlie says. ‘I feel that perhaps sheet music will go the best way of books. Since Kindles got here out, books are usually extra engaging, have extra attention-grabbing designs, they’ll make extra of a degree of what paper they’re utilizing, there’s extra collectable editions…the will for bodily objects may be very a lot nonetheless robust’.
And in his personal life as a conductor, does he keep loyal to paper? ‘I solely use sheet music’, he says, and smiles. ‘At this level I really feel like I’ve to’.
You could find Travis & Emery at 17 Cecil Court docket, London, and go to their web site.
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