LONDON — For anyone with a Black Friday and/or Cyber Monday hangover, Heywood Hill has the answer.
The beloved Mayfair bookshop, where the novelist Nancy Mitford once worked behind the counter and where John le Carré set one of the scenes for “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” is turning 90 next year, and marking the occasion with an edit of the best British novels published since 1936, with a new international subscription that promises pure immersion — and escapism.
The shop, in a Georgian town house on Curzon Street, may be tiny but Heywood Hill is known to readers worldwide as an “oasis for thought, and a place to cultivate a personal relationship with books,” according to its manager Nicky Dunne, who co-owns the shop with his father-in-law, Peregrine “Stoker” Cavendish, the 12th Duke of Devonshire. It has been renowned among bibliophiles for decades for its ability to locate even the most obscure title and send it off to a reader.
Founded in 1936 by a bibliophile called Heywood Hill, the shop specializes in books published in Britain, and its shelves and tables are stacked with fiction and nonfiction, classics and new writing. But the physical space is just the beginning.
The shop specializes in sourcing and collecting rare books and amassing specialist libraries for international clients.
Staff members regularly consult with customers, often one-on-one, to compile reading lists tailored to their pursuits, tastes or ambitions. Dunne describes the staff as “intellectual personal trainers” for Heywood Hill’s customers, who buy directly from the store or via a series of mail order subscriptions that appeal to a variety of tastes.
Heywood Hill on Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair.
Photographer:Vincent Cui
“This is a golden age of writing, with so many talented people, and so many voices. There’s such a breadth of publishing at the moment and a huge amount to enjoy,” said Dunne, who manages the shop and describes himself as “bookseller-in-chief.”
A voracious readers, he’s currently juggling Natasha Brown’s “Universality,” a social satire that was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize; John Updike’s “A Life in Letters,” which contains six decades’ worth of lively personal and professional correspondence, and Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”
He’s also working his way through a book of poems by the late Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney.
“I’m reading one a day, and sometimes I read them aloud to the team — the short ones, anyway — which they have to put up with. I know they groan inwardly as I tell them to listen,” he said.
During a tour of the tiny store, Dunne can’t help himself, and starts quoting from Heaney’s 1959 poem “October Thought.” The poem refers to cobwebs, and he likened them to the fine, but enduring, bonds between Heywood Hill and its customers around the world.
More than anything, he sees Heywood Hill’s role as a guide, steering people “toward things they may not necessarily have thought of reading. That’s what a lot of them say about our subscriptions. The love the pleasure of discovery, the serendipity,” he said.
Dunne’s passion for literature is imprinted in the family’s DNA.
The current Duke of Devonshire’s father, Andrew Cavendish, purchased Heywood Hill in the ’90s, while his mother, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was born Deborah “Debo” Mitford. She came from an aristocratic family that couldn’t stop reading, writing — and causing scandal.
Deborah was the author of numerous nonfiction books, including “Wait for Me! Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister” (2011) and “Home to Roost: And Other Peckings” (2009), while Nancy finally left the bookshop after her semi-autobiographical novel “The Pursuit of Love” became a bestseller.
Heywood Hill offers a special boxed set of Nancy’s books, which it put together with help from Deborah. In addition to “The Pursuit of Love,” (1945) the bundle includes “Wigs on the Green,” (1935), “Love in a Cold Climate” (1949), “The Blessing,” (1951) and “Don’t Tell Alfred,” (1960).
The five novels fit in a blue box, with “Love from Nancy” printed in gold on the top and on the back of each.
Nancy Mitford, who worked behind the counter at Heywood Hill, until she hit the big time with her novel “The Pursuit of Love.”
In addition to Nancy’s novels, the shop also carries books from Everyman’s Library, and indie publishers Fitzcarraldo Editions and Pushkin Press.
Heywood Hill offers a variety of annual subscriptions for adults, children and teenagers, some tailored to specific tastes, others that focus on classics and genres ranging from spy novels to bedtime stories.
For a few hundred pounds they can get a monthly delivery of signed first editions, or a mix of new fiction and nonfiction, all wrapped in signature brown paper with a blue bow.
The 90th anniversary subscription comes with Heywood Hill’s choice of the best British novels published since 1936, in addition to further reading lists and recommendations, bookplates and bookmarks designed by the English artist and designer Cressida Bell, and access to interviews with leading writers.
It costs 195 pounds for the year, less than a premium subscription to Netflix, for immersive content that requires no Wi-Fi signal, and that will never disappear.
