In the late 1970s the business was taken over by the Little & Large of the book business, Bill Bailey and Roy Pearce, who had earlier run Coffee Books on part of the ground floor of The Firs, which you can read about in my piece A Stratford Ghost Story.

Bill, in those days, was a short wiry haired man, who looked like the professor he should have been. Roy was a six foot six inch Joe Louis look-a-like. Bill was, and probably still is, a rather quiet, reticent sort of man, with Roy a gentle talkative character who knew intimately every book in their extensive, and ever growing stock. And that was the problem – they never seemed to sell any books.

The trouble was that Coffee Books had become something of a haven for the literary poor of Stratford, and on a Sunday morning, with the smell of freshly brewed coffee, and the sound of either Dixieland Jazz, or opera, wafting up through the floorboards of our flat I would make my way downstairs and join a regular down at heel group of people sprawled in an assortment of dilapidated old sofas and chairs, and drink free coffee, listen to the music, argue, smoke an assortment of exotic leaves, and read lots of books.

How Bill and Roy survived I’ll never know, but they did, and well enough to acquire The Chaucer Head when it came on the market. But by then The Firs had been demolished to make room for a new Police Station, and there was, sadly, no music, or coffee, at The Chaucer Head, just Roy chuckling to himself as he read yet another P.G. Wodehouse. Thinking about it I can only remember ever buying one book at Coffee Books – in fact Roy might even have given it to me – which was an old battered edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, that to this days still smells of that dusty old place as it dozes happily on my shelves next to a biography of Miles Davis.

Richard James gave up a very demanding, and very lucrative, position as a Heritage Management Consultant when he bought The Chaucer Head Bookshop back in 1998, but has, he assures me, never regretted the decision, although he insists he no longer makes any money and told me (with a straight face) that I had made more money out of second hand books than he had on the day he agreed to buy my troublesome little collection. Perhaps he doesn’t need that training course after all?

The book that landed on my head that day was a biography of Mark Twain, which I have now moved to a lower shelf where he is wedged firmly between two biographies of Ernest Hemingway, who considered Twain the greatest of all American writers. They should get on well, although I shall keep my eye on both of them nonetheless.