Where I'll be on Saturday, and why it matters more than it should
This Saturday I will be at Leadenhall Market, selling candles shaped like spellbooks in a Victorian arcade that, when I was small, was a film set I would have given anything to walk into.
I did not plan it. I only made the connection recently, and then I thought about it more than I should have.
My mum gave me the first one
I was a kid when the first book came out, and I read every one after it. Then I watched the films — I would say more than a thousand times, and I am only slightly exaggerating.
I can't tell you where we were when she gave it to me, or how old I was, or what I said. I have tried. That is probably the answer, though — some things arrive early enough that you cannot remember a version of yourself from before them.
What actually stayed
It was never really the plot I kept.
What stayed was the texture of it. Candlelight. Old paper. A shop so full of things you could lose an afternoon in it. Autumn arriving as a feeling rather than a date. Stacks of books that looked like they had been read a hundred times and would be read a hundred more.
That is a very particular kind of cosy, and I have been chasing it ever since without really noticing.
Then I started pouring wax
Our Book Stack came first — a small pile of leather-bound books with the wick tucked into the open pages on top, in five finishes from pale ivory through to inked black. It sits next to real books very happily, which is the joke, and the reason people tend to buy two.
A small pile of leather-bound books with the wick in the open pages on top. Five finishes, ivory through to inked black.
Have a look →Then Spooky Books, which is the same idea let off the leash. Spooky Spells, Curses and Potions, with a skeletal hand reaching over the top.
Spooky Spells, Curses, and Potions — a decorative stack of spellbooks in wax. On the table at Leadenhall on Saturday.
Have a look →And the pumpkins — the Pumpkin & Grimoire Set, a small waxed pumpkin beside a stack of gold-sealed spellbooks, and Citrouille Pointilliste, painted by hand one dot at a time.
None of these are from anywhere. They are ours, made up, invented on a kitchen counter in London. They just come from a childhood spent somewhere that felt like this, which I never quite left.
And the market
It is cream and dark red and gold, with a glass roof and iron ribs overhead, tucked in between office towers in the City. One of the prettiest places in London to stand in, and even better to sell things in.
It is also where they filmed the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron for the first film. The blue optician's door in Bull's Head Passage is the one people queue up to photograph.
So on Saturday I will be in a Victorian arcade that doubled as a film set from my childhood, selling candles shaped like spellbooks, having somehow arranged my whole life around one long story I read when I was small.
It is the Markets SoLo craft fair, so the passages will be full of makers' tables rather than the usual weekday crowd.
We will be in Beehive Passage, Saturday 12 September, 12 to 5pm. Leadenhall Market, Gracechurch Street, EC3V 1LT.
Come and find us.