A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

Established 1985, and now in large premises occupying two buildings of great historical interest in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, Jabberwock is a general secondhand bookseller, with books on most subjects, particularly Art, Literature, Poetry, History and Travel. The shop, open Monday to Saturday, 10.30am to 4.30pm, holds a large stock, of which the Internet list represents only a small fraction. We see Internet bookselling as complementary to - and not a replacement of - good secondhand bookshops. In Horncastle we have the perfect location for a bookshop of the traditional kind. When we first opened the Jabberwock Books Horncastle Bookshop we were the town's only booksellers; now there are two more secondhand bookshops in Horncastle - and in 2005 we acquired the building adjacent to our original shop, doubling the size of our premises and making Jabberwock Books, Horncastle, one of the major secondhand bookshops in Lincolnshire. A small market town, in the Lincolnshire Wolds, built on the ruins of a Roman fortification, once famous for its horse-fair and now becoming well-known for books, Horncastle is a popular tourist destination, not least for the Horncastle bookshops and the many antique shops of which some are also booksellers. We are lucky, at the Jabberwock Books Horncastle Bookshop, to have the biggest remaining part of the town's ancient Roman stonework forming part of our outer wall.