British bookseller Geoffrey Bailey, former Hatchards manager and bookselling "legend" who also ran Covent Garden shop Crime in Store and Fulham's Pan Bookshop, died last month. He was 75. The Bookseller reported that "friends recalled Bailey, who counted Princess Margaret among his regular customers at Hatchards Piccadilly, as a raconteur and prolific reader."
Of his 30-year friendship with Bailey, crime novelist Peter James observed: "Books were both his passion, his career and his life. I used to joke that my late agent, Carole Blake, lived in a giant shoe cupboard with an apartment attached, and similarly Geoffrey lived, in south London, in a bijou library with a kitchen and bathroom attached. Every time I went there it had grown a little smaller as more and more books filled the spaces already filled with books. If he'd lived to 100, he'd never have been able to move for books!... My fondest memory will always be Geoffrey seated in his favorite armchair in our home, single malt whisky in one hand, a new book proof in the other, studiously consuming each with relish."
Writer Barry Forshaw said: "Attending a book launch or publishing meal with the legendary Geoffrey Bailey was always instructive. Not only did Geoffrey know everybody in publishing--in his days both as front-of-house man at Hatchards Piccadilly and as manager of the lively London bookshop Crime in Store--but he could also identify anyone with the slightest hint of blue blood.... Geoffrey was the consummate raconteur, and would lament that he wasn't performing his Hatchards duties in an earlier century when literary celebrities had more cachet."