84 Charing Cross Road

The Maughan Library is the main university research library of King's College London and the Round Reading room is a quiet space to study.

📸 David Gutierrez / The Maughan Library - King's College London.

“There’s something hypnotic about the word ‘tea’. I’m asking you to enjoy the beauties of the English countryside; to tell me your adventures and hear mine; to plan a campaign involving the comfort and reputation of two-hundred people; to honor me with your sole presence and to bestow upon me the illusion of paradise, and I speak as though the pre-eminent object of all desire were a pot of boiled water and a plateful of synthetic pastries in Ye Olde Worlde Tudor Tea Shoppe.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

Why?

We're not saying a cat and a second-hand bookshop are going to fix all your problems.

But we're also not NOT saying that...

Mr. Toast at Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire says hi.

Photo: Molly Hammatt, Dyrham Park - National Trust

'The Wood Elf' by Margaret W. Tarrant from The Story Wonder Book, 1937.

William Chambers (n.d), ‘The Sculpture Collection of Charles Townley in the dining room of his home in Park Street’. Pen, ink and watercolour on paper, England, 1794.

A drawing showing the sculpture collection of Charles Townley in the dining room of his house in Park Street, Westminster.

🎨 "Piccadilly Flower Sellers" (1928) by Herbert Ashwin Budd (1881–1950).

Herbert Ashwin Budd's art is a testament to the power of creativity and imagination. His works continue to inspire and captivate audiences, inviting us to see the world through a different lens. As we immerse ourselves in the beauty of his creations, we are reminded of the transformative power of art and the enduring legacy of a visionary artist.

A seriously detailed lithograph of two black exotic birds, one of a series featured in Richard Bowdler Sharpe’s "Monograph of the Paradiseidae, or Birds of Paradise".

🎨 From the collections held at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library.

With its sex-crazed monks, dissolute noblemen, mad scientists, shambling monsters and blood-sucking vampires - not to mention its apparently endless fascination with innocent young ladies in diaphanous gowns being pursued around crumbling castles - it is easy to see why Gothic literature has often been regarded as somewhat disreputable.

Gothic fiction has always possessed the ability to adapt itself in order to reflect the latest ideas and concerns of society: Matthew Lewis wrote his brilliantly lurid novel The Monk (1796) in response to the horrors of the French Revolution.

📸 An early 19th-century edition of The Monk, complete with a full plot outline - ending in 'Most Ignominious Death' - on the right-hand page

This may look like a normal cat versus mouse encounter, but this Mūshnāmah (Book of the Mouse) tells a tale where the mice get the upper hand.

Mūshnāmah, a mock-epic (d. ca. 1370) attributed to ʻUbayd Zākānī, features a satirical fable concerning a cruel and hypocritical tyrant, symbolically depicted as an evil cat, often associated with the founder of the Muzzafarid Dynasty (1314–1393) Mubāriz al-Dīn Muḥammad (r. 1314–1358), who repeatedly torments a community of virtuous mice.
In the tale, the tyrant is symbolically represented as an evil cat that torments a community of virtuous mice. While this finely transcribed, and whimsically illustrated manuscript lacks a colophon, the style suggests that the commercial atelier (muṣavvirkhānah) of painter Faqīr Chand (ca. 1790–1865), or his son Shīvā Lāl (1817–1887), known as Shāhī Muṣavvir (Royal Painter) illustrated it.

Steeped in notoriety.

📸 Wrong hands