Vintage Penguins in Lyme Regis

I didn't come to Lyme Regis to find old Penguins. In fact there were moments yesterday morning while I was dragging my suitcase and assorted bags containing the 170-odd books (mostly Penguins and a few Enid Blytons) I have found so far through train stations and up staircases when I wondered whether I even wanted to continue searching. Perhaps 170 books is enough for anyone, and I could now turn my focus to the scenery. I managed to walk through the streets of Exeter past more charity stores than I have ever previously seen in one location without feeling even slightly tempted to see if there was a Penguin waiting on the shelf.

But I didn't manage to walk past The Sanctuary, an enticing book store in Broad Street, Lyme Regis. Even though neither of us planned to buy anything, we spent about an hour browsing the shelves and coming across loads of Penguins priced between one to three pounds. And then I spotted a book I have been searching for since reading The Last Tresilians last year: it was no. 1960 A Use of Riches, one of the two other novels that Penguin published by J.I.M. Stewart. Amazingly, I found the other one (no. 2037 The Man Who Won the Pools) a few minutes later in a charity shop across the road for 25 pence.


The trip to Lyme Regis was really about John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Persuasion: it was something of a literary pilgrimage. And yet walking on the cobb has proved a much more difficult ambition to fulfil than you would expect. Last time I tried to get there I walked through dark streets and falling snow and arrived at Waterloo station to find all trains cancelled. This time I made it to Lyme Regis, but was stopped by a policeman 200 metres from the cobb because it was believed that a digging child had unearthed a landmine.

It turned out to be a rubber tyre, and so this morning after breakfast I headed to the cobb again, and I was rewarded with a beautiful winter's morning and a calm ocean, and the opportunity to experience the cobb in the best way possible: alone, and in complete silence.