We’re back home. I wanted to stay there. Seriously.

But home we had to come.

Don took this photo of me in Hyde Park during our last night in London.

I’m still sorting out my emotions and my thoughts and feelings about our trip and everything I learned – about myself and about others. I’ll share some thoughts with you when I’m less jet lagged and slightly more coherent. I will say this: this trip was transformative and profound. And Don and I are closer than ever.

I apologize for falling off the face of the blogging earth but I just didn’t have the time to blog during the last week and a half of the trip. And I wanted to be in the moment as much as I could. I kept up with Instagram because it takes no time and if you follow me there, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what we were doing and seeing. IG is great for that.

I think that over the next week or so, I’ll share memories and photos with you but not necessarily in chronological order. Like today – I thought I’d share a bit about books and bookshops.

Because of the magic of IG, I was aware of two London bookshops that I really wanted to visit and I’m happy to say I got to both of them.

First up is Daunt Books. There are a few locations, I believe, but the one that was only a few blocks from our hotel was Daunt Books in Marylebone. (I chose a hotel in Marylebone because I stayed in a flat in that area when I was last in London – 17 years ago – and I was familiar with the area.) We visited the shop twice and, who am I kidding, I could have gone every day, and every time we visited it was full of book lovers.

Our first visit was in the evening and it did not disappoint. I was unable to explore every inch of the shop because there was a talk and signing scheduled for that evening in the back of the shop.

And in the daytime:

What more could you ask for? A knowledgeable staff, tons of books on all subjects, maps, children’s literature, literary magazines, beautiful wrapping papers. This shop has loyal customers and it’s easy to see why. Both Don and I bought books here and the second time I visited, they gave me a cloth bag with their logo. I was as excited as a little kid.

Then there is John Sandoe Books. A particular instagrammer visits this shop a lot and her photos of the interior made me swoon. So we hopped on the Circle Line and got off in Sloane Square and walked a few blocks to the shop.

I was already about to faint when I saw the outside.

Inside? Absolute heaven.

There’s a downstairs and two narrow winding staircases lead to the upstairs. There are books everywhere.

Photos of authors are everywhere. This is a stairway wall and that’s Sir Ralph Richardson.

Just to the right are shelves of Persephone Books, an imprint that is re-publishing twentieth century female authors. They have their own bookshop, as well, but I didn’t have the time to get there.

Just below the gray Persephones are past editions of Slightly Foxed, a literary quarterly that I follow on Instagram. I’m thinking of subscribing but I wanted to read an edition first. I bought an edition from 2015 here at John Sandoe and I bought the current Fall edition at Daunt Books.

You can see from this photo that I decided on Number 43.

Upstairs.

View from the window seat.

Don took this of me reading. Sitting on the window seat, of course.

I would move to London just to be near these bookshops. I’m not kidding, I’m deadly serious. I love them both, but John Sandoe is the fulfillment of all my bookshop dreams.

Sigh.

I bought these:

Two editions of Slightly Foxed, the literary quarterly, a Persephone edition of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding  by Julia Strachey, Edward St. Aubyn’s latest, Dunbar, and Parisians  by Graham Robb. Don bought a compendium of Orwell’s writings on Truth.

Two more buys, but I must give you a brief back story. I’ve always wanted to collect editions of To Kill a Mockingbird  that are written in different languages – actually, I got the idea from Don. If you remember, back when Don was shooting that movie for PBS in Prague, he searched everywhere for an edition in Czech, but couldn’t find one. So I went to Paris hoping to find one in French. But I ended up in a lot of English language bookshops, like Shakespeare and Company, so that didn’t help. Finally, one day on the Right Bank, I walked into a tiny little shop and found it. Huzzah! Then I found a 50th Anniversary edition issued by a London publisher at Daunt Books.

I love them both.

Okay. That’s it for today. We are seriously jet lagged and right now I feel like I’m wading through muck. I have to rest. Our muscles are aching from so much walking, much of it on cobblestones. I can’t even begin to estimate how many miles we walked. And I have to do some coaching on Anastasia  Broadway in a few days, so I need to be kind to myself and give myself time to recover and to re-enter.

I missed you.

Happy Thursday.