William Heffer did not begin life looking like a future Cambridge institution. He came from Exning in Suffolk, the son of an agricultural labourer, and by eighteen seventy-one he was working as a groom, with the sort of prospects that did not usually end on Trinity Street. Then a modest loan nudged the story sideways. In July of eighteen seventy-six, he opened a small shop at one hundred and four Fitzroy Street... selling stationery first, not books. Pens before poetry. Sensible, really.
Books crept in through bibles and academic texts, and by eighteen ninety-six Heffers had opened its bookshop at three and four Petty Cury, where it stayed for seventy-four years. This became a family machine as much as a shop: seven of William’s nine children became directors, and five worked in the business. Even the staff could stay for a lifetime. R D Littlechild started as a bookselling apprentice on the twenty-fifth of April, nineteen oh three, on two shillings a week... about a dozen pounds today... and served for fifty-four years. Not much job-hopping there.
This Trinity Street home came in September of nineteen seventy, inside the Wolfson Building designed by Austin-Smith: Lord. Its open plan, galleries, and descending levels felt, as Pevsner said, “something quite new for a British bookshop.” Nearby, the trade had old company: Bowes & Bowes at one Trinity Street traces its roots to fifteen eighty-one, and Deighton Bell began at Green Street in seventeen seventy-eight under master bookbinder John Deighton. Heffers bought Deighton Bell in nineteen eighty-seven. Four generations of Heffers ran the firm until Blackwell’s bought it in nineteen ninety-nine.
Walk south to the end of Trinity Street and on into King’s Parade. The next stop is the long stone screen on your right, facing King’s College Chapel - Wilkins’s 1820s screen, opposite the gown-makers at number twenty-two.
