Monica Williams

FROM the meditations of Emperor Marcus Aurelius to The Gruffalo translated into Latin, there is no bookshop in the world like the Hellenic Book Service.

Celebrating its 60th anniversary, proprietor Monica Williams set up the shop with her mother in Charing Cross Road in 1966. Aged 86, she is still running the service today in a two-floor venue in Tufnell Park.

Brought up in the West End, she told Extra about her childhood in post-war London. “My father, Stelios Constantina, came from Cyprus to study the violin at the Guildhall in 1938,” she said. “We lived in Shaftesbury Avenue. He joined the RAF during the war and worked as an electrician. My mother, Photini, joined him. She was very bright, self-educated.”

Monica went to the St Clement Danes CE Primary School, Drury Lane, before heading to Paddington and Maida Vale High, Elgin Avenue.

“I used to walk through the Covent Garden flower market on my own, aged five, to school,” she remembers. Growing up in the West End meant she had a rich cultural upbringing.

The specialist service ran from a bookshop in Charing Cross Road

“I was an only child and I lived in theatres, museums and the National Gallery. I’d walk along Old Compton Street and see Tommy Steele. Cat Stevens lived around the corner – his father had a Greek restaurant – and we used to play together. I learnt tap and ballet at the Italia Conti school in Windmill Street, partly because my mother wanted me to learn how to speak the Queen’s English.”

Hellenic Book Service began as a mother-and-daughter partnership.

“My mother ran a Greek bookshop in Denmark Street called Zeno,” she said. “It was owned by a Greek Orthodox priest. We would see the stars going by to sell their music in Tin Pan Alley.”

After Zeno closed, mother and daughter decided to set up their own business. “I had trained at the City Poly as a secretary, shorthand, touch-typing, which was handy for the shop. We decided to have a go. It was a big risk.”

They found a place for the service on London’s premier book stretch, Charing Cross Road. Neighbours included Russian specialists Collets, counterculture shop Better Books, dance-related Beaumonts, art book sellers Zwemmers and the antiquarian Henry Pordes.

“Our shop was special­ist, and it attracted plenty of authors. We started with modern Greek works. I would come across the odd book in Latin and so we branched out,” she says. “Choosing stock was really a matter of intuition. We stocked English books on Greece and I’d have titles sent over from Greece. It is more difficult today, be­cause of Brexit, we have to pay customs duty.”

After 24 years in the West End, the landlord took back the premises – today it is home to TK Maxx – and Monica moved to Tufnell Park. Customers draw on her expertise earnt through a life in the book trade.

“We stock lots of classical Greek authors, of course, but also contemporary works and translations too,” she said. These include Julia Donaldson’s seminal children’s book, The Gruffalo, in Latin!

On her shelves you can find translations of The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Pat Barker, Agatha Christie, Philip Pullman and Stieg Larsson alongside contemporary Greek writers, too.

Greek and Roman philosophy takes up shelf space, as well as the original works by the likes of Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, a new wave of authors writing about the ancient Stoics has captured a zeitgeist. “We saw that during the Covid-19 lockdown there was a real spike in people buying books on Stoicism,” she said. “There is much to learn from these ancient writers.”

Monica has seen how classics have been sidelined in curriculums, and says we do so at our peril.

“Classical civilisation is a gateway. It brings pupils to life, Roman armies, gladiators, Pompeii. It is a really good way to inspire. Learning Latin also helps with other languages, but there is more to it than that. Latin is a major element of our shared past. It reminds us where English comes from. It reminds us of our shared, immigrant, story on this island, and so much English literature is inspired by Greek writers.

“It really does not feel like 60 years, and I still have customers who first shopped at the Service back in Charing Cross Road.”