John Sandoe opens a Chelsea shop in 1957 with a friend who found the premises.

John Sandoe (Books) is named after the bookseller who opened it. The Independent, in an obituary by the playwright Julian Mitchell published on 19 January 2008, said John Sandoe founded his Chelsea bookshop in 1957, in a small Regency cottage just off the King’s Road crammed with books from floor to ceiling. Mitchell wrote that Sandoe had once wanted to be a writer, studied at McGill University in Canada and briefly worked as a stockbroker in Montreal before returning to Britain in 1955 and deciding that if he was not going to write books he would sell them. He learned the trade at Bumpus on Oxford Street.

Matthew Bell, writing in Country & Town House on 16 November 2017 for the shop’s sixtieth anniversary, added that Sandoe took advice from the Mayfair booksellers Heywood Hill, and that his stockbroker father met the plan with the line “Books? You might as well sell boots.” The shop says Sandoe opened on 11 November 1957, and that his intention was to offer his own selection of current books and to obtain any other book a customer asked for. It calls that aim a fair description of what it still tries to do.

The premises came through a friend. Bell wrote that Felicité Gwynn, sister of the cookery writer Elizabeth David, took her dog to the vet in the same short terrace, Blacklands Terrace, spotted the vacancy and told Sandoe, who persuaded her to leave the equestrian bookshop J. A. Allen and join him. Bell said the ground floor had been a second-hand bookshop run by Tom and Ros Chatto, who gave it up after the birth of their son in April 1957. The shop’s own history lists earlier occupants: a poodle parlour called Chloe of Chelsea downstairs, and a secretarial agency upstairs in the room that is now its paperback room.

Parcels before breakfast, sliding bookcases and three units made one.

Gwynn became part of the shop’s character. The shop says she worked there from the outset and left in 1984, remembered for her influence on customers’ reading and for occasionally throwing books at people in exasperation; Bell credits her with 26 years at the shop. Mitchell described Sandoe getting up at six to make up parcels of books and deliver them round London in time for breakfast, then sweeping and dusting before opening. Bell wrote that customers could open accounts from the start, a service still offered in 2017, and that early patrons included Frances and Ralph Partridge and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, followed in the 1960s by Mary Quant, Lucian Freud and Keith Richards.

The shop grew sideways rather than upwards. Bell wrote that when the poodle parlour and the secretaries left, a system of sliding bookcases was built upstairs to hold thousands more books, and that when the dressmaker next door closed, the shop knocked through into the neighbouring house. In 2013 the vet in the third unit, Anthony O’Neill, retired. The shop says it acquired his lease and stayed open through eighteen months of work that gutted and renovated the premises and rolled the three units into a single shop, adding about a third to the floor space. Bell called the result a terrace of rickety Regency shops. The shop says its stock room kept a mirror from the dressmaker’s days on the wall until 2014, and Bell wrote that in the early years customers could buy cigarettes from a vending machine in the shop, a holdover from the 1930s, when the actor Dirk Bogarde remembered the building as a newsagent and tobacconist.

The visual identity is small and portable. Bell wrote in 2017 that the shop’s lettering and its distinctive black and white bags had quietly strengthened the brand, and that loyal customers send in photographs of themselves holding a Sandoe bag in far-flung corners of the world. He also singled out the staff’s skill at filling the windows with books. The shop says its book bundles are wrapped in brown paper and tied with coloured paper ribbons, and it credits the artist James Campbell for the artwork used on its website.

A founder’s name kept by the people he sold to.

Some bookshops take their identity from the building they occupy before any sign goes up. A shop in a former theatre, warehouse, garage or bank inherits ceiling heights, columns, stairs and windows it did not design, and those features often end up doing the work a logo might do elsewhere. Exposed trusses, a balcony or an old frontage become the backdrop to every photograph and every event, and they are hard to copy in a branch somewhere else. When such a shop moves, the question becomes what to carry with it: the shelving, the fixtures, a sign, or only the name. Keeping one physical element from the old rooms can give regular customers a thread of continuity in an unfamiliar space.

Inside, a great deal of the identity is handwritten. Staff recommendation cards clipped to shelves give each bookseller a small public voice, and their handwriting, paper stock and length vary from card to card in a way a printed label does not. Events and readings add a calendar to the identity: posters, a printed or emailed programme, a chair layout and a microphone stand become recurring images of the shop. Gift wrapping at the till, loyalty cards stamped or punched by hand and a store newsletter written by staff all carry the name into homes. When a larger company buys an independent shop and keeps its name, these local habits are often what keeps the shop recognisable to the people who used it before, so for designers the task is to document them as carefully as the mark itself.

Two colleagues and a customer take over in 1989.

The shop has been run by its buyers and their partners since Sandoe left. The shop’s history and Bell give 1989 as the year Sandoe retired; Mitchell wrote in 2008 that he retired from the shop in 1987. The shop says Sandoe sold the business to Stewart Grimshaw, John (Seán) Wyse Jackson and Johnny de Falbe, the latter two having worked for him since 1979 and 1986. Bell described the buyers as two colleagues and a customer. The shop says Wyse Jackson left in 2003, four years after Dan Fenton, who had joined in 1992, became a partner, and that Fenton left in 2015. Bell wrote in 2017 that de Falbe continued to run the shop very much in the Sandoe mould, scouring publishers’ lists for titles his customers might like.

The founder saw the shop reach fifty. Mitchell wrote that Sandoe attended the party for the shop’s fiftieth anniversary, and The Independent dated his death to 29 December 2007. The business still trades under his name and describes itself as an independent bookshop since 1957.

For a design guide, John Sandoe (Books) shows how a small shop can carry its identity in a founder’s name, plain lettering, a black and white bag and brown-paper parcels rather than in a large sign. Compare Daunt Books, another London independent named after the bookseller who founded it, and Hatchards, the Piccadilly bookseller that also kept its founder’s surname. For this guide we use bag black, brown paper and paper white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep John Sandoe (Books)’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.