One Day With John Sandoe Books

ONE DAY WITH | MASTERS & MUSES | WORLD OF CABANA

Family-run John Sandoe Books has a host of illustrious regulars – which once included Christopher Gibbs – and has been a much-loved presence on London's book scene for generations. Johnny de Falbe, who runs the Chelsea bookstore with his wife, Arabella, talks Cabana through the rhythms of his day, the keys to the shop's success, the unexpected and fascinating readers they meet on a daily basis, and how bohemian Chelsea has developed over the decades.

INTERVIEW BY SARA PIERDONÀ | MASTERS & MUSES | 14 NOVEMBER 2025

John Sandoe Books in London's Chelsea © Miguel Flores-Vianna.

I wake around 7am, and quite often, the first thing I do is read in bed. If the weather’s decent, I walk to work—it takes about 40 minutes from Hall Court, where I live, to [the bookshop] and it’s actually a pretty pleasant walk.

John Sandoe Books is made up of three very small 18th-century buildings. Though from the outside—or even inside—you’d hardly guess they’re separate. And the way things are organized is not obvious to new customers, as it’s very much shaped by the quirks of the architecture. You can definitely get a bit lost in there. We, of course, know where everything is, but the unusual layout leads to some unexpected juxtapositions—like finding Isherwood’s letters next to a book on art.

The feeling of getting lost in the shop is due to the books themselves. We have around 30,000 books, and about 28,500 of them are individual titles. So it’s not that you’re seeing multiple copies of the same book, on the contrary you stumble in many different topics and categories. Except science. The reason why we don’t have science, is that science books block the conversation.

The fact that I mainly sell single copies makes reordering interesting. This is because I have to reorder other single copies, so it's not a choice based on sales trends, but on intuition and how I want the bookshop to look. Let's take an example, and say Alberto Moravia: there aren't many people who want to buy Alberto Moravia nowadays in England, but I keep a copy of his books anyway, because he is an important author.

Arabella and John in the window of John Sandoe Books © Miguel Flores-Vianna.

The Swinging Sixties happened here in Chelsea. Designers like Mary Quant and Biba had their boutiques on King’s Road, and later on, Punk took over, so fashion has always played a big role. That influence is still present today, but what’s missing now is the sense of independence that used to define the scene. One fantastic change, though, was the demolition of the old military base. That cleared the way for the creation of King’s Road Square, which completely transformed the neighborhood.

Christopher Gibbs was a regular customer. His knowledge was vast. He was deeply educated. He might buy a classic book on, I don’t know, 18th-century country houses, but equally he might come in and buy a memoir on somebody of the 60s. I remember him coming inside once because he had seen a book in the window on some very arcane architectural thing, and he just enjoyed the specialism of it, and the fact that it was beautifully done. If you had a book about neolithic daggers, he would see it and he would understand why it was there. He would think “Oh, that’s lovely”.

Thirty or forty years ago, most of our customers lived in the area. Today, there’s a lot more tourism. We’ve always had international visitors, but now it’s almost daily that someone walks in from Korea, Edinburgh, or Milan. Just last week, a young woman wearing a hijab came in with a list of books. She told me she couldn’t get any of them in her country. The list included Pessoa and Kerouac—surprisingly male choices. She said, “I want something to open my mind”. It was clearly a planned visit.

John Sandoe Books in Chelsea. All images © Miguel Flores-Vianna. 

We also get people who just wander in without expecting to. They discover the place by chance, that kind of serendipity still happens. People often say, “It must be hard to run a bookshop these days, since only older people read.” I always want to say, “Come and see for yourself.” We have so many young readers, more than people might expect.

There are fields, such as interior design, where it is acceptable to talk about taste. But taste in literature seems to evoke elitism, so it has been replaced with the word “curation”. Regardless of what you call it, it is still personal taste that underpins the identity of independent bookshops: you shop at a particular place because you feel an affinity with, and are represented by, the owner's taste. And of course, even though I may have books in my bookshop that I don't particularly like, my taste is expressed because I recommend and display the ones I believe in.

I spend my whole day chatting with people about the books they have read. So, I hear from them what struck them about a certain book, or what they think of a certain writer. I'm always picking things up from customers, which is fantastic. And you can see how people handle a book. No one can read the contents of an entire library, and I personally cannot say how many books I have read. But I know that you don't necessarily have to have read a book to imagine what kind of book it will be.

John Sandoe Books in Chelsea. All images © Miguel Flores-Vianna.

I often just have a sandwich for lunch at the office. But when I do go out, there are a few independent restaurants nearby. One of them is called Rabbit, which is quite close. However, the place I really like is Daquise, a traditional Polish restaurant—but it’s a bit too far for a lunch break, and honestly, a bit too heavy for lunch anyway.

I read pretty much all day long, whenever I have a book around. I don't have a television, so I also read at times when other people might be watching television. Just this morning I finished a book by Juliet Nicolson, and I recently finished a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson. I tend to read books that I have an interest in, rather that reading books because I think I should.

Occasionally I allow myself to abandon a book without finishing it. Sometimes we are bothered by the author's choice of words. Today, my wife was annoyed by a book in which the author said something like ‘venturing across a road’, and she objected, saying, "how can it be an adventure if there is a road and nothing complex about the situation? The author is introducing a wrong note."

My favourite book is The Leopard. Author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has brought fresh language…it is a book of genius, and it’s so short, with nothing accidental in it. Other novels that I loved are from Shirley Hazzard, or (I discovered her books recently, two or three years ago) Sylvia Townsend Warner.