One of my favourite types of independent shop is the second-hand bookshop. I’ve been an inveterate haunter of them for years. Visiting a town for the first time, I find out where the second-hand bookshops are, and from that comes my whole grasp of the place’s geography. I picture Edinburgh, for instance, as a cluster of bookshops around West Port, a couple of outposts east of the Meadows, and a final straggle down Leith Walk.

There used to be many more second-hand shops in Edinburgh when I lived there three decades ago. In my memory, they overflowed with books piled in dusty Dickensian gloom. I remember buying a copy of George Herbert’s The Temple in a long-vanished shop in Guthrie Street. It had been there for so many years that the price was pencilled in shillings and old pennies.

Currently, though we have excellent – and very different – shops for new books in Stromness and Kirkwall, there’s no second-hand shop in either town. You have to go to Birsay for that (and I do.) Many years ago, not in Birsay, but in Moira McCarty’s long gone Stromness shop, I picked up a well-thumbed collection of stories by a writer I’d never heard of: God’s World by Naguib Mahfouz (‘inscribed by translator, £3.45.’) Mahfouz has since become one of my favourite writers. Luckily for me he published over 40 books, writing about his native Cairo as obsessively as George Mackay Brown did about Orkney, in an exhilarating variety of styles: comedy, tragedy, political satire, multi-generational family sagas.

*The 1973 edition of God’s World, signed by Roger Allen.*

Despite having been famous across the Arab world since the 1940s, God’s World was his first work to be translated into English, in 1973. Further translations appeared sporadically, then in a flood, after he became the first Arabic-language winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. I recently came across a small but intriguing Orkney connection. Mahfouz never visited the county – he rarely travelled outside Egypt – so doesn’t add to the meagre record of just two Nobel Literature laureates we’ve had visiting our shores. (Seamus Heaney and Winston Churchill, thanks for asking.) The connection goes right back to the start of his career. His first book was neither a novel nor stories, but a translation from English of an Egyptian history primer. Mahfouz called it Miṣr al-Qadīmah, its original title having been Ancient Egypt, from A&C Black’s series ‘Peeps at Many Lands’. Its author was James Baikie. That name immediately grabbed my attention: there must be an Orkney connection, I thought. A little research confirmed there was.

James Baikie was born in 1866 in Lasswade, Midlothian, son of Hugh Malcolmson Baikie and Margaret McAndrew, who had married in 1857 in Edinburgh. Their origins, however, were here, both having been born in the parish of Walls and Flotta. (Some sources are more specific, giving Hugh’s place of birth as Hoy, and Margaret’s as Walls. Better genealogists than me can confirm.)

Hugh was a teacher, and his son seems to have inherited his academic abilities, studying at both Oxford and Edinburgh Universities. His professional life was as a minister in the United Free Church, first in Ancrum in the Borders, then at Wardie in Leith. But his passion was for ancient history, and especially that of Egypt. His first Egyptian book was Story of the Pharaohs, which was a success both here and in Egypt. A letter from his publisher in November 1908 noted, ‘You will be pleased to hear that all the Cairo booksellers are stocking your book…’ and reported sending special copies to the city’s ‘six principal hotels’ for hotel managers to place in their Reading Rooms.

*‘The Sun God’s Voyage Through the Underworld’, illustration by Constance N Baikie*

This was followed by literally dozens more books, most of them on middle eastern history, including Ancient Egypt, picked up by the youthful Naguib Mahfouz, translated into Arabic, and published when he was only 20 years old. Baikie’s writings have largely been supplanted by a century of scientific archaeology, but it was vivid enough at the time to inspire many, not least the man who went on to become Egypt’s greatest writer. Indeed, the plot of Mahfouz’s first novel, Khufu’s Wisdom, was entirely taken from Chapter 7 of Baikie’s study.

All of which is, I know, very tangential to Orkney. Still, being irresponsibly imaginative myself, I can’t help but picture Hugh and Margaret telling bedtime stories to young James describing their native isles with their standing stones and elaborate burial mounds – and of James’s imagination being sparked into a lifetime’s obsession with ancient history, which in turn influenced the course of Arabic literature.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 11th April 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.

I may have been too harsh in suggesting that Baikie’s works had been overtaken by modern archaeology. As recently as 2011, John Ray, Reader in Egyptology at Cambridge University, wrote for the BBC: ‘One of the best guides to Egypt ever compiled was the work of James Baikie (1866-1931), who wrote his detailed account of the country without ever seeing the place.’

Baikie’s books are often illustrated with striking drawings and paintings by his wife, Constance Newman Baikie (née Smith). Clearly a talented artist - see the dramatic scene above - not much else is know about her, other than she was born in Glasgow, daughter of a stockbroker. She outlived her husband by 29 years, dying in Dumfries in 1960. Historian Amara Thornton has written about her, including here, and I am grateful for some of the detail she unearthed in the A&C Black archives.

Finally, after I’d sent the above text to The Orcadian, I did a little bit more digging into Baikie’s family background. His father’s middle name, Malcolmson, was nagging at me: weren’t there Hoy Malcolmsons in my wife’s family? A bit of research revealed that there were indeed. I checked with the family expert in such matters, Bruce Gorie, formerly of Kirkness & Gorie, and he was able to make some very detailed connections. I may share this further information in future, though whether anyone but Bruce and I are interested in it is another matter!

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 7th April 2024