Shepherd Market, W1, has many ghosts, some of whom are literary. In the shadow of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s former digs – the scene of ‘wild and continuous’ parties in the summer of 1933 – Heywood Hill has just celebrated 90 years of bookselling. In today’s Republic of Letters, we have a true book-loving Queen and she is a marvel. To mark Heywood Hill’s anniversary Her Majesty graciously toured our tiny shop. She talked about her love of all kinds of books (The Cazalet Chronicles in particular) and gamely joined Jerry Vinalon and Jay Lomot, our splendid professional book-packers, in helping them gift-wrap parcels. She signed a postcard which one lucky book subscriber should find in their next package.

Not every customer is so fortunate. I love the story of an incensed Christopher Isherwood ringing the shop from California many decades ago, boiling with outrage at our latest invoice and the high cost of postage from London. It did not help his mood that inside his most recent parcel he discovered that our then packer had mistakenly included a very large and heavy hammer.

As HMQ left the shop this month, the irrepressible Jeffrey Archer was waiting outside with a warm greeting. Lord A is well known here. His son William remembers that on his graduation Jeffrey generously opened an unlimited tab for him at Heywood Hill, ‘any book that I fancied I could charge to my father’s account’. Cue 30 years of boundless reading pleasure.

Enjoyment is what bookselling appears to be all about. Good books and invariably interesting people continuously flow through our shop (just as the old River Tyburn is now piped beneath it). Unlike the faux intimacy of (anti)social media, lolling with my entertaining and talented team in a fast-moving current of bookish acquaintance is pretty refreshing, and keeps the mind ticking over. I love it. Two really gifted readers have both been colleagues, originally immigrants, one American (and young), the other German (and less so). The first devours well over 200 books a year and she would with great insight summarise any on demand. The other is a high lama of reading, devoted to the mind-expanding possibilities of print, and the nourishing sediments good books settle within.

The broad accessibility of literature is appealing. Book savants may be found anywhere. Another Patrick was a builder, a hard-as-nails foreman on a refurbishment next door. Chatting to him on the pavement one day, he turned to our window saying: ‘I see you have some Proust in.’ ‘Yes we do.’ Pause. ‘I only read him in the French. And I much prefer Rimbaud.’ A bow was offered.

Despite, well, everything, Britain’s literary ecology is still just about intact. The Queen is doing all that she can to support it, and imaginatively so. Who else could organise to give away physical copies this Christmas of a very good children’s book – Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures – to every ten-year-old in the country? But in general, the literary landscape is pretty parched and in need of constant watering by book people everywhere. On the bookshop side, there are around 1,000 independents heroically trading up and down the land, each adapted to their own topographical niche.

We are blessed in the habitats Mayfair supports. Never mind the new PM, round here Robin Birley would be a strong candidate for mayor. The sight of Robin perambulating between his exceptional establishments is reassuring for those of us on the front line of retail or hospitality (and we feel like a rare mixture of both). Even Robin’s dogs have a high style about them, and he’s been known to tip his booksellers too. There’s no one like him.

People are usually far more nuanced than how they are seen. Nancy Mitford, the Homeric heroine of our shop’s creation myth, took a job here soon after an unexpected hysterectomy. Her panache quickly put the place on the map. In August 1942 she wrote: ‘I had a smart set to with Evelyn about The Marmalade Cat having gone up to 6/s; however in the end he took it.’ Nancy’s sister Jessica was the red sheep of her family, emigrating in early 1939 to the United States – pretty gutsy aged 21 – where she became a pioneering journalist. The family scribe is now Jessica’s grandson James Forman Jr, a law professor at Yale and author of Locking Up Our Own, with a Pulitzer Prize to his name.

A bunch of writers and others – Heywood Hill’s charming daughter Harriet, John Saumarez Smith’s gifted son George – called in to celebrate our 90th. We met in Shepherd Market, still an atmospheric village largely left alone by tourism, and still full of character and characters. Back in 1933 Patrick L.F. lodged in Number 28. Beatrice Stewart a former artist’s model, with a prosthetic metal leg, was his landlady. In her youth she was immortalised by the sculptor Adrian Jones as the wreath-bearing winged charioteer atop Wellington Arch, as Paddy put it, just a minute from her window-sill in the market ‘as the pigeon flies’. Immortals both, for another 90 years at least. (I’d kill to read Beatrice’s memoirs and P.L.F.’s part in them.)