For Matthew De Morgan, the £1,200 tailored book subscription he takes out annually from Heywood Hill is “like having an intellectual personal trainer”.

The chief executive of an international commodities trading business said: “The subscription is properly clever as it broadens my scope and breadth of reading. It’s like having a personal trainer making sure I’m on top form.”

Morgan’s interests include 20th-century history, aviation, certain types of glassware and specific types of art. For a busy executive, the book consultations that come with the costly subscription are “good value” as the booksellers “ferret away” within his field and “fine tune” book suggestions based on his feedback.

Heywood Hill, a quaint bookshop on Curzon Street, was loved by the late Queen Elizabeth and described by Evelyn Waugh as a “centre for all that was left of fashionable and intellectual London”. As the Christmas shopping season draws nearer it is celebrating its 90th anniversary with “London’s greatest book subscription”.

Hundreds of books are wrapped daily in the shop’s distinctive brown paper and tied together with a blue ribbon before they are shipped off to bibliophiles across the world.

Nicky Dunne, the bookseller-in-chief since 2011 and the son-in-law of the owner Peregrine Cavendish, the 12th Duke of Devonshire, reflected on his orders list the night before speaking to The Times.

Nicky Dunne

HORST FRIEDRICHS

“There’s a three-year-old boy in Cape Town who’s been given a subscription, there’s a wife giving a subscription to her husband in Los Angeles, who has requested the accompanying message ‘My One True Love’ and there’s a customer in Adelaide,” Dunne said. “People are drawn to us for that mix of trust, literary heritage and the contemporary curation of books.”

Founded in 1936 by the old Etonian George Heywood Hill, whose wife was the daughter of the Earl of Cranbrook, the bookshop’s four tailored subscriptions, which range in price from £235 to £1,200, all include a reading consultation with one of the shop’s booksellers. The most expensive subscription, known as the “Tailored Quarterly”, provides 40 hardback books over 12 months and the bespoke collection is described as ideal for “insatiable readers”.

With a customer base spanning 75 countries, there is the option to have these consultations over the phone but the majority of Heywood Hill’s clientele are either in the UK or the US, so they often choose the in-person option.

The consultations, which last about 20 minutes, are aimed at “trying to find out where someone is in their reading,” Dunne said. He insisted the consultations were “not an inquisition and it’s not a session with an English teacher, although some of the team have been English teachers before”.

New benefits, introduced to the shop’s tailored subscriptions to mark their 90th anniversary, include: “exclusive author questionnaires, recommendations from leading writers, curated reading-lists by decade stretching back to 1936, specially designed bookplates, bookmarks by the celebrated illustrator Cressida Bell, expert essays across genres and surprise gifts.”

Heywood Hill bookshop on Curzon Street in Mayfair was a favourite of the late Queen Elizabeth

ALAMY

For Dunne, 55, the continuing success of Heywood Hill can be attributed to its location in Mayfair and its Anglophile customer base. In a climate where many independent bookshops are closing their doors, Dunne has a “huge amount of admiration for all independent booksellers as it’s a tough game”.

He said: “We are very fortunate to be situated in Mayfair as it’s such a marketplace and meeting place for the world. A lot of leaders in the cultural, business and political sectors pass through our shop.”

Dunne said that “Anglophiles all over the world” who “appreciate British and European publishing” were at the core of the shop’s clientele, and added: “They want a trusted gateway that is human, rather than an algorithm.”

Katie Meynell, the shop’s manager, said: “Our American subscribers have always been among our most devoted. Our booksellers don’t follow algorithms, they follow curiosity.”

What attracted subscribers such as De Morgan, 55, to the bookshop was the “bespoke service”. He said: “They go out of their way to look into your interests and as new publications and new authors come out they go away and put effort into researching them.”

De Morgan also gives subscriptions to friends as gifts and his recipients are never disappointed.

In addition to tailored subscriptions, Heywood Hill offers a Whodunit? subscription for fans of crime fiction and with the shop’s historic connection to espionage there is a fitting Tradecraft subscription, which is priced at £295. The author John Le Carré was famously a customer at Heywood Hill and in his novel *Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy *the character George Smiley sets off for the shop with a “merry heart”.

Harriet is one of the shops staff members who provides consultations for subscribers

JOHN NGUYEN FOR THE TIMES

For those prospective customers who are yearning for a taste of what Heywood Hill has to offer at a more affordable price than £1,200, there is the cheaper option of paying £195 for the 90th anniversary special subscription. Despite the shop’s wealthy clientele, Dunne said their subscriptions were also routinely given as gifts to work colleagues and sometimes even prisoners.

When Heywood Hill’s busy booksellers are not catering to their subscriptions service, they are putting together libraries tailored to private clients’ fishing lodges, ski chalets, boardrooms and yachts. One notable commission Dunne received was putting together a 4,000-volume library devoted to 20th-century art and design for the Vistajet founder Thomas Flohr’s Swiss chalet.

For those who wish to be on the other side of the book consultation and secure a job at Heywood Hill, Dunne warned it is no easy feat as the last available vacancy attracted interest from more than 200 applicants. To cater to customers with diverse reading interests, the staff at the bookshop have “lots of different types of reading sensibilities” and the two things Dunne looks for when recruiting are “being a good reader and a good listener”.

A tailored consultation to offer an escape

I told Dunne that I enjoyed reading about how the world of politics operates, political decision making, crime thrillers and would like to learn more about President Putin’s rise to power (Ed Halford writes). Some of the details I gave were broad, while others were very niche.

As a journalist who writes about current affairs on a daily basis, Dunne was informed that my main aim was to find books that offered an escape from my work.

To feed my appetite for reading about political drama, it was suggested I read *Why We Get the Wrong Politicians *by Isabel Hardman, Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll and Lessons in Diplomacy: Politics, Power and Parties by Leigh Turner.

My specific interest in finding out more about Putin’s Russia was met with the following reading suggestions: Red Notice by Bill Browder, Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich and* The Spy and the Traitor* by Ben Macintyre.

Finally, to respond to my request for crime thrillers and stories that were told by multiple narrators, I was given the following recommendations: *Box 88 *by Charles Cumming, Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd and *Olive Kitteridge *by Elizabeth Strout.

All the recommendations came with thoughtful accompanying notes and further prose about why they matched my interests.