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"Perhaps, if bookshops can be haunted, No. 4 Sheep Street can claim more ghosts than most. Haunted certainly by my father"
That was my father's opening line to his unfinished memoir discovered a few days after his death in 2002. He called it The Life and Death of a Stratford Bookshop, but it was so much more than that. Aged seventy, he had decided he must at last tell the truth about his overpowering and eccentric father, Captain William Jaggard. However it seemed he couldn't bring himself to finish his heartfelt story. It ended abruptly.
Three years ago, I received a strange enquiry from an American researcher seeking a famous Shakespearean book, once owned by the Captain, complete with Shakespeare's signature. I started to investigate and dug into 'the Jaggard Papers', the Captain's research on the Jaggard family tree from over a hundred years ago.
And so the idea began to form that I should try to discover what happened to Gerald and his family, learn why he abandoned his emotional story, and - if I could - complete his memoir.
The iconic old bookshop in the heart of Stratford-upon-Avon links the two men, but the real drama concerns my grandfather's colourful and rather unbelievable life, the damaging impact on Gerald, and of how he survived and started a new life.
Shakespeare Press, Gerald's completed memoir, charts our three-year journey of discovery.
