There would be no 'prince John' without brave Terence

John, in our earlier days a friend, opened his shop in November 1957, defying the disapproval of his father, who thought "trade" an unsuitable career. His first customers in a then unfashionable King's Road, where the nearest restaurant was pleased to serve us tinned pilchard salads for 18 old pence, were not the local grandees but John's friends. More important, they were friends of the older man who was his true "father" in this enterprise, whose house he shared and from whom he seemed inseparable.

I dare say that John's father disapproved of Terence as much as of the bookselling, for affectionate relationships between men still appalled society and were an offence for which a prison sentence was the almost inevitable punishment. Nevertheless, Terence was the rock on which the bookshop stood, Terence the backer, the emotional support, the man whose friends of an older and richer generation bought books enough to give the shop some hope of eventually being viable.

John's obituarists hint at the familial difficulties but paint a rosy picture of immediate success entirely due to John's undoubted social graces and good humour, his inclination to play librarian and school his clients in their tastes, and to the fastidious efficiency that these concealed. They tell tales of a King's Road swinging into the Sixties with John's bookshop in its wake, of the famous Bloomsbury families of yore flocking to the shop and of Edith Sitwell as a grey eminence of sorts. To these I must add that the friendship of Gwenda David, another forgotten soul, sister of the celebrated Elizabeth, brought him extraordinarily useful contacts through her work at Penguin and Viking.

In all this they forgot, or did not realise, that it took some five years for the shop to become reliably profitable, a quinquennium of support from Terence, who seems to have been forgotten or ruthlessly removed from this small history.

With solvency, John took a younger lover and abandoned Terence to a broken life, even a broken heart, to a saturnine decline and a death that came too soon. A decent, kindly man, all these years on, in the context of a bookshop that has become "an enduring institution", Terence deserves to be remembered as its foundation stone.