Perfect Lives
A conversation with Bruno Halper and Daniel Lichtenstein, proprietors of a book, record and ephemera shop in SE14
Hello and welcome to Wooden City, a newsletter about London.
If you haven’t come here via @caffs_not_cafes, I'm a writer called Isaac Rangaswami and this is my Substack.
Today is a special free interview with the owners of an idiosyncratic shop. I only publish pieces without a paywall occasionally, and you can read others here, here and here.
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One Sunday in February, I went for a wander around Deptford, before drinking a couple of pints at the Little Crown on New Cross Road. Then I walked home to Brockley, via a newly opened shop that I’d been meaning to visit.
This business occupies a pair of slender whitewashed units between two houses. The unit on the left has bars over its windows and looks less like a garage than the one on the right. It also has a deep red door, and a sign with scratchy black lettering that reads “Perfect Lives”.
Inside are more objects than either space should reasonably contain. You can browse boxes of jazz, dance, classical and folk revival records, as well as a hoard of rare and delicate printed material. Many of these books, posters and publications have yellowed with age, and their contents are too varied to group together under neat umbrella terms. I’ve since learned that this is because Perfect Lives is a collection of people’s collections.
On this first visit, I asked the guy behind the counter what was cheap. As he pitched me several things, it soon became clear that he knew the provenance of every single item in the shop. I left with a summer 1983 issue of the official journal of The International Mackintosh Society, for £5. At the time of writing, Perfect Lives’ recent acquisitions included an uncrumpled, 50-year-old public notice about a philandering Cuban percussionist and an oversized programme for Fernando Arrabal’s The Labyrinth, from its 1968 London premiere.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve asked lots of shopkeepers about their businesses. The guy I spoke to at Perfect Lives was the most forthcoming proprietor I’d spoken to, so I made a mental note to come back. Later, I found out that it was a two-man band and decided to ask the owners if they were up for being interviewed.
I sat down with Bruno Halper and Daniel Lichtenstein in August. They wore identical trousers and drank from the same water bottle as we spoke, more like brothers than business partners. They told me about where they source their products and how they make a living selling them. We also spoke about things like permanence, the state of London, the places they like to go and the lives they lead as proprietors of such an unusual shop.
I had the best time speaking to Bruno and Daniel. Businesses like theirs give me hope that London’s supply of old-fashioned shopkeepers is still being replenished.
Isaac: What is Perfect Lives?
Bruno Halper: A shop.
Daniel Lichtenstein: Yeah, we’re a shop. A weird thing has happened where people think that anything that has old stuff in it is an archive now. We’ve had a couple of students come by and congratulate us on our library/archive, which is amusing.
Isaac: Are you archivists who run a shop?
Daniel: I think we're shopkeepers who keep stuff we like, and there’s always an element of archival practice in it, I suppose, in that it is curatorial or selective. There's also some stuff that we feel complicated about selling, so we put to one side and say, “when the time is right, or when we get enough stuff together or when we remember, this should go to X, Y, Z.” But yeah we’re a shop foremost.
Isaac: That seems like a common thing. Basically every second-hand bookshop owner I've spoken to has told me they were collectors, who just figured they might as well sell books too.
Bruno: Hmmm…
Isaac: Oh, so are you in it for the money?
Daniel: Around the same time we were thinking, “maybe we should open a shop,” we bought two big collections of thousands of books. At first, we just tried to flip them.
Isaac: So there is a commercial mindedness to what you’re doing?
Bruno: Yeah, I think so much of what we enjoy is the wheeling and dealing element. Not that we’re some mindless capitalists…
Daniel: Yeah we try to be as cheap as we can be, but we have to make a living.
Isaac: What kinds of items do you specialise in?
Daniel: I suppose what we specialise in is what we like. And we learn a lot about what we like every day. We find a lot of stuff that we didn't know existed until yesterday. Bruno's more music and I’m more literary; Bruno's been a record dealer since he was a baby.
Isaac: The first time I came here, I noticed other customers were mainly combing through the records. I’ve also seen your business referred to just as a record shop in a few different places.
Bruno: For a long time we were, but I think now we're split evenly down the middle. Maybe we're even more of a bookshop than a record shop.
Daniel: I think our big money comes from the record bros, but we probably do more individual sales to your average person who’s walked by and leaves with one book.
Bruno: I mean the shop is just a piece of it. What I was going to say is that we specialise in whatever whoever has recently died specialised in. So much of our stuff comes from clearance. Like the other day we got a huge collection of experimental fiction, including a number of very nice signed B.S. Johnson books. We weren't specialising in [that before] – well, we do have a lot of experimental fiction – but it depends who's died. It depends whose house has been cleared recently.
Isaac: Could that open your eyes to stuff you wouldn't have sold before?
Daniel: 100%. And what's also so nice is to have someone who's so invested in a scene, or a movement, essentially give you their reading list. You're able to learn about stuff, not just in a very highly individuated way, but also with all the surrounding context, often, which is nice.
Isaac: As well as books and records, you sell ephemera. How would you describe ephemera to somebody who isn’t familiar with that term?
Bruno: Paper…
Daniel: Stuff that is likely to get lost or destroyed.
Isaac: Do you stock any new things?
Bruno: I think we are definitely, as much as I don't like to admit it, a nostalgia shop.
Daniel: We will be [stocking new things] soon, though. Some literary magazines we like, stuff like that.
Bruno: Maybe this is cynical, but I think it's easier to sell old things. I think hindsight is so useful when determining what speaks of the era and actually it's hard to map what is important as it's happening.
Isaac: How did you guys get into this – the books, records and ephemera game?
Daniel: Bruno was his own record dealer and Perfect Lives was his record shop. And then he and I became friends. We kind of knew each other as babies, but not really. My aunt is Bruno's godmum, so my aunt and his mum are best friends. We had this family dinner and I'd just come back from Ethiopia, and I’d brought back loads of tapes…
Bruno: …he thought I was trying to fleece him.
Daniel: And he was like, “I’ll give you proper money for them.” I didn’t trust him and thought he was trying to fuck me over. And Bruno thought I was trying to fuck him…
Bruno: I still think it's on the cards…
Daniel: And then we started to hang out, to do this radio show. And then lockdown lifted and we started to go to boot sales together. And then, we were just doing that for years, as friends. Bruno was buying records and I had these mini phases – I was a lamp dealer for a minute, and then a furrier…
Bruno: He had 16 seal furs at one point…
Daniel: We just started buying together over time to split the risk about stuff we didn't know about and then buying bigger and bigger things together and then eventually…
Bruno: It’s much more wheeler-dealer than I think [people understand]. We stick things in auction. We find a lot of stuff which is outside the purview of our shop that we still sell. This is what interests us, but if we find it and we can flip it…
Daniel: We won't turn down a windfall because it doesn't fit in the shop. That's kind of the most romantic part of it for me, and I think for you, is being at the market and buying something down the road at five in the morning and then walking up the road and selling it somewhere at six for a little more.
Isaac: Where do you source your stuff?
Bruno: Lots of house clearance. We've got a lot of people who are in clearance on our address books who call us up if the right person has died, as horrible as that sounds.
Isaac: Like rich people?
Bruno: People with interesting taste. You know, just people with things. I mean it's a whole world unto itself, the house clearance world.
Daniel: We do a lot of soliciting of vans that drive past, running out to give them our numbers. I think that's one of our strengths, we like talking to people, chatting to strangers.
Bruno: You never know where you’ll solicit a collection from. You can go to a concert at the Wigmore Hall and get chatting to someone outside. We just talk to people.
Isaac: What's the weirdest place you've got stuff from?
Daniel: One example is Dan Knight, who did the show around the corner the other day which we put on collaboratively with our friends at Worse, a gallery. Bruno found him because he was walking down the street near his house.
Bruno: Yeah, I was walking past a block of flats and the contents of someone’s house were piled on the street. And I asked someone passing if it was theirs and he said, “no, but would you like to come up?” And I said “yeah, I'd love to.” And it was an amazing flat – there were all these Robert Mapplethorpe prints in there. I got some nice mimeograph occult stuff off him. And I also pulled out Dan Knight's record. Then I tracked Dan down, found his number. It’s really amazing – I think he made 100 of them and most of them were in his studio. And this guy had no idea where he got them from.
Isaac: So these Dan Knight records you picked up, no other shop in London sells them?
Bruno: Yeah, I don't think so. Well, it’s from the 80s, so I think someone's probably had one.
Isaac: What types of things do you sell the most of?
Bruno: One month it will be like loads of smut. And then like our poetry will go. Last Wednesday, we had a super busy day, when it’s normally our quietest day. But for some reason Saturday was completely dead. All of it is completely unmappable, which I like.
Isaac: What made you want to open a shop like this?
Daniel: It seemed like the thing to do, you know. We both wanted a change. We had so much fun getting up early and going to boot sales together all the time, and wanted to turn it into something more, something that felt less broken up.
Isaac: It's a big leap to want to change that into a job.
Bruno: It’s honestly really nice.
Daniel: We have very varied days. And very full, you know. We're working all the time, but it doesn’t feel like it.
Daniel: You don't know what kind of micro-career you're going to fall into, for a week.
Isaac: I might find that difficult, because I'm quite routine-driven personally.
Daniel: Yeah, I mean, it's a sort of conflict…
Bruno: I'll call Danny up and be like, “we're going to Essex right now.” He'll be like, “what the fuck do you mean?” Or I’ll call him up at 1am, and be like…
Daniel: “Look at this thing at auction.” And I’ll say, “I think this can wait until tomorrow, Bruno.” Given we're literally together 95% of our waking hours – and if we're not together, on the phone to each other – we're pretty good at managing that side.
Isaac: How did you guys end up renting this retail unit?
Daniel: So, we were looking for a shop for ages and then we found a really amazing place just one street over, which was an old butcher. It was an old shipwright’s building. The top two floors date to 1727 I think.
Isaac: Oh I know it. The people that took it over just painted over the old sign and then left it immediately.
Daniel: Well, it was the owner's son's cafe after it was the butcher. And then we were in it. And we were in there, not paying rent, because the landlord never countersigned, for eight months. Just waiting to set up.
Bruno: It felt like Waiting for Godot.
Isaac: You never got to open?
Daniel: We never got to open.
Bruno: Yeah, the electricity never got turned on.
Daniel: But our neighbour over there, he said, “look I've got a friend around the corner, she has a shop that she's looking to rent. Do you want to take a look at it?” And within the week, we had come here. As sad as we were to leave that place, we were just like, “let's cut our losses.” It was so quick.
Isaac: What is it like running a business like yours at the moment?
Bruno: I think it depends what you're looking for. We get to live the life that we want to live. I think so much of the appeal of doing this is the constant running about and constant education. Learning about so many different things and just being exposed to so much information. So if you want to live that life, it's really great. But we're not getting rich, by any means. But economically, it's a weird thing because sometimes we’ll be cold, [then] sometimes we'll find something that we can put in auction and we'll be sorted for months. You never know when it's coming or what's coming.
Isaac: Do you think if you'd opened two, three decades ago, you would have been in a more central location?
Daniel: Yeah, we could have afforded to be. And also people would have wanted that.
Isaac: What do you think changed in this city to make it so much harder for a business like yours to operate in the centre?
Bruno: I love London so much. But what's happened to the city, like the centre, I think is disgusting. I am disgusted by what’s happened.
Isaac: Like the march of capital?
Bruno: Yeah. And it's outrageous that it's been allowed to happen.
Isaac: How do you think your shop connects to all this? I'm interested in your shop because there aren't many like it. Deptford is probably a great exception to this rule, but high streets in so many other areas, like the Strand and Oxford Circus, are largely chains.
Bruno: I wish we were [in central London]. I would feel very guilty if we were on Deptford High Street. We're not from this part of London – we're both from Shepherds Bush. And I think it'd be really hard to argue that we weren't a gentrifying force.
Isaac: At what point do you become local then? Do you think if you opened a shop in Shepherd's Bush, you'd have a license to do it because you both grew up there?
Bruno: No, I just think it’s about the community you’re serving. I think you can be from anywhere. But I think there is a recent shift of peoples in Deptford. And I think if you're catering to the incoming peoples, like we are… Well, we are actually [catering to newcomers] a lot less than I thought we would be, which is nice.
Daniel: Yeah, we have lots of locals.
Isaac: So what shops in London do you like? Where do you guys go?
Bruno: I think where we spend our money most is food.
Daniel: The place we probably visit the most, and I'm resisting my urge to gatekeep, is that amazing Dominican spot on Camberwell Church Street, the one that’s also a money transfer place, with a beauticians inside, next to Fladda. It's just amazing chewy, fatty pork and rice and beans… we eat there a lot.
Isaac: So you guys just go to restaurants, you don’t go to shops?
Bruno: No, we go to shops. Our friend Josh, who runs Twos in London Fields (and has a second location on Hackney Road), sells wonderful clothes. Our friend Rory, who runs the t-shirt shop, Dog London in Shoreditch. John and Liam at Atlantis Records in Hackney, Nick at Record 28 Books, our friends Misty and Em who run an itinerant bookshop, Market Bookshop London, Peter of BOOKS in Peckham, Josh and Kane who run the shop and Upsidedown Records, both around the corner. Solomon at 19UJ too has great stuff, and Special Rider Books & Records in Shepherd’s Bush. There's a community of shopkeepers… we talk to each other a lot, sell to each other. When we find good t-shirt hits, we’re happy to move them on quickly to Rory.
Daniel: Being very frank, I think we’re able to shop at shops a lot less than we'd like to because our social lives are totally inverted. We're up at four in the morning and then we're at the market and then we're here and then we leave here at like eight o'clock. We probably have like one half a free day each a week, and we just kind of want to chill out, or we have other commitments.
Isaac: When you turn this into your job, you probably don't do it to relax.
Daniel: No, I mean we do. It's just hard to find the time.
Isaac: I wrote about a lot of specialist shops last year – haberdashers, pet shops, cobblers. When the owners of those places die or retire, they're rarely replaced by something similar. So I worry that the overall supply of specialist shops isn’t being replenished. But then it heartens me that places like yours can still emerge.
Bruno: But I also don't know about the generation below us [and their] interest in these things. I know loads of cool Gen Z kids… I mean, we are technically Gen Z. But I think to a lot of kids, anything physical is a novelty, anything that you can touch has become a novelty…
Daniel: And by the same token anything not experiential or immediately consumable is seen as a waste of money to some people. People sometimes won’t want to pay – and it’s not at all that people have to buy stuff when they come in – but won’t want to spend a fiver on a thing that they’ve wanted for ages, or have known about and are really excited to see in real life.
Isaac: For a lifetime of use!
Daniel: And then go and spend that on an iced coffee, you know? Not to sound like an embittered shopkeeper… living is so expensive now, but still I feel we’ve been trained to ascribe value to things that hold little.
Isaac: I think something’s happened to make people devalue cultural items, like music. Me as a writer, I make part of my living from paid subscriptions to this Substack. But a lot of people think that writing should be free.
Bruno: That’s the reason why journalism has fallen apart. It's because no one's being paid. People need to make a living.
Isaac: I think people's minds have been skewed about what has value and I wonder what the reason for that is. Why do those Gen Zs value one thing over another? Maybe just because the world's been moving that way for so long that they don't know any different.
Bruno: Yeah I don’t think they know any different. I love the internet to some degree, because it's democratised a lot of information. But there is such a low ceiling to what is available on the internet. The internet archives things very badly. Things don't stick around very well.
Daniel: Especially recently and with SEO, if something isn't immediately monetizable, it's so much less likely to appear on a search engine. Even if it exists out there, you're never going to find it.
Bruno: Yeah if something's no longer profitable, it will go. I think there is this big lie of the internet that there's a permanence to this, and there is none. It's really sad.
Isaac: It's funny because people don't think that something lingering in somebody's attic could actually have a lot more permanence than something digital.
Bruno: I was looking at this academic journal yesterday about 18th century cockfighting. And it cited something as “images online”. And it's just crazy that we've got to the point where academic articles can just cite random images online. It’s now a useless reference. It was a dead link. That shouldn't pass peer review. But there’s this general consensus that what’s on the internet is around.
Isaac: So who influenced you guys in what you’re doing – collecting and selling physical things?
Bruno: This goes back to what we're talking about before and the other businesses we deal with, like old-school bookrunners.
Isaac: What’s a bookrunner?
Bruno: A bookrunner is like a book dealer but more scrappy….
Daniel: They don't necessarily have shops. They sell to other dealers. They put stuff in auction, sell at fairs. There are many interesting characters about…
Isaac: As you guys age, do you think you’ll morph into these kinds of characters?
Bruno: I hope so.
Daniel: We’re already them I think in some ways, which is both nice and worrying.
Bruno: All these old guys, they really love that we're out here doing this and they're so helpful to us. If we need something we can call them and they will sort us out.
Daniel: That would be a good piece to just interview the old-school bookrunners.
Isaac: Yeah, a few people have also told me about people who run prop houses, those kind of old-school London characters. But maybe they're not even supposed to be drawn attention to.
Bruno: It’s insular…
Daniel: I don’t think it would hurt their business.
Bruno: The bookrunners are fine. I think the clearance guys, that's different. They exist in a much greyer world, they end up with things they maybe shouldn't have. We know a guy who showed us a pair of original Josef Albers paintings on Masonite in the back of a Luton van that he was paid to take away. They’re not stealing or anything, but if they’re clearing a house everything’s fair game.
Daniel: The funny thing is that the opposite thing happens with clearance [than] with the internet, where people think that when someone dies and you get your house cleared, that some guy comes along with a van, and suddenly all of this stuff just ceases to exist. Like it goes into landfill. Or just they take it away.
Isaac: But it lives on in the market?
Daniel: Yeah, though actually lots of it sadly is just thrown away by clearance companies who were not very discerning, or just didn’t have the time to sort through it, or families who understandably want to clear a house quickly.
Bruno: Especially books, because it’s free to recycle books.
Isaac: This makes me imagine all the amazing things that have never been found, or have been found and persist somewhere secretly without people knowing.
Daniel: Well, yeah we’ve got sad stories…
Isaac: So why did you call it Perfect Lives?
Bruno: It's named after a Robert Ashley TV operetta.
Isaac: Who's Robert Ashley?
Bruno: He was a New York-based poet, musician, composer.
Isaac: Why that operetta?
Bruno: So, actually, it started ages ago with my friend Jules, who no longer lives in the country. It was his naming of it. So it's like a generational [thing].
Isaac: Well, I think a lot of what you have in here is inheritance, isn't it?
Daniel: I mean, speaking of inheritance – and the lifecycle of objects in the market – we speak about this a lot. The idea of us dying… We have a separate contract where, if I die first, he gets my clothes and vice versa. [I love] the idea of my house being cleared, or someone like us in 50 years, being up at five and going through our shit thinking, “fucking hell this is a good house.”
Bruno: Yeah, I dream about [that]. Like when we're on a house call and we're like, “this a good house.”
Daniel: Or thinking “we should stick around this van” at the market.
Isaac: So you're not worried about somebody getting all the things you collected throughout your life for really cheap?
Bruno: The idea of it all going out for a pound a piece… is beautiful to me.
A note on Perfect Lives’ location: Perfect Lives is relocating to Hackney in November, so Danny and Bruno will be moving out soon to start furnishing the new place. If you’d like to visit their premises at 6A Florence Road before then, you only have a couple of weeks to do so.
Thanks for reading! Next up is a piece about my comfort restaurants at the moment, out w/c 29 September.
Wooden City is written by Isaac Rangaswami, with editing from James Hansen.
Such a fabulous piece of writing and interviewing … now obviously desperate to go to their shop. I’ve been past a few times and clocked the sign (so intriguing, like all good shop signs) but never managed to stop.
Wonderful interview, Isaac!