B lackwell’s is more than a bookshop; it is an Oxford institution with its own historian — Rita Ricketts.

A bookshop is an appropriate home for her, as she is a natural storyteller.

A visiting scholar at the Bodleian, Rita is also director of the official fringe for the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival as well as the originator of the World Writers group at Blackwell’s.

I wondered what object could inspire her to tell stories to herself when she is marooned on our desert island? Which antique, work of art or antiquarian book would she like to find washed up on the beach?

Rita said: “In the cemetery near my childhood home was a beautifully sculptured angel with outstretched arms. Inscribed on its chest was ‘Jesus called a little child’. At the age of five, I loved the statue but didn’t think it a good idea to call little children, even to heaven. That carved angel was the first significant ‘antique’ in my life.

“Visions of growing up appear in the form of a statue of General Wolfe on Blackheath, at whose feet I would sit before careering down the hill on my bike, passing the Greenwich Meridian and visiting my favourite painting in the National Maritime Museum, The Death of Nelson by Benjamin West.

“Describing it now sounds rather morbid but they were days of illicit freedom: crossing the Greenwich tunnel to play on the Isle of Dogs, even though our parents forbade it.

Life in my twenties and early thirties was as a student, teacher, mother and feeder of poets and writers. Some are long dead, like George Fraser, and some were already famous like Seamus Heaney (fed on whiskey and Irish stew) and Fay Weldon (on chocolate cake — I had burnt the pizza for the main course!) “That was also the time I inherited a marquetry box made by my grandfather, who had died when I was six. I remember my surprise when I opened it and found inside the letter I wrote to him asking him to get well. “In 1981, we set sail for New Zealand. Arriving in cold wintry Wellington and feeling lonely I cried with the early settlers buried in the cemetery, which had been cut through by a motorway. An iconic painting of a bird flying over that road by an outraged artist, Rita Angus, would remind me of Wellington.

“But the antique that would root me to the New Zealand soil is further north in Auckland — a huge sculpture of a Maori Elder sited opposite the ferry terminal.

“He is part of that landscape and practical too, because he acts as a windbreak. This giant ‘father’ =would listen while I reminisce about times spent at the one-roomed, bunkbed-lined wooden beach hut with a stove where we stayed with Booker prize-winner, Keri Hume, author of The Bone People. She took my five children out to sea armed only with a machete!

Awarded the New Zealand 1990 Scholarship, by the European Commission, I set off to the European University in Florence. From its monastic terrace in San Domenico I could look down on the whole of Florence.

This view is my antique of the mind — ‘a mind with a view’ — one I can always own. After a period of struggle in England finding solace in work and teaching variously in an inner city comprehensive, a college of further education and part time at UCL, I eventually found my ‘turrangawiawai’ (place to stand) in ‘Blackwells’, after writing a history of those reading and writing folk associated with this family firm (Adventurers All).

“My research in New Zealand had involved collecting stories of those affected by the big economic change brought about by Britain’s membership of the EU. Now I was inundated with more stories; of scholar’s manqué making their way against the odds.

“The room I work in was where Sir Basil sat on his mother’s knee looking out of the window as the circus paraded down Broad Street. The wallpaper, hand printed in 1872 by William Morris, is called ‘Powdered’.

“I think the Broad Street shop is itself an antique, filled with the spirit of books and the hunger for learning of those that love them. The early Blackwells had little formal education. The first nonetheless became Oxford’s first public librarian. The second founded the famous bookshop on Broad Street. The third, Sir Basil, was the first in his family to go to university.

With the help of Reg Carr I created a tripartite link, between Blackwell’s, the Bodleian and the university admissions, for prospective students, with an aim to widen participation.

“New Zealand is a place where anyone who makes the effort, irrespective of formal qualifications, can go to university. Oxford University’s vice-chancellor, John Hood, supported such development in New Zealand universities.

“Despite popular prejudice, Oxford deserves a better press for the encouragement it gives schools and teachers in the State Sector. It has an open door, to a world of ideas and imagination, through books. The great Bodleian too will open its doors more widely when the renovated Gilbert Scott Building (an antique too?) transforms it from a fortress to a fairway.

“Libraries, local public ones, and bookshops were and are my arcadia. And so my final choice has to be a book.

“In the Blackwell archives I find treasures galore, many of which are now in the Merton Blackwell Collection and a larger collection, together with the working Library of Sir Basil, (generously donated by Julian Blackwell) will soon be lodged in the Bodleian.

“The one I have chosen was printed on the Kelmscott Press so it will also remind me of this room. In 2004, to celebrate 125 years of ‘Blackwell’s of the Broad’, I persuaded the Bodleian to mount an exhibition of selected editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The show included Caxton’s mid-15th century version, a Gainsboroughesquely illustrated 18th century edition and William Morris's ‘Kelmscott’ Chaucer curled around with Pre-Raphaelite maidens disporting themselves in finery.

“But that is not the one I want on the desert island. Producing finely printed books was Basil Blackwell’s iconoclastic act, staying the hand of mass production. His (Shakespeare Head) Chaucer was also printed on the Kelmscott Press. Its illustrations are in stark simplicity.

“This is a beautiful book; an antique we could all afford if only it was still in print. Its characters would remind me of Blackwellians, those devoted and well informed booksellers, and of all the people with rich stories who walk through Blackwell's doors.”