An archive of news and site updates
In Memoriam Robin Myers
Posted on 08/05/2023 at 14:05Robin Myers passed away on the morning of her 97th birthday on 1 May 2023. The first female President of The Bibliographical Society, which she always referred to as ‘Bib Soc’, Robin was awarded an MBE in 2009 for services to bibliography. I first met Robin in 1979 when she gave a talk to the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles on The Stationers’ Company, a year after her appointment as its Honorary Archivist. Robin’s interview may be found here http://www.sheila-markham.com/book-collectors/robin-myers.html
In Memoriam Robin de Beaumont
Posted on 25/02/2023 at 18:02Robin de Beaumont has died at the age of 97. A highly-respected and knowledgeable bookseller who began his working life as an architect, Robin was renowned for his incredible eye for books as physical objects. He pioneered renewed interest in Victorian book illustration, and gave his collection of British wood-engraved illustrated books to the British Museum in the 1990s. Robin’s interview may be found here http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/robin-de-beaumont.html
A Mighty Slab of our Culture
Posted on 22/01/2023 at 15:01If you’re reading this, you’re probably already interested in the rare book trade and its practitioners. And so I have no hesitation in recommending a recent book by Marius Kociejowski, poet, travel writer and A Factotum in the Book Trade, to quote the title of his volume of memoirs. Marius believes that bookshops are magic places, but fears that their future is at stake ‘and with it goes a mighty slab of our culture’.
A distinctive figure in the London book trade since 1978, Marius began his career with Bertram Rota, and later worked for Peter Jolliffe (Ulysses Bookshop) in Museum Street, and Peter Ellis in Cecil Court. There are memorable pen portraits of Marius’s colleagues and customers – past and present – including Edith Finer, whose shop in Cecil Court was later occupied by Peter Ellis. Marius’s description of Lady Finer’s business includes this quotation from my interview with her in 1992, ‘There’s a difference between books as a way to make money, and books as books. It makes me sad when I hear of people going into the business as a business. I love my books and I want to sell them as books.’ The full text of Edith Finer’s interview is available here: http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/edith-finer.html
A Factotum in the Book Trade is published by Biblioasis, Windsor, Ontario, 2022, £13.99, ISBN 978-1-77196-456-2. It’s easily available online, but please buy it from a bookshop.
London Rare Books School 2022
Posted on 27/06/2022 at 11:06Leo Cadogan and Angus O'Neill are the tutors for the course on the Modern Rare Book Trade which starts today at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. It was a great pleasure to find my two volumes of conversations with the antiquarian book trade on the reading list for the course.
In Memoriam Alfredo Breitfeld
Posted on 11/07/2021 at 12:07Today marks the first anniversary of the death of Alfredo Breitfeld of Librería de Antaño in Buenos Aires. Alfredo was one of a handful of booksellers who became sick with Covid-19 after attending the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in March 2020. His condition worsened on the flight back to Buenos Aires, where he spent four months on a ventilator. Alfredo Breitfeld passed away on 11 July at the age of 82. His son, Gustavo, plans to continue the business, adapting to new trends in buying, selling and collecting, ‘We were partners with my father for more than thirty years, and I learned a lot, although I must admit that these moments are very challenging for our profession. I will try hard and with passion!’
http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/alfredo-breitfeld.html
'I was so much older then'
Posted on 20/06/2021 at 17:06Rob Rulon-Miller looks back on a quarter of a century since I interviewed him. George Floyd was murdered less than ten miles from Rob’s home, and his thoughtful afterword describes the efforts of CABS-Minnesota to assist those who have found themselves isolated, distanced, or removed from the antiquarian book trade by reason of race, culture, class, religious affiliation, or gender.
http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/rob-rulon-miller.html
Laurence Worms's half-century
Posted on 07/06/2021 at 11:06Congratulations to Laurence Worms who celebrates fifty years in the book trade in June 2021. My interview with Laurence was conducted at the halfway point in 1995, but he has kindly provided occasional updates which have been added to the original text, http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/laurence-worms.html
'We Are All Greeks'
Posted on 03/04/2021 at 17:04
On 24 March 2021 Greece began the commemorations to mark the bicentenary of the country's war of independence. Although the armed struggle against the Ottoman Empire began in Moldova, the first successful uprising took place in the Peloponnese in March 1821. In that remote corner of Greece, there is a remarkable library that deserves to be better known. The Public Historical Library of Andritsaina houses the magnificent collection of Konstantinos Agathophron Nikolopoulos (1786-1841), who formed it while living in exile in Paris for most of his life. The poiema Karkinikon of Ambrose Pamperis, illustrated above, is one of the many bibliographical rarities in the collection. The poem is entirely written in palindromic style, in which each of the 416 lines can be read backwards and forwards. It opens with a portrait of the dedicatee, Tsar Alexander I, and was published in 1802 by George Vendotis, who compiled the Greek dictionary that Lord Byron carried on his travels. It was Byron's support for the cause of Greek self-determination that inspired Philhellenes everywhere to regard the struggle as their common cause. As Shelley declared in the preface to his poem Hellas, 'We are all Greeks'.
Booksellers' Labels
Posted on 01/04/2021 at 12:04
Alican Akın of Khalkedon Rare Books in Istanbul is a passionate collector of ephemera relating to the history of the antiquarian book trade. He is particularly interested in booksellers’ labels, the miniature tickets, often exquisitely designed and usually affixed to the corner of an endpaper. My interview with Alican will appear in the Summer 2021 edition of The Book Collector, and shortly thereafter on this website. The decorative label above belonged to a bookseller in the Ottoman era.
Just as an ex libris documents a book’s previous ownership, a bookseller’s label also contributes to our knowledge of its provenance. It provides a vivid sign post on the book’s journey from one owner to another. There's a Museum of Labels on the website of Plurabelle Books, where they are charmingly described as the postage stamps of books.
A Baptism of Fire
Posted on 07/03/2021 at 11:03It’s thirty years to the day since I conducted my first interview with a bookdealer. On 7 March 1991 I set off with my barely portable cassette recorder to meet Peter Eaton at Lilies, his extraordinary home in Buckinghamshire, which he had transformed into England’s largest bookshop. My first question was dismissed as ‘bloody silly’, but we battled on and the interview was duly published, with a photo of Peter scowling at me. I remember thinking that it would be my last interview. One hundred and thirty-four interviews later, The Book Collector will shortly publish my first interview via Zoom, in which I meet Alican Akın of Khalkedon Rare Books in Istanbul. Next stop Pavel Chepyzhov in Russia and then Edwin Bloemsaat in the Netherlands. It has taken a pandemic to wake me up to the fact that the world is my oyster.
William Poole Remembered 1935-2021
Posted on 18/02/2021 at 14:02
There are booksellers who have continued to work after the deterioration – or even complete loss - of their eyesight. William Poole was born blind and still managed to become a bookseller, which must surely be a unique achievement. It was a privilege to interview William in the autumn of 2013, when I went to the flat in New Bond Street that he shared with his lifelong companion Patrick Pollard. I’m very grateful to Patrick for letting me know the sad news of William Poole’s death last month at the age of eighty-six. If you haven’t read William Poole’s interview, perhaps I might encourage you to do so in memory of an extraordinary man and a hugely inspiring member of the antiquarian book trade.
The photograph of William Poole, with Patrick Pollard on his left, was taken during an auction at Burgersdijk en Niermans in Leiden in 2017.
http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/william-poole.html
An eight-hour cocktail party without any drink
Posted on 18/02/2021 at 13:02Although I interviewed George Ramsden twenty-one years ago, it is still one of my favourite interviews. The news of his sudden death in 2019 at the age of 65 came as a great shock to the many people who had known and admired him. Described by The Times obituarist as an eccentric and unworldly bookseller, Ramsden began his career working for John Saumarez Smith at Heywood Hill, a shop once described as an ‘eight-hour cocktail party without any drink’. By the time I interviewed Ramsden, he had opened Stone Trough Books in the bibliophile city of York, and had just published his magisterial catalogue of the personal library of Edith Wharton, which he had painstakingly reassembled. We met in London on one of Ramsden’s monthly visits to the PBFA book fair at the Hotel Russell. It was mid-winter and very cold, but Ramsden wanted to be photographed outside in order to show off a new overcoat, of which he was very proud. After the interview was published in The Bookdealer on 17 February 2000, Ramsden wrote me a charming letter saying that he had shown the ‘coat photo’ to his son (aged ten), who had asked eagerly ‘Will the Queen see it?’
http://www.sheila-markham.com/interviews/george-ramsden.html
The rare book business above Princess Diana’s favourite café
Posted on 17/02/2021 at 15:02
I found this photograph on the website of Charles Russell, whom I interviewed in 1996 when his business occupied three floors above The Chalet in Grosvenor Street in London. It’s one of 237 photographs of booksellers and their premises taken by Charles Russell during the 1990s, when he spent a lot of time on the road before the ‘ubiquitous use of the internet’. Charles’s remarkable collection of photographs may be found here:
https://www.russellrarebooks.com/memories?limit=10
A modest Italian café , The Chalet was a Mayfair institution frequented by the great and the good for fifty years. The café’s heyday was probably during the 1970s when Lady Diana Spencer was a regular customer, and would consult the proprietor, Lulu Fugaccia, about boyfriend problems before she married Prince Charles. The family-run café closed in 2014.
Requiem for the Old Bookshops of Europe
Posted on 05/04/2019 at 10:04In a recent issue of the London Magazine – England’s oldest literary periodical – there is an essay by Will Stone on the fate of antiquarian bookshops as their lights go out all over Europe. It’s an impassioned argument for their importance, and a plea for their survival as rare fauna in our cultural landscape. “They should be valued, visited and relished, not as relics to be admired or as a novelty cabinet of curiosities, but as intellectually aligned companions and educators, mentors, and more than anything as wise friends whose storehouse of words might guide us out of our ingrained ways of feeling and thinking.”
New Year New Upload
Posted on 31/12/2018 at 12:12To mark the New Year, I have uploaded a number of interviews to the online archive, where they appear for the first time. The new material includes interviews with John Loska of Colin Page Books, Larry Ilott of Cobnar Books and Peter Budek of The Eagle Bookshop, whose website is one of the most engaging in the secondhand book trade. 
The Death of a Secret Scholar
Posted on 02/06/2018 at 11:06The sudden death of Ian Jackson (1951-2018), California bookseller and member of the Editorial Board of The Book Collector, deprived the trade of one of its most erudite members. A lone-wolf eccentric, Jackson belonged to the select group of booksellers and collectors that Iain Sinclair calls the ‘secret scholars’. The Summer 2018 number of The Book Collector contains the Editor, James Fergusson’s handsome tribute to his colleague, and reminiscences of Ian Jackson contributed by his numerous friends and admirers. It was an honour to be invited to contribute the following brief appreciation.
After quoting a Latin tag in the House of Commons, Sir Winston Churchill said, ‘I translate for the sake of Honourable Members who were at Eton’. Ian Jackson made no such concessions to the readers of his catalogues, correspondence and stream of scholarly publications. And so my pen friendship with Ian, a self-proclaimed Epicurean humourist, adept in several modern and two ancient languages, was always going to be an intellectual challenge. Although we never met in person, over the years I formed an impression from his letters and occasional photographs of an existence not far removed from the miniatures in a medieval book of hours. Biblical in appearance, Jackson’s daily life appeared to follow the cycle of seasonal activities, pruning vines, chopping wood, collecting walnuts and - if not actually slaughtering it – feasting on a fatted domestic animal with visiting scholars and bibliophiles of the highest distinction. When corresponding by email with Ian, it was always a surprise to receive a reply in what I calculated to be the middle of the Californian night. Pacific Standard Time had no meaning for Ian, who told me that he ran his business according to Cluniac hours. None the wiser, I learnt not to be surprised by the timing or content of communications from Berkeley – until the Valentine cards started arriving. On investigation, I discovered that numerous people, male and female, received these cards, of which there was a selection of designs of carefully calibrated obscenity. After expressing some surprise, I was downgraded to the blandest design before falling off the list altogether. Fortunately Ian continued to send elegantly inscribed copies of his quirky catalogues and other highly imaginative publications, often beautifully illustrated by his wife, Ann Arnold. His biographical and bibliographical tribute to Bernard Rosenthal, who died last year, might almost stand as a fitting memorial to them both. Written in the style of Pierre Bayle, it is an astonishing scholarly exercise that only Ian Jackson could pull off without shooting himself in the footnote.
Fisher and Sperr's Back Room
Posted on 25/03/2018 at 12:03No self-respecting secondhand bookshop is without a back room, the inner sanctum reserved for favoured customers, where the bookseller keeps his most precious finds.
Many readers will remember Fisher and Sperr’s bookshop in Highgate High Street, over which John Sperr presided until his death in 2010. Professor Mark Mazower, the distinguished historian of twentieth-century Europe, grew up in North London and attributes his book-buying addiction to Fisher and Sperr’s shop. A favoured customer, he describes a visit to John Sperr’s back room in his account of the momentous upheavals of twentieth-century Europe told through the memories of a single family – his own.
‘In Highgate, I found myself thinking about Fisher and Sperr, an antiquarian bookshop on the high street next door to the Hilltop Beauty Salon. Why it had come into my mind I am not sure – maybe because nothing preserves defeated ideas better than an old bookshop, which keeps intact the possibility of their discovery and reincarnation. And perhaps for that reason I remembered how dismayed I was only a few months after Dad’s death when a dusty green curtain appeared across the familiar bow window to mark John Sperr’s passing (in 2010).
The shop had been there for so long I had somehow assumed it would go on forever; Mr.Fisher had disappeared years ago, but John Sperr had manned the desk to the end. He had become forbiddingly deaf and barked at visitors, but once you had his confidence, the key came out, the cavernous back room with its treasures was grudgingly unlocked, and the light was turned on. Inside it was always freezing and the books were crammed high, gathering dust and rarely touched.
One afternoon I found a small leather-bound edition of the Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, its title page bearing in a precise but minuscule schoolboy hand the signature “V.E.Rieu” and the date “Nov.10th 1902”. I bought it because I had heard of Rieu, who would later become the first translator of Homer in paperback and the founder of Penguin Classics, the great disseminator of the world’s learning. He had lived and died nearby, leaving his library to be dispersed and then reassembled in a bookdealer’s afterlife.’
Mark Mazower
What You Did Not Tell. A Russian Past and the Journey Home
London, Allen Lane, 2017.
Celebrating a Year of Anniversaries
Posted on 04/03/2018 at 20:032018 marks the 70th anniversary of the foundation of ILAB, and the 60th anniversary of the ABA’s first book fair.
The Danish bookseller, Einar Gronholt-Pedersen, was President of the Danske Antikvarboghandlerforening when it hosted the congress in Copenhagen, at which the ILAB was formally incorporated in September 1948. Here he is in a photograph from 1969, inspecting a book on the ‘Under £5’ stand at the ABA fair, held at the National Book League in Albemarle Street, London.
The ABA held its first book fair at the National Book League in 1958, where it continued to hold fairs until 1970, by which time the number of exhibitors had risen from 28 to 45.
Solomon ‘Inky’ Pottesman, collector of incunabula, was a regular and memorable visitor at the ABA book fair in its early days. As depicted in this photograph from 1973, Pottesman was never without a brown paper parcel, which he carried by the string.
Keith Fletcher took these photographs when he was in his twenties and early thirties, working with his father, Bill Fletcher, in the family bookshop in Cecil Court. Interviews with both father and son may be found on this website.
The two photographs, here published for the first time, belong to an extraordinary collection of Keith’s photography documenting various book fairs and ILAB congresses that he attended as a young man.
Keith Fletcher is a Past President and a current Patron of the ABA.
I have grown more optimistic...
Posted on 29/12/2017 at 17:12Twenty-two years have gone by since I first interviewed Stuart Bennett - long enough for much to have changed in his business. Here are Stuart's thoughts as another year comes to an end.
"Has the antiquarian book business slowed down, or have I? Maybe my problem is the decreasing amount of unusual or high-quality antiquarian literature coming onto the market, although I and others had plenty of adrenalin when Robert Pirie’s extraordinary collection came up at Sotheby’s New York at the end of 2015.
"In 2009, towards the end of my term as president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, I was interviewed for the ABAA website and – perhaps reflecting on my pending sixtieth birthday and the fact that the majority of ABAA members were then at least as old as the Association itself (founded in 1949) – I remarked that over the next ten or fifteen years membership would implode and what was left of the ABAA would look around and ask “what happened?”
"I have grown more optimistic since then, mostly out of admiration for my younger bookselling colleagues and their generation of collectors and curators. There are fewer of them than there were in predecessor generations, and fewer still who share my affection for really old English books. But those who do are enormously impressive, and the energy and enthusiasm of educators such as those at Rare Book Schools in Virginia and California, Indiana University, the Colorado and York Antiquarian Book Seminars, and elsewhere, along with their growing number of students, should mean that the torch stays alight for at least another generation."
John Saumarez Smith's Swansong?
Posted on 30/09/2017 at 11:09John Saumarez Smith has just added an afterword to his interview, which was originally conducted in 2003. The afterword coincides with the publication of a catalogue with the codeword ‘SWANSONG’. In the introduction to the catalogue, John writes, ‘When the Swan has Sung, I very much hope to keep in touch with those of you who have supported me since my departure from [Heywood Hill,] Curzon Street. Booksellers don’t retire but hope to continue to share their pleasure in books with their bookish friends’.
New website
Posted on 30/06/2017 at 12:06Welcome to the new design of my website. I hope that you will find it a more engaging experience, and that you will return from time to time as I plan to introduce new features with the collaboration of my colleagues in the trade, to whom this website is devoted.
Why haven’t you interviewed so-and-so?
Posted on 30/06/2017 at 12:06I’ve been asked this question many times, and usually the answer is that they don’t want to be interviewed, or that I should come back in a few years’ time. Meanwhile perhaps the best thing I can do is to let their catalogues speak for them, starting with Susanne Schulz-Falster’s outstanding catalogue on bookbinding and paper manufacture, produced jointly with Michael Banzhaf.