Sheila Markham

In Memoriam James Fleming

James Roland Fleming, writer and editor, died suddenly on 22 November 2024 at the age of 80. A nephew of Ian Fleming, who founded The Book Collector in 1952, James took the journal back into family ownership on New Year’s Day 2016.
There and then James and his brother Fergus Fleming decided that they should bring out a special edition devoted to the life, as a great book collector, of their uncle Ian. The Spring 2017 edition of The Book Collector opens with James’s recollections of Ian, in which the first paragraph sets the scene.
‘After fifty years under the guardianship of Nicolas Barker, The Book Collector has come full circle. It was Ian Fleming who, amidst all the incidents of an extraordinary life, found time to launch the journal, lead it and promote it indefatigably. His line died out with the death of his son, Caspar, and it is to me, a nephew, that The Book Collector has descended.'
James regarded it as a great honour to follow in at least one of his uncle's footsteps, and his commitment to the journal was evident from the start. We had our first meeting in characteristic style over a splendid lunch. I got drunk and rather silly on a rum-laden tiramisu, and James dined out on it for years to come.
My last email exchange with James reflects everything that I most valued about our collaboration on my interviews for The Book Collector. It concerned a reference to Atlantic salmon fishing in a draft of my interview with Charles B. Wood, antiquarian bookseller and author of Bibliotheca Salmo Salar.
‘May I be picky? To say Atlantic salmon fishing suggests Charles is fishing in the Atlantic whereas what he means is that he's fishing for Atlantic salmon, which is a separate species from other salmons, and found mainly in Europe. Go well, my dear.’
I will remember James not only for his dedication to the interests of collectors, bibliographers, booksellers and librarians, but also for his passion for the English language which stayed with him till the end. Shortly before he died, James was heard to instruct a nurse in the correct use of ‘less’ and ‘fewer’.

Go well, dear James, my editor and friend.

In Memoriam Robin de Beaumont

Robin 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

London Rare Books School 2022

Leo 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. 

'I was so much older then'

Rob 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

'We Are All Greeks'

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'.

http://www.andritsainalibrary.gr/en/

A Baptism of Fire

It’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.

An eight-hour cocktail party without any drink

Although 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

Requiem for the Old Bookshops of Europe

In 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.”

The Death of a Secret Scholar

The 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.

Celebrating a Year of Anniversaries

2018 marks the 70^th anniversary of the foundation of ILAB, and the 60^th 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.

John Saumarez Smith's Swansong?

John 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’.

Why haven’t you interviewed so-and-so?

I’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.

View the catalogue