Leo Cadogan

You need to have an instinct for a book to have any success in the rare book trade. I think it can be encouraged, but taught is too formal a word. The key thing is osmosis, and a working environment is better than a classroom. My first job was dusting the tops of the books in the Senior Library at Oriel College Oxford. It was the summer of 1997, and I had just finished my degree. As an undergraduate, I had taken a paper on Literature and Politics in Early Modern England, which had introduced me to publishing history, and I found it a fascinating subject. One of the tutors associated with the course was Scott Mandelbrote, who is an esteemed bibliophile.

   After Oxford, I wasn’t sure what to do, and it was thanks to Steve Weissman, a family friend, that I heard about an opening in the English Department at Bernard Quaritch Ltd. I found myself working for Ted Hoffman, a very learned person with the highest standards, who was also very much a man of the trade. Ted taught me how to write a physical description of a book. I recall a lot of back-and-forth with my efforts covered in ink corrections. I was in the same office as Mary James, who now runs the award-winning Aldeburgh Bookshop, and she was very kind and helpful. It was a fantastic experience, observing and absorbing the business at close quarters from such distinguished colleagues.

   I hadn’t been at Quaritch for very long before I moved to Christopher Sokol, who specialises in early Continental books. It was another wonderful deep dive in terms of learning. Christopher would give me a pile of old books, often quite complicated material, and I would try to work it all out and write catalogue descriptions. I would return the next day to find much crossing out, and ink all over my descriptions. Christopher believes in getting quickly to the point, and it was a great training in cataloguing.

   I stayed for two years with Christopher, and then decided to study for an MA in Renaissance studies at the Warburg Institute. I was fulfilling an intellectual ambition and I found it incredibly stimulating. In fact I stayed on to do a doctorate in legal history. Although I didn’t finish it, my knowledge of medieval law became very useful for bookselling. The experience taught me that I’m not an academic, and made me realise that bookselling can provide another route to acquiring and circulating knowledge.

   During my studies, I worked part-time for Charlie Unsworth, who specialises in classics and early printing, and for Unsworth’s rare books concession in Foyle’s bookshop. I’ve been very lucky with all the different people who have helped me, and working for Charlie was an important experience. Managing a shop was interesting from a commercial aspect, and I also enjoyed selling books on intellectual history.

   When I finished at the Warburg Institute, I stayed on full-time at Unsworth’s for a couple of years. I’m not sure if it was bull-headedness or arrogance, but the time came when I wanted to run my own business. By 2007 I had been in the trade for ten years, and I was attracted to the model of the dealer selling to institutions from an office.  I chose that model, and founded a business dealing in cultural and intellectual history, mostly continental European, pre-1800, with an eye to the unusual or iconic. The trade is a supportive place, especially for newcomers. I remember early on I had a talk with Susanne Schulz-Falster, who ran her business on a similar model, and she was very helpful.

   The book trade has always been concerned with rare books, but in the last twenty-five years there has been a huge and beneficial move away from the canonical lists towards the overlooked texts. Of course dealers are still selling the canonical works, but new areas of interest have opened up for booksellers like me.  Part of it is a steady movement away from the dead white European male. Also, I remember the excitement of getting my hands on the catalogue of Barney Rosenthal’s collection of printed books with annotations, now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was published in 1997, a few years after Robin Alston’s A short title catalogue of books with manuscript notes in the British Library. The concept of the transmission of ideas through marginal annotations in printed books made a huge impression on me, and both books are still prized possessions. I believe that those catalogues were important in re-orientating the trade and taking it towards the present interest in copy-specific details.

   As one assembles new information from annotations, it can help to change our picture of early modern book ownership. I had a Latin edition of Pliny that belonged to an early seventeenth-century English family, with the signature of the patriarch, and initials of another member of the family. I discovered that they were his daughter’s initials, which strongly suggests that she was able to read Latin. These discoveries help to set books within an interesting and lively context.

   Since the mid-90s when Mary James in London was producing her pioneering catalogues of books by, for and about women, the subject has become huge business. Some booksellers have believed that it is enough to put ‘Women’ in large letters on the cover or at the head of a catalogue to ensure its success. There is now a considered view that we should catalogue books relevant to women’s studies with the same broad care to context as we would any other book. I’ve been creating a niche for myself, with others, in books about the life and work of women religious. Last September I took to Firsts rare book fair a copy of Andrés de Borda’s Practica de confessores de monjas, Mexico, 1708. The author was a Franciscan monk in Mexico, and this is his guide for nuns’ confessors, written in the form of a dialogue between a priest and a woman religious. It explores issues including intimate relationships between nuns and their women servants, who are called madres de amor, and the special rights accorded to the wives of viceroys when they entered a convent.

   I took to the same book fair a Latin textbook by a Portuguese Jesuit, printed by the sister-in-law of Joaquin Ibarra, the great eighteenth-century Madrid printer.  Manuel Alvares’s Prosodia was printed in 1764 for the University of Cervera, Catalonia’s university from 1717 to 1835. The university press was run at the time by Maria Antonia Ibarra Cous. She was the widow of Joaquin Ibarra’s brother, who had previously run the Cervera press. Maria passed the business to her daughter Maria Antonia Ibarra, who became a notable printer in the 1770s and 80s.

   I’m conscious of not saying anything original but the growing number of women coming into the book trade is a wonderful development. I don’t want to talk about a great new generation to the exclusion of the past. Every generation has its amazing booksellers, but I’m very optimistic for the book trade at the moment. I’m also conscious that I had an extremely fortunate to start to my career with Ted Hoffman at Quaritch. Many people don’t have that opportunity, and I’m a great supporter of the ILAB International Mentoring Programme. It’s designed to lend a hand in the early days of a bookseller’s career when help is most needed. I was a trustee of the ABA Educational Trust, which is wonderfully run by Adam Douglas, and partly aims to foster the entry of younger booksellers into the trade. In the summer I now teach with Angus O’Neill the course on the Modern Rare Book Trade at the London Rare Books School. We aim to demythologise the trade and to tackle some of the cliches - although there’s still a lot of tweed-wearing. The important thing is that we all work to make ourselves accessible and relevant.

   Recently Dr. Sian Witherden started coming to work for me for a couple of days a week. I’m officially her ILAB mentor, but I’m learning so much from her. She is a Resource Description Librarian at St John’s College, Oxford, and her work there (as I understand it) involves converting, publishing and promoting online descriptions of the College’s collection of medieval and early modern manuscripts. Sian has also worked on the Material Evidence in Incunabula project. She also has interesting ideas about the layout and presentation of my printed catalogues. It’s very helpful during our somewhat lonely careers as sole traders to be aware of developments in the wider world, and I’m grateful to Sian for her input.

   Since the boredom of lockdown, I spend far too much of my energies on Twitter. I fell into the habit of tweeting about the books around me in my office at home. It was fascinating to see what feature would fly on an international network – what piece of rare book history would work as an electronic image. A photograph of the fore-edge of a book, showing the vellum navigation tabs, attracted a large number of ‘likes’. It’s fascinating to discover that there’s a modern social currency for medieval place-markers. You find yourself in a community of people who share your taste and curiosity in rare books. It pays for itself in the sense that unexpected sales happen now and then. Twitter is also useful for spotting academic trends. As I don’t belong to any formal academic networks, it can provide information that I would not otherwise be privy to.

   Social media in general helps me to get over the hump of sitting down and actually starting work. It helps to keep the blood moving. We all have to figure out how to tell a good story. Some booksellers reach for the key punchy points, and others get there more slowly. The goal is always the same; books must be made to live.   

Interviewed for The Book Collector in Spring 2024