A Second Book of Booksellers by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: E-Book partnership
Published: 2014-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Tim Bryars

Courting the Collector

My first paid work in the antiquarian book trade was unpacking boxes in the basement of the Staffs Bookshop in my school holidays. Years later I discovered that the boxes had been packed by Ken Fuller, now my friend and neighbour in Cecil Court. My mother had worked as a cataloguer for Frank Hammond in the mid-1960s, and was responsible for many of his Voyage and Exploration catalogues. She also worked for Jim Fenning, whose business is still active. I grew up knowing the difference between sheep and calf, and how to collate a book. When my sister and I came along, my mother stopped working. We lived in Walsall, where I went to the local grammar school. In due course, my mother returned to work, and found a job with Peter Stockham in the Staffs Bookshop in Lichfield, which is about ten miles from Walsall.

It was everything that one imagines a country bookshop to be – a huge stock crammed into several rooms and the cellar, in two fifteenth-century buildings behind an eighteenth-century façade, with sloping floors and bulging ceilings. Peter Stockham had moved there in 1988, after a dozen years in Cecil Court, where he had traded as Images. The shop had been a bookshop since Peter was at school in Lichfield and had first been attracted to its warren of books. My mother was responsible for writing the series of four catalogues, which Peter issued between 1996 and 1998, entitled For the Amusement and Instruction of Youth. They were very highly regarded, not least for my mother’s detailed notes on almost 3,500 books from Peter’s astonishingly eclectic stock.

After school I read Modern History at Oxford, where the modern period is taken to begin with the division of the Roman Empire into East and West. There were still a number of rare book shops in the centre of the city, and I was a frequent visitor to the Classics Bookshop, Titles, Waterfield’s and Blackwell’s, although I could not possibly afford to buy anything. I was also very interested in drama, and was a member of OUDS. After graduating I performed in the Edinburgh Festival – I played Machiavelli’s father-in-law in a production on Princes Street. I also won a travelling scholarship from the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and Cambridge Commonwealth Trust to visit India to pursue my interest in the European commercial community after Independence.

In 1995 I entered the antiquarian trade, finding a job by advertising myself in the Situations Wanted column in the Bookdealer. It was read by Charlie Unsworth just as he was thinking of expanding his antiquarian department, specialising in early printing and the classical world, which had been and remain interests of mine since university. Charlie took me on to build up the department, giving me a pretty free rein to do it. I worked with him for four and a half years, during which time his firm became a member of the ABA. The experience gave me an excellent grounding in bookselling, and the opportunity to work with new, secondhand, remainder and antiquarian material.

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