About me...
Some of my earliest memories are of my Mother reciting Yeats’ Fairy enticement ‘Come Away, O human child, to the waters and the wild with a Faery hand in hand’. Also firmly embedded in my childish memory are images from Arthur Rackham’s ‘Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’; a babe in christening robes flying over the London chimney stacks; a little child steering a sailing boat on the Serpentine. From Gulliver’s Travels, I recall worrying how poor Gulliver could survive the attack from the gigantic bees. A very different and pleasing sensation came from the intriguing sensual swirls of Charles Robinson’s edition of The Child’s Garden of Verses.
After erratic studies of history at Oxford followed by an intense though brief period working with the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, I started a ‘temporary’ life in the world of antiques. Despite initial dabbling in African masks & delicate porcelains, I soon began to deal in old books. I was excited to encounter Rackham and Charles Robinson again since I could feel their intrinsic worth. I was delighted and thrilled to discover that there were many other illustrators of great talent & happiness, even today I find unknown illustrators, not just in Britain but also in Spain, Italy, Sweden, the USA and elsewhere. Fantasy illustration is world-wide.
My ‘temporary’ changed into permanent and I became an Antiquarian Bookseller, opening a bookshop in the King’s Road called Chelsea Rare Books and later founding the Imaginative Book Illustration Society (IBIS).
Life has moved on and I find myself living in a charming converted chapel in the Somerset Levels still happily buying, selling and cataloguing Children’s & Illustrated books. I enjoy doing bibliographic research and think it right to share the accrued knowledge with fellow enthusiasts. For this the Internet is an excellent medium, however, for selling books I still prefer the more traditional way, on paper. If you would like to receive a sample catalogue, just let me have your address and I will forward a copy, to anywhere in the world.
The poor but expensive service given by the Post Office this Christmas is forcing me to rethink the sending out of Catalogues. It seems only fair that loyal customers should have first pick of my catalogues, so I am proposing to continue to send paper copies of my catalogues to those loyal customers and only when I know that they have received their paper catalogues I will send out a PDF of the catalogue. This means that I can use the internet to keep in touch with people who enjoy my catalogues, but for whatever reason are not purchasing books at the moment. I am grateful to my long-term customers, including many in the USA, so I hope this seems fair.