Meet the Exhibitors

I sort of fell into bookselling by accident having always been a buyer, reader and collector. I'm a musician and found bookshops a good way to pass the long days when I was on the road, eventually needing to sell books in order to continue to buy them. A failed musical project got me interested in Gypsies, and a successful musical project got me living in Spain in the late seventies, leading to my other speciality. I did my first book fairs in Cambridge helping another musician, and the first under my own name in Exeter, when I moved to Honiton in 1982. Apart from a slight gap when my sons were born I have continued to work as a freelance jazz musician, which is why I always look so tired! Over the years I reckon I've done nearly a thousand book fairs in the UK and Europe, and I see this will be my twentieth at Chelsea – still my favourite. How many of us, I wonder, have done all twenty? See you there.