Meet the Exhibitors

My name is Steve Liddle and I've been a bookseller since 1982. For most of my bookselling career I was half of a partnership, 'Patterson Liddle', with my old friend John Patterson. We had our first shop in Bristol and then moved to Bath around 1991, closing in 2005. John has retired and we remain the best of friends. I soldier on alone. I work from home these days but love to escape to exhibit ...

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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...

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I have been an Antiquarian Bookseller after falling into a job with Francis Edwards Ltd. in Marylebone during my Gap Year, and realised that books were my passion. I had always collected books and making a career in them became irresistible. The world of books is an ever changing kaleidoscope and indeed a mirror of the world and its ages. After watching the BBC Antiques Roadshow avidly for...

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If you are coming to the Chelsea Fair, by all means alert me in advance if you have a field of special interest, and I will see what I can offer. I try to bring to the market (via Fairs, Catalogues and our quirky shop) material that the internet does not quite do justice to, which favours browsing, or which needs to be physically encountered. Fine bindings and printing, original artwork, bo...

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I was born in 1947 and brought up in the Hulme / Moss Side area of Manchester. My parents had friends in Brooklands, in those days a very well to do area of south Manchester. Most Sunday afternoons we would catch the electric train to Brooklands and have tea with Auntie Doris and Uncle Neville. As a youngster of 5 or 6, I was quickly bored listening to their adult conversation and spent a lot...

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Blackwell's has been dealing in rare and collectable books in Oxford since the first shop opened on Broad Street in Oxford in 1879. That shop is now the flagship location of the UK's leading academic bookselling business, and Blackwell's Rare Books continues the original tradition, now based on the second floor of the Broad Street shop. We carry a general stock of antiquarian books, modern firs...

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In 1922, when my father, Bill Fletcher, left school his father advised him to choose a subject or a type of book in which to specialise. He spent 70 years as a bookseller without ever managing to follow his father’s advice, for he explained that if he were to be restricted to any particular field there would always be so many beautiful and exciting books that he would be unable to buy because...

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In my early teens I used to tour the second hand bookshops of South London with my brother Peter. As result I traded in them whilst working my way through University. My degree started out as Chemistry and ended up as a B.Sc in Geology, hence I end up as an antiquarian bookseller specialising in whatever took my fancy! The first thirty years were spent trading from Chelsea Antiques Market on Lo...

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I have been an antiquarian bookseller since 1997, when after university I went to work for one of London's larger book dealerships. Since then, I have had a broad and interesting book trade career. I love old books and manuscripts: not just for their text but also for their illustrations and visual appeal, their bindings, the notes and ownership marks that one can find in them. In all this, I ...

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In this picture I am at Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California and in my element, looking for that elusive gem. I started doing this back in the 1960's before I left school,delving into my fellow students' boxes of books for which they had no further use. I made my first sale to Thomas Thorp in their gargantuan bookshop at the top of Guildford High Street in 1965. I got £5 for a box of ...

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A thoroughly enjoyable fair and well worth the drive from Glasgow: we pack our faithful Volvo to the gunnels and make this annual trip to meet old friends and forge new contacts. I have been bookselling for over 30 years and always strive to stock interesting items in excellent condition - books, prints, manuscripts, ephemera and a few surprises!

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Andrew Sharpe & Adam Yates Andrew Sharpe has been in the book trade for thirty years originally selling new books in Ilkley. The shop earned a high reputation in this field, but in 1986 it was the opportunity to purchase a house-full of excellent antiquarian and scarce books which led him to fit out and open a second hand department in the basement. As is usual in the trade, stock soon expande...

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The Chelsea book fair is a particular favourite of ours and we hope to have some interesting stock to show on Stand 60. We try to specialise in books and manuscripts dating from pre-1800, the earlier the better, including theology, cookery, natural history, travel, and languages. We also stock illustrated and hand-coloured items and, of course, we have more recent material in other subjects...

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"A genius for friendship with all and sundry, infectious enthusiasm, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty - he would not have claimed for himself any of these [...] attributes..." - John Sparrow, quoting an obituary notice for Geoffrey Madan, "intended for The Times but never sent". Nevertheless, I shall bring a few quite uncommon...

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The Old Hall Bookshop is one of those apparently increasingly rare institutions, a shop that sells Second Hand and Antiquarian books. Although we also sell new books we have firmly retained a good balance of both new and second hand. Having a shop means that we do get a lot of people wanting to sell us books. Although many of these offers have to be filtered we do get many interesting and un...

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I’ve been selling books and photographs for 18 years. The first 10 years were spent working for three London booksellers: Shapero, Sotheran and Quaritch. I then established Allsworth Rare Books in 2002, specialising in Travel books and photographs. I have a particular in interest in Africa and the Far East, but basically I sell books, photographs and artefacts relating to all far-flung and...

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Sixteen years ago, I returned to Northumberland, the county of my birth, after fourteen years at Marlborough Rare Books in London. Now, I try to find and sell unusual rare books & manuscripts in all fields; Thomas Bewick, as a fellow-Northumbrian, is of special interest – but (in no particular order) architecture, books about books, legal, and religious works also appear in our catalogues. ...

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I have been an Antiquarian Bookseller since 1961. Next year I will celebrate 50 years in the antiquarian book trade. I grew up in London where as a schoolboy I started browsing in secondhand bookshops. One Saturday on a trip to the British Museum I visited the Marchmont Bookshop in Bloomsbury where I met Stanley Smith the proprietor who had a contagious enthusiasm for early printed books. ...

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My previous life was as a stage manager and one of the shows that I was involved with was 84 Charing Cross Road. This and an inability to resist bookshops, not the best of reasons, pushed me into a career change and I became a bookdealer in 1985. For six years I had a shop in Beverley and so naturally I started dealing in East Yorkshire topography. A passion for Byron led me to the Roman...

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