A Third Book of Booksellers, by Sheila Markham

26th November, 2025

Sheila, we are looking forward to the launch of your new book, A Third Book of Booksellers. It will be published on 1st December 2025 and is the latest in a series you began in 2004. It will be available through Bernard Quaritch Ltd.

 

The series is perceived to be an essential archive of book-trade history – how did you first get into interviewing booksellers and dare I ask when?

You may indeed. The series began in 1991, when my first interview was published on 7 March in The Bookdealer. Peter Eaton was the subject of the interview, which I can only describe as a baptism of fire. I visited him on a bitterly cold day at his home in Buckinghamshire, a rambling Victorian house with 19 book-crammed rooms. I eventually found Peter behind a door marked ‘Funeral Office’. While two aggressive dachshunds circled me, I managed to ask my first question, to which Peter replied, ‘That’s a bloody silly question.’ I returned to the offices of The Bookdealer in Charing Cross Road and reported to Barry Shaw, the proprietor and editor, that perhaps interviewing wasn’t for me. Barry had entrusted me with the project while I was contributing a miscellaneous column to his trade paper. I’m hugely grateful to him for encouraging me to continue with the series of bookseller interviews after that decidedly wobbly start.

You have certainly talked to many of the great characters in the trade. Although I would love to ask you which was your favourite interviewee, I know this would cause a stir, but which one of your interviews felt like a real coup at the time and why?

Perhaps a stir could be minimised if I named my favourite interviewee amongst those who are no longer with us. The answer would be – without hesitation – John Chancellor (d.2014). We met in a pub somewhere in Northamptonshire, seated at a sticky table between a jukebox and a one-armed bandit. Although John began by saying that his career as a bookseller was ‘a cautionary tale’, I hadn’t anticipated quite such a story of self-destructive adventures that took him from a Queen Anne house in Kew to a hotel room in the Dominican Republic, dealing ‘one vicious blow after another’ to his business.

As for a real coup, I don’t think I’ve achieved anything approaching a journalistic ‘scoop’, but I always feel very privileged when the great and the good in our trade are willing to be interviewed. The late Albi Rosenthal springs immediately to mind, and Mitsuo Nitta – Albi as a supreme example of the so-called ‘gentle invasion’, the Continental emigré booksellers of the thirties and forties, who made such an impact on the antiquarian book trade in this country and in the United States, and Mitsuo Nitta for his insights into Japan’s importance in the global market for antiquarian books during the extraordinary years from 1975 to 1995. I should also like to mention Alfredo Breitfeld as a very personal coup. I met Alfredo and his charming wife Susana in their office in Buenos Aires in 2008. Alfredo was my first interviewee from the Spanish-speaking world. It sounds like a cliché, but I was immediately struck by the passion and, what I regarded as ‘Latin’ excitement, with which he talked about his work. I’ve subsequently found the same approach amongst the other Hispanic booksellers whom I have interviewed, and I’m keen to interview more of them.

Every interview must have an element of surprise – can you share some highlights, please?

In terms of surprise, nothing quite equals my interview with William Poole (d.2021). I was aware that he was blind, but I hadn’t realised that he had been blind from birth. William entered the book trade with an interest-free loan from the RNIB, and the help of Patrick Pollard, his amanuensis, with whom he developed a respected business in the history of Classical scholarship.

In the good old days, did you interview everyone in person and did that have its own challenges?

I suppose it was physically more challenging. Many of my early interviewees lived outside London, in the ‘good old days’ when almost every provincial English town had a good second-hand bookshop. There was no Satnav, and I would be map-reading and driving on unfamiliar country roads, and getting very cold or very hot because the air con in the car never worked. I would often arrive in need of complete bed rest. I’m not sure if this answers your question…

Is there a bookseller you wish you had interviewed, but never got round to it and is there a wish list of booksellers who still need to be immortalised?

I wish I had been able to interview Diana Parikian (d.2012). I asked her more than once, but she always declined. When I first met her in 1979, Diana was a tremendous force in the international antiquarian book trade, highly respected and one of the first women at a time when the trade in this country was still male dominated.

There is certainly a wish list of booksellers whom I would like to interview. When friends who are not in the trade ask if there can be anyone left, I tell them that I have barely scratched the surface.

On your website you also have a few interviews with book collectors, but certainly a lot less. Is there a book on collectors in the making?

I don’t think so. I firmly believe that book collectors write best about themselves.

You started your career in books while you were still at Oxford. What were the defining moments of the last few decades?

I owe everything to the late great Mickie Brand of Marlborough Rare Books who gave me my first job in the trade in 1979. As the Principal of my old college remarked, ‘There’s nothing like starting at the top.’

Another defining moment came in 1986 when Mickie introduced me to Colin and Charlotte Franklin, for whom I worked during the late 1980s. I learnt so much from them, and will always be grateful for their insistence that I should do more writing. I can only imagine how proud the Franklins would be to know that their granddaughter, Euphemia, is working for Maggs.

In 1993 Colin introduced me to Frank Herrmann, the co-founder of Bloomsbury Book Auctions, and one of the greatest movers-and-shakers I have ever met. Frank was at the time Chairman of the Library Committee of the Travellers Club, where I became librarian in 1994 and remain to this day.

I’ve been hugely fortunate with my benefactors. I’ve already mentioned Barry Shaw, and I would also like to mention the editors past and present of The Book Collector for continuing to publish my book trade interviews.

My most recent ‘defining moment’ was undoubtedly Deborah Coltham’s email in 2021 to say that I had been awarded Honorary Membership of the ABA.

The Book Collector team and I are sure our subscribers always look forward to reading your interviews. If you could travel back in time who would have been your preferred interviewee – Percy Muir or Ian Fleming?

Percy Muir, not least because his autobiography Minding My Own Business was the first book that Mickie Brand recommended to me for my education as a bookseller. Percy would have been a wonderful raconteur, and I loved the fact that he had started out as a music-hall performer.

We are very much looking forward to the third book – and can we expect the fourth in about ten years’ time?

As you have rightly calculated, it seems to take me ten years to put together a book. At the present rate of production, a fourth volume seems unlikely. But never say never.