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Interview with Gordon Brough

10th April, 2026

Gordon Brough is chairman of Sotheran’s. He was born in Dunfermline but brought up in Dundee. He is a collector turned bookseller.

When did you come to London?

I came to London about 35 years ago, around 1990, and I worked as a lawyer in the City until last Christmas. I have been a lawyer for almost 40 years focusing primarily on investment management. It comes to a point where you don’t want to admit how long it has been!

Are you enjoying retirement from your law career?

Very much so – I haven’t entirely retired; I have a few jobs outside the industry. One is a literary agency, Peters Fraser + Dunlop where I am one of their non-executive directors. I don’t do very much but I work with really nice people, and it’s all about modern books. Another role is in digital media with Brave Bison; again very different from the book trade.

Then of course at Sotheran’s I deal with the very old rather than the very new.

When it comes to Sotheran’s, was it a case of ‘I loved the company so much, I bought it’?

No, I can say that definitively. I was approached by the managing director, Chris Saunders, who has been there for over 25 years. He approached me as I was a customer and he knew I was a lawyer. He asked me to help with the situation of the company. The de Rothschild family who owned it didn’t want to continue with the rare book business … and when I was approached, I had no intention of buying the company. But after a few months, I ended up doing exactly that. Sadly the business was in pretty poor shape when I was approached.

They had just left their historic home in Sackville Street which was being renovated. They had been there for over 80 years, but even when downsizing it was too big. They moved to Upper Brook Street and that’s when I took it on. Although they were nice enough premises, they weren’t right for the business. In addition, they hadn’t bought stock for years and they hadn’t done a book fair for ages, partly because of Covid, of course. It was a pale shadow of its former self.

In the early part of the 20th Century the company’s owners had built a five-storey building on Piccadilly. Sotheran’s had basically gone from being one of the most important booksellers of the time to practically bankruptcy. I don’t think this was the fault of the then owners, more a sign of declining fortunes in the trade generally.

Candidly it has been a bigger job than I thought. It’s been over 18 months now and everything has changed. We have new premises. A small shop in Cecil Court that acts as a feeder for those buyers who want better material and come up to the first floor of Charing Cross Road.

My son, Fraser, owns and runs Cassius & Co., a contemporary art gallery  in Kinnerton Street, and we help with books to go with his exhibitions – he pairs up his art with relevant books where he can. He has always done that, even before I bought Sotheran’s. A recent example was Robert Crumb, the satirist, who produces cartoon-like but really high-quality satirical art. Fraser  paired them with Boswell and Hogarth and other early satirists. We can help with that and in return he helps us with our art exhibitions in Charing Cross Road. It’s working well and we are beginning to explore the boundary between art and literature. Our emphasis is on the book side of things, but I do like this overlap. Lots of bookshops like Shapero and Harrington sell art, so we are not unique, but we are doing it in a slightly different way, and we have started doing more events. It works well together and it’s helpful to have Fraser and my daughter Clarice on Sotheran’s Board.

The moment you are on the first floor, the footfall drops off, which is why we have the shop, and at the moment we are trying to rebuild the client base. We have quite a good historical customer base, but we have to work on that constantly and keep renewing. We don’t stock as many Thackerays as we used to, and we have broadened out what we do.

I mean this quite seriously. We have got to encourage interest in books as an industry. There are a lot of comments at the moment that we are at the dawn of a new age where people aren’t reading, and all the numbers are pointing that way. So we have significant headwinds as an industry, and we need to make ourselves more relevant – that’s what we are trying to do in a very small way as part of regenerating an old business.

It does feel like society is being challenged, not in a nice way, and we need to come back to the importance of knowledge. So our watchwords are really knowledge and beauty. We are trying to focus on books and the quality of production. It is really depressing when I go into Hatchard’s and I spend £35 on a brand-new book and a year later all the paper is brown. The quality of paper is so bad; I like books to be attractive things. As long as we can produce some really nice quality books, there will be a market for them. That’s my hope!

How did you start collecting?

Around 60 years ago I used to be taken for annual holidays to a small Scottish town called Newtonmore, which was really a village. In those days a village had a shop or two in it and there was a cafe that had books in it. One of the shelves had Ladybird Books on it and for two or three years I was obsessive about buying and collecting them. The history of Lord Nelson, the Romans in Britain, they were maybe a few shillings each. I never see them now, apart from the fancy one that satirises the art world which is quite funny. So there was something about collecting Ladybird Books as a child, which of course I no longer have, but it got me hooked on reading, and I read a lot as a child.

When I went to university I got hooked on the Beat generation. I went to Dundee university to do law, but at some point I picked up a book by Alan Ginsberg and coming from a very  Victorian family background this seemed like the wildest behaviour, and I was just too late to catch that generation of the 60s. I was really intrigued by Ginsberg and his lifestyle and what he wrote, but the fact that three people who lived together – Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac – would each end up writing significant books in American literary history is fascinating! It is quite surreal that you get that little microcosm that’s so generative of intellectual advancement and that got me on to that whole generation. And then I started reading their influencers back to Joyce and Blake and Rimbaud.

And then I moved on to collect those who have been influenced by them like Nick Cave and Patti Smith. My collecting has been very serendipitous, I have never been a very good collector, I have jumped from one thing to another. But it has been absolutely fascinating how you learn from that.  Of course I have forgotten more than I have ever learned, but now it has led me to a very happy point where I am content with a small number of books. As a result of having bought a bookshop I had to make a choice, or at least I felt I had to make a choice, and I decided that I couldn’t be a collector and a bookseller. So I no longer collect, but I still have a small number of books that I will always have near me and that I will always come back to. Books give you grounding in life, which is really helpful.

What has it been like to become a bookseller?

It has been a real struggle; I have been working much harder in the last 18 months. We are finally coming through the worst of it. Additional staff, creating a new team – they are young, diverse, clever as anything and that is a great way to take the business forward. They are really on the case and keen to make it work.

I have to say the trade has been very welcoming. I am sure my slightly cynical view of life is that everyone will think it’s hilarious if I fall on my face, but I’d dearly love another bookseller in Cecil Court or Charing Cross Road. I think us moving back there has helped, but we would really benefit from one more bookshop owner, just to give it forward momentum. It’s a shame as it is quite an elderly industry. But the younger generation is really knowledgeable, hardworking and enthusiastic.

And that will save Sotheran’s after 265 years. When I was buying the business, I thought I had better read the book about the first 250 years while I was negotiating, and the bl**dy thing had gone bust at least three times before I got halfway through the book and I thought this is likely God’s way of telling me not to buy the business. Perhaps I should have listened. However, it has been great fun so far and I really am excited for the next few years, but not without a sense of trepidation with all the headwinds. We have a lot of aspirational businesses out there like Peter Harrington, Shapero, Maggs and Quaritch, they show that it can be done and it is just a case of making the right space for yourself. We are certainly trying to. I would also like to put on record that I have now made every mistake possible for a bookseller to make. Eighteen months ago when I took it on it was embarrassingly bad initially, and it has been a challenge to get to this point.

We have recently started a quarterly – our latest issue is all about how you have to reinvent yourself to stay ahead. I am enjoying doing slightly more innovative things now.

You say you have swapped book collecting for bookselling. Are you no longer buying at all, or do you apply the one in one out rule?

No, it’s all out now!

Apart from Beat, I collected anything from 1922/23 onwards, The Waste Land and Ulysses and other modernist material right the way through. I have to admit I can’t completely stop buying books, but they tend to be new. It’s a habit that doesn’t end. That said, I find new book shops very ‘noisy’ these days. They are full of books that were written by a celebrity – a novel, a cookery book, a biography. Booksellers used to guide you, but now there isn’t much I really want to read. I like the smaller, owner-managed bookshops. I used to go to a shop in Cecil Court, and I blame them for getting me into collecting. They would say, ‘Oh we think you may like this book’ and yes, I did. I realise now that I was probably being reeled in, but never mind!

Are you spending more time at Sotheran’s HQ or Sotheran’s Athenaeum as it’s now known?

Yes, I am pretty much full time now, apart from one day a week maybe. However, the good thing is that I can expand or contract my involvement as my other interests and the business requires. I don’t always realise how fortunate I am.