Powerful blend of the old and the new

David Coombs, Antiques Trade Gazette, 01 March 2000 - [ E-mail a Friend ]

"Books are one of the easiest things to sell on the Internet, suggests antiquarian bookseller Hugh Pagan. They can be sent in parcels without undue danger across national boundaries and in Britain they are zero-rated for VAT.

"There is a situation in which there are Internet sites with very large numbers of books; these are geared to new books or what one might call ordinary second-hand books. Though there were and are sites where you can find antiquarian books, the antiquarian books on them rub shoulders with what are frankly used books.

"There was a feeling, which we discovered to be shared by several American dealers, that we ought to have a site on which quality booksellers would sell quality antiquarian books. We had the idea for Worldbookdealers.com last spring, we put in together in the summer, got it properly underway and then launched in November 1999.

"The advantage of having a communal site is that it will attract book lovers, collectors, scholars from the world over - customers who don't necessarily know about your own firm in advance. That is working and we have a queue of people coming on and anticipate that, by the middle of the year, we shall have a strong European presence as well as British and American. We've limited ourselves to members of the International League of Antiquarian booksellers, which is a good enough way of ensuring that we are dealers of quality.

"In the short term I think antiquarian booksellers can look forward to relatively beneficial trading conditions. The auction houses are, I think, finding that book auctions require too much labour. So rivalry between booksellers and the auction houses, temporarily at least, has tipped back in the bookseller' favour.

"Antiquarian booksellers are accustomed to cataloguing things in enough detail with descriptive notes and with fixed prices, so the customer knows n exactly what he is getting for his money.

"I sell books on the history of architecture, of any period form the 15th century onwards, in any language, other than languages I simply can't read like Hungarian. I also do books on related topics like interior decoration, furniture, sculpture and quite a lot of avenues in and around architecture. In terms of printed books, for one reason or another, a lot of the best books are on architecture, or they're on things like mural painting, which in a sense is part of architecture because it's how they decorated the surfaces of the walls.

"Essentially mine is a specialist business, most of it done by catalogue. That doesn't mean to say that it's a small business, because I trade internationally and from time to time one has very valuable books through one's hands. About half the business is to institutions of one form or another.

"I think by and large my private customers are genuinely interested in the books that they buy. There are some architects, there are chartered accountants, there are people in all walks of life. There may be people who buy from me on the basis of investment but I sell to people because they want to buy the book.. the reasons are entirely up to them.

"You've go to be interested in books, but the important things about being a bookseller is that you mustn't get too attached to them. One is a grocer, One of the very interesting things about being a bookseller is that you have all these different sorts of objects, of different kinds and values on your shelves, and you never know from one minute to another whether you're going to sell an out-of-print book from the 1950s for £40, of whether some great treatise from the 16th century.

"When I entered the antiquarian book trade after university in 1973, it was still done, relatively speaking in the old-fashioned manner. I was taken on by Ben Weinreb who was the leading specialist in architectural books at that time. There were people with large shops in central locations. We didn't have computers. It was all manual. There were no databases. There were these people of extraordinary learning and knowledge - they didn't have PhDs or anything, but they had seen books for 40 or 50 years and they carried it all in their heads. Nowadays, particularly in an age when booksellers no longer employ masses of young assistants, booksellers have to do it more or less off their own back without this advantage of accumulated experience."