Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

by Oliver Darkshire

There’s something wistful about old books when they are gathered in one place. They have a faintly unsatisfied smell, as if they’re all distantly aware that they’ve missed their chance to be a worldwide smash hit.

If he had to sit on a stack of books for ten years before they sold, then so be it – a book will find its proper owner in due course. The true spirit of book buying, as far as he was concerned, did not debase itself with trivialities like ‘What will I eat later?’ or ‘How will I pay my rent?’.

walls lined with pictures of elegant people trapped in moments of extreme contortion. You almost felt like their hips were following you as you moved around the room.

bookselling is the ugly stepchild of the antiques business or the art world, and our shelves are filled with a great many fascinating and peculiar articles that go entirely unremarked on by visitors, unless we go to great effort to point them out.

if a task didn’t need two or maybe three reminders to make it happen, then it wasn’t important enough to bother with in the first place.

people only really have room for one allconsuming hobby in their lives at a time. If you’re spending 24/7 in a dance studio, you’re not spending it in a basement scrounging about for old books, or knitting.

A word of advice, if you value your life: stay away from any virulently bright green cloth bindings from the Victorian period, because the wretched things were coloured using arsenic, and it’s a nasty way to go.

Sotheran’s has been ‘one year away from closing since 1761’.

All anyone can do is take reasonable precautions. Keep the books away from fire. Don’t throw them in a puddle. And remember to take delight in them.

She had a stare that made you want to go home, head to bed early and wake up as a gigantic beetle, never again to be burdened with the responsibilities of polite society.

The interior was a maze of unhelpful signs and mood lighting, with the mood of the day being disapproval.

a tiny box room in the back of an old lady’s house which smelled like the colour brown,

A seventeenth-century book on bedbugs and A Brief History of Time might seem like very different books to you, but to Sotheran’s they are essentially the same book at different levels of magnification.

There’s never any question of whether a book is ‘appropriate’ – all books have something to teach us, but the nature of the lesson varies wildly.

I think one has to be guided by the cardinal rule which supersedes all others: one does not sell books to Nazis. A bookshop is not a court. As a custodian of books you can use your discretion to decide who you sell to, and unlike a court you don’t have to give a reason. If you sell to one racist, you’ll just attract more of them.

Sotheran’s has a strictly No Nazis policy. Nazis don’t get to have nice things like books or bookshops.

Social media is like a cat: it can tell if you’re only pretending to like it, and it will claw you. If you’re afraid of it, because you’re afraid of seeming like you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’re missing the point, which is that the entire platform is thousands of people all desperate to acknowledge that they have no idea what they are doing, revelling in the fact that expertise is just the end result of a long series of mistakes.