Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

by Oliver Darkshire

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.

It’s my belief that anyone worth knowing enjoys spending time in a bookshop.

Agreed.

I think one has to be guided by the cardinal rule which supersedes all others: one does not sell books to Nazis.

However, if it looks like a goose, honks like a goose and steps like a goose, then it’s probably a Nazi, and there’s honestly only one kind of person who complains when I say ‘I don’t sell books to racists’, whatever they are calling themselves right now.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that collecting books is much more than a hobby. The sheer amount of space required to house most book collections means that whoever shares your living area needs to be very understanding, or more ideally a co-conspirator, because the rest of their lives will be spent making room for your incredibly invasive pastime, until one day they trip on a folio and plummet to their doom down a staircase.

Hell hath no fury, they say, like a man treated the same way as he treats women.

My favourite remains a set of personalized bookplates, emblazoned with the motto ‘estne volumen in toga an solum tibi libet me videre’, which I believe translates roughly to ‘Is that a book in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’