I studied Arabic, Persian, and Syriac at Yale and wrote my undergraduate thesis on an 18th-century Copto-Arabic hagiography of St Thecla, copied at an Egyptian monastery. I worked as a student at the Yale Center for British Art and the university’s archives, but without any thought that I might become a bookseller.
A speculative application for a trainee post at Bernard Quaritch Ltd, one of London’s oldest antiquarian booksellers, established in 1847, led me into the rare book trade. Quaritch had a long tradition of dealing in Islamic books and manuscripts and I was lucky enough to run the Islamic Department, where I issued a series of successful catalogues of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, culminating in a two-volume catalogue devoted to the Tazkirat al-Umara, a magnificent, illustrated Urdu account of the princes and ruling families of Northern India, including Ranjit Singh, ruler of the Sikh Empire, produced for the remarkable Scottish-Rajput mercenary Colonel James Skinner in 1836.
A chance encounter with Nicky Dunne at a friend’s shop on Cecil Court saw me move to Heywood Hill on Curzon Street, “the biggest little bookshop in the world, probably.” This was a brilliant introduction to an entirely different style of bookselling to Quaritch, mixing new and old books with flair, all while producing carefully considered libraries for discerning customers.
Finally, a serendipitous conversation over dinner led me to John Randall (Books of Asia), which was an education in the breadth and variety of non-Western material and my first introduction to the world of lithographic printing in Perso-Arabic script, from early chromolithography in Punjab and Istanbul, to the lithographic incunables of Qajar Iran and early Malay printing in Singapore.
I became an independent dealer in 2019.
I am an occasional contributor to The Book Collector, the journal founded by Ian Fleming in 1952, and have presented at the British Library and published on the miniature Qur’an printed by David Bryce at Glasgow with its origins in the first Qur’an legally printed within the Ottoman Empire. In 2016 I co-organised a two-day conference with Peter Jones at King’s College, Cambridge, Mania and Imagination: Perils and pleasures of the private collector, present and future. This was the second conference in honour of A. N. L. (Tim) Munby, Librarian of King’s from 1946 to 1974. Speakers included Justin Croft, Mirjam Foot, Margaret (Meg) Ford, Michael Meredith, and Toshiyuki Takamiya.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (www.royalasiaticsociety.org) and a member of the Bibliographical Society (www.bibsoc.org.uk/).