We are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association,
and subscribe to their code of ethics. You can visit their site at www.abainternational.com.
Through the ABA we are members of the international professional
body, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers,
and we list stock on the excellent ILAB site at www.ilab-lila.com .
Cecil Court is a picturesque late Victorian street lined with antiquarian book and map-sellers, right in the heart of theatreland in London’s West End. Leicester Square Tube station is a stone’s throw away. Cecil Court now has its own website at www.cecilcourt.co.uk where the bookshops give details of their hours and specialities. With so many bookshops in such a central location, offering everything from children’s books and modern first editions to sixteenth-century folios, theatre posters and early world maps, Cecil Court is the ideal place to begin present-hunting or a dedicated bibliophilic tour of London. The website www.thebookguide.co.uk would also be very useful when planning a trip and www.londonprintdealers.com contains useful listings.
Tim Bryars is a Fellow of the Rare Book Society, founded in 2004 with a practical educational purpose. The Rare Book Society is already offering an internet-based on course on Cataloguing for Beginners, and courses on Selling on the Internet, Book Collecting for Beginners and Dealing in early Printed Books will follow. The courses are not intended to be easy, but they are intended to be useful. They are geared towards members of the trade, librarians and collectors – in other words they are for everyone with a willingness to learn more, whether one is building on existing knowledge or exploring new areas of interest. The Society website at www.rarebooksociety.org contains fuller information about the courses and enrolling.
We are also members of the International Antiquarian Mapsellers
Association, formed recently to promote the professional trade
in antiquarian, collectible maps and related books. The association's
website can be found at www.antiquemapdealers.com
.
We also exhibit at the London Map Fair, held each June in the Olympia Exhibition Centre, and organised by London Map Fairs Ltd in association with IMCoS. Over forty dealers exhibit, about half of them from overseas, including dealers from Italy, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands and the US. The fair’s website at www.londonmapfairs.com contains more information, including a list of exhibitors.
Map Forum is a quarterly magazine for map collectors and cartographic enthusiasts. Subscriptions can be ordered online at www.mapforum.com or copies can be purchased direct from my shop. It caters for all levels of expertise, with detailed articles on map-making techniques, biographies of significant cartographers, coverage of cartographic curiosities in each issue and a regular round up of what has been happening in the cartographic world.
The International Map Collectors’ Society (IMCoS) has
a website at
www.harvey27.demon.co.uk/imcos/.
Members of the Society include map collectors and dealers,
and
the Society promotes both map collecting and academic research.
They also have a useful page of links, including information
on
collecting and the history of cartography.
There are a number of internet market-places where we also
list stock. If you are looking for specific items and do not find
them on our site, then you might well find them on Biblio at
www.biblio.com - a database which has several
thousand dealers listing books of all types and at all prices.
For specifically antiquarian books I recommend a visit to
Bibliopoly, the excellent site organised by Quaritch at
www.bibliopoly.com. Many well known
international booksellers are offering stock already and the site
itself is very sophisticated and fully searchable in several languages.
Resources for Book Sellers and Book Collectors in the UK can
be found at http://www.2nd-hand-books.co.uk/index.html. They
have a directory of individual booksellers, and also links to
associations such as the ABA and PBFA, booksearchers, libraries
and other useful sites. You can find a European directory at
www.eurolibri.net. There is also a webring
listing international book dealers (mostly US) at www.rarebooks.org/bookdealers.htm
and a French-based international directory of bookdealers at
www.livre-rare-book.com.
If you have any sort of interest in cartography then you should
keep an eye on the excellent gateway at http://www.maphistory.info/ organised by
Tony Campbell at the Institute of Historical Research, London.
It is a comprehesive and regularly maintained site with information
and links to most aspects of research and collecting in the
real and virtual worlds. Images of early maps on the
web - the only comprehensive listing of its kind, comprising almost 600 links and updated each month may be of particular interest.
For more modern books about Greece than the ones we offer visit
the Hellenic Bookservice at
www.hellenicbookservice.com where
they have more new and secondhand books about Greece than anyone
else I know of.
