SALES: I sell rare books, manuscripts, music and ephemera. I've been an antiquarian bookseller since 1998, first for leading booksellers in London, and since 2010 independently. I specialise in European cu (...)

How did you start working in sales? What type of things have you sold in your career?

Whohub

I sell rare books, manuscripts, music and ephemera. I've been an antiquarian bookseller since 1998, first for leading booksellers in London, and since 2010 independently. I specialise in European cultural history, which is a suitably broad category, but I suppose my real interest is cross-cultural material: translations of English and American literature, say, or things relating to musical performances abroad, anything which documents the spread of one culture into another. What I really like to find is an original foreign literary work with links to the Anglophone world, or musical responses to events. So I've had things like contemporary German poetry written following the execution of Charles I in 1649; a Russian song composed after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812; a German novel set among the Iroquois from 1799. I don't like to be bound by date, and am equally interested in the twentieth century as the sixteenth. My goal is always to try to offer material which is interesting, perhaps curious, and hopefully something you've never seen before.