Out-of-print and secondhand: A view of the antiquarian book trade.

Extract

In this essay I seek to describe some of the workings of the secondhand and antiquarian book trade relating to Africa, in which I've been involved for twenty years. I apologise in advance if the account appears overly autobiographical, but in a sense there is no alternative to this method of presentation: there is no standard path to becoming a bookseller, no course on which to enrol and no qualification to achieve, as there is with librarianship. Those involved in the field become so for all number of reasons, those who stay involved do so through a love of books that sometimes borders on a passion, a passion mirroring that of their most avid customers. Lurking beneath the bookseller exterior we often find the nascent psychology of that fascinating species, the book collector. (Incidentally, I've never been happy with the term ‘Africana’, which in any case, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary definition, relates particularly to books on Southern or South Africa; however there seems to be no alternative label, and when it came to register a name for a new website, it was this that I chose. Nevertheless it throws up some odd expressions, including one I saw in a catalogue some years ago, which described an item as “An interesting and unusual Africanum”.)