Joanna Pitman

A paradise for bookworms

Joanna Pitman visits Maggs, the antiquarian booksellers, and learns how to build a library that will rise in value

Imagine coming across a book that has lain untouched for 100 years, and making an unexpected historical discovery. Ed Maggs, an antiquarian bookseller, had just such a thrill recently. ‘I was reading the epistolary diaries of a rather eccentric Victorian called Cuthbert Bede. I became strangely fixated by the story of this man who was obsessed by an unnamed woman. He fell into a state of schizophrenia and was incarcerated in an asylum called Munster House in Fulham. But as I was reading, I was wondering who this woman could have been — and wouldn’t it be fascinating if it turned out to be Alice Liddell? In the end it did turn out to be her. It was a real hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment. We sold the book to the Bodleian.’

Making such discoveries must be like unearthing archaeological remains. But Maggs is used to this sensation, because he works in a kind of permanent literary archaeological dig. As a fourth-generation antiquarian bookseller, Ed Maggs (known to his staff as ‘Mr Ed’) is managing director of Maggs Brothers Rare Books, housed in Berkeley Square in a splendid 18th-century house of fine decorated ceilings and Adam fireplaces. Maggs stocks rare books on subjects from natural history to travel and military and naval history. There are books lining every wall of the main rooms of the house, in the vaulted kitchen underground, in stores dug out under the garden, in the stables at the back (where the chief cataloguer in the military history department works between the iron railings of a horse stall) and in the original maids’ rooms, one of which is a kind of book hospital ward, filled with long lines of ailing books waiting patiently for treatment.

Many of us live with too many books and feel a sense of creeping book-breeding going on in our homes, so it is salutary to see such an extreme case of the problem.

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