About twenty years ago the morning the front door bell rang. At the time I was living in a Brunswick Road barrel fronted Regency... »
Book Collector
Holleyman and Treacher, and how I met Mister Watkin
In 1989 when I first came to Brighton from antiquarian Norwich I little expected to find an equivalent to Thomas Crowe, or the Scientific Anglian. But to have the shops of Colin Page and Holleyman and Treacher within a minute’s walk of each other was exhilarating. Rather than join my Art School colleagues in... »
Collecting Books
David Watkin was a dedicated collector of books. He bought carefully but knowledgeably from the main dealers in Britain and the US, in person or by catalogue. Even when he feared poverty in his later years (never with much conviction) I saw him contemplating catalogue items such as the Complete Plays of Vanbrugh for... »
David Watkin’s Library
For a man who earned his living through images, David Watkin was astonishingly confident with the written word, reading and writing and declaiming. At various stages of our friendship I remember his completing Thomas Mallory, Proust and The Faerie Queen. He took particular delight in Shakespeare’s plays and mined deeply within the two volume... »
Maggs of Berkeley Square
We’d gone to the Apocalypse Exhibition at the Royal Academy – DW guffawing his way around The Chapman Brother’s ‘Hell‘. Afterwards he took us to visit his chums at Maggs… where a complete tour of the building ensued, courtesy of Mister Maggs, with Jozef taking the following snaps. Maggs Rare Books Share/Save »