It is exactly 40 years since my elder brother John gave up a successful career as a publisher to set up in business on his own as an antiquarian bookseller. He lived at the time in a fine 18th-century house on Kew Green next to the botanical gardens, and perhaps for no reason other than its location he decided to specialise in botanical books. The business, conducted from his home, went quite well; but various events led him in due course to move to New York, where Kew Books, as the business was and still is called, established itself grandly in Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side.
This proved less successful. The overheads were enormous and the competition formidable, so John moved to Puerto Rico where Kew Books was re-established in the capital, San Juan. The Puerto Ricans are not renowned for their interest in old books, so John developed a sideline in old maps of the Caribbean. And what had started as a botanical book business became more and more diversified as it strayed further and further away from home. It came to include books in Spanish and other languages, and also many books in categories other than botany, such as literature, history, philosophy, and so on. And whenever John moved from one country to another, he left part of his book collection in storage behind him. So by the time he moved from Puerto Rico and set up the headquarters of Kew Books in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, his thousands of books were spread all over the western hemisphere from New York State to Venezuela.
This may seem an odd way to run a book business, but then John is an unconventional businessman who has always preferred buying books to selling them.
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