Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. This is John Bachelor. A fun conversation and excerpt with the author Oliver Darkshire.

His new book is the story of being a bookseller in London.

Southerans is a very famous bookshop.

And he works there as an apprentice and then a

sophisticated bookseller. Herein he discusses how you deal with a collector when a

collector comes to you and says I want your help to find and then names a subject. For me it

would be the Civil War Indiana, 1862, 1863, 1864, 1863, 1864, 1865, family business. And we would start in Indiana and then grow the story.

It's wonderful.

Here's Oliver understanding how, if I walked into Southerans,

how he would help me build my collection.

The Dracula's are obsessed with a single line of thought.

They'll, they'll like, um, they'll say, I like botany but only herbs, only a specific one.

I like tables, only tables of a certain kind I like war stories but only from a certain

period and they will buy anything that has anything to do with their subject

matter so you're first of you're by the main things which they'll already have probably and then you'll

spiral outwards finding them things that are tangentially related to their collections. They build a themed library

around a certain thing.

And if they're wealthy, these libraries can be quite big

so you end up quite desperate to find things that are even slightly related

to the original subject, which is quite fun.

And then it builds off quite a good back and forth, I think, over the 20 years or how long it takes to build a library.

More of this later.

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