Sheila Markham & Conversations with the Rare Book Trade
27 January 2026 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm GMT
Sheila Markham is an Honorary Member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association for her oral history project celebrating rare booksellers and collectors from around the world.
After reading Theology at Oxford, Sheila joined Marlborough Rare Books in 1979, where she spent seven years doing a traditional apprenticeship. She worked for various leading figures in the rare book business, and ran her own business specialising in books on the Ancient Near East for a few years. In 1994 she became Librarian of the Travellers Club in London, a position which she continues to hold.
In 1991 Sheila was invited by the editor of The Bookdealer to conduct a series of interviews with her colleagues in the world of rare books. The project continues to this day, although they now appear in The Book Collector, and the total number of interviews published so far is 172. Two collections of interviews were published in book-form in 2004 and 2014, and A Third Book of Booksellers: Conversations with the Antiquarian Book Trade will be published on 1 December 2025.
In her talk, Sheila will share some of her findings from these conversations, covering a period from the early 1990s, when bookselling had hardly changed since the invention of printing, to the turbulent times of online commerce.
The majority of those interviewed come from the English-speaking world, but booksellers in Argentina, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and Turkey are also represented. One of the recurring themes in these global conversations is the unanimous belief in the survival and enduring appeal of the book as a physical object.