Carl Williams Rare Books

"Flesh and blood is what we are.." Vi Subversa

Or rather, in my case, paper and ink. I've worked in the rare book trade for twenty or so years. Firstly, as a Sunday lad in Boutle and King, which at the time specialised in Surrealism, pataphysics and Dada. Then I worked briefly for Jake Fior, after which I worked in an academic bookshop in Bloomsbury while running books within the trade and working as a shelf stacker at the British Library of Political and Economic Science. I helped start the UK branch of a dotcom in '99 dealing rare and secondhand books then worked for Maggs Bros until January 2016. For three of the years that I worked at Maggs I also worked on secondment to Julio Mario Santo Domingo's LSD Library. In the brief time that I have worked as an independent dealer I have, among other things, mounted a small show of original calendar art from India with/at Tenderbooks, sold a major collection of protest posters produced by the Berkeley Poster Workshop and done an important valuation for a sixties/seventies archive for London's Victoria and Albert Museum. I buy books well as sell them.