Brian Lake became Vice President to Laurence Worms in 2011. He has managed the London International Antiquarian Book Fair at Olympia for two years and edited the ABA’s Newsletter for six years – both posts from which he will be standing down later this summer. He is an ex-Chairman of the other UK trade association, the PBFA.

During his presidency Brian intends to build on the reforms and improvements that have taken place under Laurence Worms and to increase the practical cooperation with other like-minded associations within the UK and around the world for the good of ABA members and the book trade as a whole.

Michael Graves-Johnston

Rob Shepherd

I have been in the antiquarian book trade since 1989, beginning as a porter and junior cataloguer in the book department at Phillips.  After a PhD in medieval manuscript studies I worked for Simon Finch Rare Books, before starting my own business in 2005.  I am a contributor to the BBC’s "Antiques Roadshow".  

As a young graduate I joined Ken Spelman Books in the summer of 1979, and since then have been a full-time bookseller, and in partnership with Peter Miller since 1984. 

I am active in both the ABA and PBFA, and am currently a member of the ABA Olympia 2012 Fair Committee, as well as long-time Fair Manager of the York National Book Fair.

Barbara Grigor-Taylor

I am a partner and owner of Peter Harrington. I started working for my father in 1994 and have been running the firm since 2001.  

For the ABA, I worked on the Chelsea committee from the late 1990s and then on the Olympia committee to the current day. I have therefore been involved with the team in creating what looks to be an exciting new fair at the National Hall.

I started my bookselling career in Bristol in 1982. This was a happy (some say) accident due to my being recruited as a shop-sitter for a local secondhand bookseller who preferred being out of his shop. A traditional attitude which I believe still exists within our trade to this very day. I had a bookish background and have always felt at home with them. The idea of rare and valuable books was unknown to me though. Books were just stuff you read and then looked after until you read them again, or not.

Angus O'Neill

Janette Ray

As with many of my colleagues I came into this business partly by accident, although books have always been a big part of my life. I had got fed up with taking orders, and when a new job did not work out – I was driving 1000 miles a week selling books to libraries with my patch covering Land’s End to Stoke on Trent – I got the opportunity to open a shop in Wells, Somerset. Eight years of keeping a general secondhand bookshop taught me how to think on my feet, recognise a good book and make a profit. However I could not afford a high-street shop and was unhappy with all my best books going ...

Roger Treglown

Laurence Worms has owned and run Ash Rare Books since 1971.  He represented the antiquarian book trade on the (British) National Book Committee from 1993 to 2002 and has been six times an elected member of the ABA Council.  He was largely responsible for drafting the revised Rules of the Association and the Association's Code of Good Practice introduced in 1997, served as Honorary Secretary of the Association from 1998 to 2001 and as President from 2011 to 2013. He is a former member of the Council of the Bibliographical Society and continues to serve on the Council of the London Topographical Society. He is also a founder member and Fellow of the Rare Book Society.

I have been bookselling for thirty years and in the ABA for twenty. I've been on the South West committee as treasurer for probably ten years and have been involved in running ABA book fairs in Bath and Jersey (remember that one?). I have also been on various PBFA committees over the years and have organized dozens of fairs - I still run two a year in Tavistock and one in Sidmouth. I have had retail shops in a number of provincial locations and have been in the present one for ten years. I have exhibited at all the Olympia book fairs bar one, and have not missed one at Chelsea. I have also ...

Three early ABA presidents captured together in a press photograph of the Amherst Sale at Sotheby's in 1908 - left to right, (6) Walter James Leighton, (7) James Tregaskis and (8) Benjamin Dawson Maggs.

Below is an evolving series of lives of all the ABA presidents - a collaborative exercise in creating a sequential history of the rare book trade.  It depends very much on your input.  If you have any material at all - archival records, old obituaries, original catalogues, extracts from family history, facts, anecdotes, photographs, research or anything at all of interest to add - then please get in touch.