Fairs & events

The July seminar in the new book-collecting series organised jointly by the Institute of English Studies (London University) and the ABA Educational Trust will be given by Carl Williams of Maggs Brothers, one of the rare book trade's most engaging and offbeat characters – and one of its brightest.

Carl is a former runner and rare book dot-commer who studied Sociology and, later on, Diplomatic History at the LSE. He also worked as a curator on secondment to the Ludlow Santo Domingo Library in Geneva for about three years. He now trades in counterculture and its origins – i.e. beat, subversion, extremism, psychedelia, situations, the demonstrative, the errant, the proscribed, the carnivalesque, madness, the concrete, the macabre, protest, the occult, erotica, the primitive, surreal, marginal, punk, sounds, modernism and po-mo and the absurd by the RAF, Timothy Leary, Guy Debord, Black Panthers, Alex Trocchi, William Burroughs, Living Theatre, Cobbing, Brion Gysin, Aleister Crowley, AO Spare, Sex Pistols, Derrida, RD Laing Artaud et al. – for Maggs Bros. in Berkeley Square. He occasionally curates art shows of punk, agitpop and related stuff in the Maggs Gallery.

For some examples – here is a link to the Maggs website www.maggs.com – and here one for the Counterculture Blog – maggsbros.tumblr.com.

Photograph of Carl Williams by Jess Gough.