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.

Make a note in your diary: 6pm on Tuesday 10 July 2012 – Room 261 (Senate House, second floor), Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. All are welcome.

All the seminars will be aimed at a broad audience including book-collectors, book-dealers, historians of all kinds, librarians, indeed at anyone with an interest in collecting any sort of text from the sixth former to the retired professor. The atmosphere will be informal, as will the presentations. We hope and expect that many of the talks will be illustrated by actual examples.

They will all be held in the University of London’s Senate House Library (Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will run from 6.00 to 7.30 pm, usually on the second Tuesday of the month.