Thomas Heneage Art Books
Our October Bookshop of the Month is Thomas Heneage Art Books, a prestigious specialist art bookshop located in St James, London. Established for nearly 50 years, they’ve seen some changes in the book trade. We chat to them about those changes, how they pick the art books they sell, exhibiting at fairs and their plans for the future.
1. We see you were founded in 1977. What is it like running such a well-established art bookshop in modern-day London, has it changed much through the years?
I suppose it is quite tough to conceive of a bookshop where clients are allowed to smoke, where typewriters are an essential piece of kit, where you have to telephone a call centre for a connection and sometimes count £15,000.00 in cash or verify the validity of a cheque! When we installed our digital stock system in the late 80s, we were pioneers!
2. You offer a wide range of services including one to compile and maintain bespoke art libraries for clients – tell us a little more about how this service works.
If only we didn’t have confidentiality clauses!
We were once asked to put together a library of catalogues raisonnés from Daumier to Damien (Hirst). One of our staff found herself booked on a flight to the desert her first day of work and it took 6 of us a whole week to sort and shelve the thousands of books we had sent – at the end, we celebrated amongst the dunes, in the shadow of Richard Serra’s then new installation.
Shortly after, the same client called upon us to create a custom management tool to sort and easily navigate their vast library by artist, exhibition venue, auction location or collection – so we came up with ART|LIBRARY, currently used by a number of international dealers, private collectors… if only we didn’t have confidentiality clauses!
3. How do you pick the books which are stocked in the shop, are there specific criteria?
We always focused on books for the art market – catalogues raisonnés, monographs and international exhibition catalogues. As our staff learns from the interviewing stage, it is our policy to stock the most authoritative book on any subject and in any language, irrespective of its being new or second hand.
4. What is the most enjoyable part of your working day, and why?
Routine – or the lack of it, in our case.
We exhibit at a number of international fairs, from the Winter Show in New York to the Salon du Livre Rare in Paris. This April we were at the Venice Biennale preview, collecting ephemera for an American institution, and we just acquired an extensive Chinese art library which we are due to present at the Hong Kong Firsts book fair in December.
5. And finally, are there any exciting plans coming up for the shop that you would like to share with us?
We are celebrating 40 years in Duke Street this year – our anniversary falls on Guy Fawkes’ night! Luckily, books are not nearly as flammable as people imagine. One of the volumes we might bring to the Winter Show this January proves it – a vellum-printed copy of Malfilâtre’s Narcisse dans l’île de Vénus, 1795, recorded in the 1805 library catalogue of Count Boutourlin, one of the greatest Russian collectors and head of the Imperial Russian Library. Boutourlin’s magnificent personal library was destroyed during the devastating Moscow fire of 1812, and it was believed that the Malfilâtre was lost in the conflagration. Our copy has mild grey stains at the tops of the leaves and it is tantalising to identify it as one of Boutourlin’s, rescued from the ashes!