SIMON FINCH AND VOEWOOD RARE BOOKS:
Simon Finch has been a Rare Book Dealer since 1980. He has had shops in Notting Hill Gate and Mayfair and in Holt, Norfolk. His firm has handled a wide variety of material from the First Folio of Shakespeare to the wilder shores of the counterculture and everything in between. In 1998, Simon bought Voewood, one of the finest Arts and Crafts houses, and brought it back to life with an eight-year programmed of renovation and restoration.
Voewood Rare Books, which operates from Voewood, is the continuation for Simon of a long career in the book trade. It also represents an important link with the House. Voewood is always beautiful, surprising, mysterious and perhaps a little disorientating and we aim to bring something of this spirit to the bookshop.
What’s in a story, though? How does the story develop authenticity? More to the point, how does such a story create that trusting feeling that customers crave?
ANDREW TAYLOR
Growing up with a deep love of books, Andrew hoped (and perhaps knew) that at some point, somewhere, he would work in the book trade. However, he spent too many years as a solicitor and is now making up for lost time, but having joined the trade he is learning as much as he can as quickly as he can. He attended the 2016 York Antiquarian Book Seminar. When not at Voewood, he lectures, writes and researches on art and cultural history.What’s in a story, though? How does the story develop authenticity? More to the point, how does such a story create that trusting feeling that customers crave?
VOEWOOD, PERCY LLOYD AND E.S.PRIOR
Voewood is a house built on books. Although it was commissioned by a priest, the Reverend Percy Lloyd, it was paid for from his family’s fortune made in publishing. Percy’s father, Edward, owned two of the best-selling nineteenth-century newspapers and was the leading publisher of “Penny Dreadfuls”, cheap, gruesome, sensationalist but enormously popular crime and detective novels. It was Lloyd’s The People's Periodical and Family Library that first published, in weekly serial form, the story of Sweeney Todd. He is said to have told his illustrators that they should show “more blood, much more blood”. Edward was, in fact, a cultured, civilized and intelligent man who combined all the Victorian qualities of buccaneering business acumen, a rich (although, by the standards of the day, slightly rackety) family life and a commitment to self-improvement.