Our History

We have been buying and selling rare books and manuscripts since 1847. Our founder, Bernard Quaritch, was born in 1819 at Worbis, a small town near Göttingen in Germany. After working for booksellers in Nordhausen and Berlin, he set off for London in 1842, aged 23. Quaritch knew no one there, but was armed with a letter of introduction to Henry Bohn, then London’s leading book dealer. Impressed by Quaritch’s persistence, Bohn took the young man on.

Quaritch later recalled saying to his employer ‘Mr Bohn, you are the first bookseller in England, I mean to become the first bookseller in Europe’. Bohn’s answer is not recorded, but Mrs Bohn, already impressed by Quaritch’s diligence, replied ‘I believe you will’.

She was to be proved right. With modest capital, Quaritch set up on his own in October 1847. The same month he issued a catalogue, the first of a series that now numbers over thirteen hundred. Quaritch had soon assembled an impressive clientele: among his customers were Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte (Napoleon’s brother), Gladstone, Disraeli and above all Lord Crawford, creator of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana. The poet Edward FitzGerald, who frequented the shop from the first, was to become an intimate friend: it was Quaritch who first published The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

From left to right: 1) Bernard Quaritch’s first catalogue, October 1847
2) Our 100th anniversary catalogue, 1947. It offered 229 items, ranging from a 1485 Aesop to a
c.1590 manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and a first edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, published by Quaritch in 1859. (Quaritch archive)

As energetic as he was dedicated, Quaritch was to be seen at every major sale of the late nineteenth century. At the Sunderland and Beckford sales his purchases accounted for more than half the totals raised. At the Syston Park sale in 1884 he bought a Gutenberg Bible for £3900, at that time the highest price ever paid for a printed book, and broke his own record in the same sale by paying £4950 for the 1459 Mainz Psalter.

Quaritch’s catalogues expanded with his business. By 1880 the catalogue had 2166 pages containing descriptions of 28,000 items. His efforts culminated in the 17 volumes of the General Catalogue (1887-97), which the bibliographer Seymour De Ricci has described as ‘the greatest bibliographical monument ever produced around the stock of a second-hand bookseller’.

In fifty years Bernard Quaritch had built up the most extensive enterprise in antiquarian books in the world. His interests within the field were wide: natural history, fine arts, periodicals, oriental learning, travels and archaeology came within his span; but he was known above all as a dealer in incunabula, fine manuscripts, Bibles, liturgies, early English literature, Shakespeareana, cartography, Americana and historic bindings.

On his death in 1899 The Times wrote ‘It would scarcely be rash to say that Quaritch was the greatest bookseller who ever lived. His ideals were so high, his eye so keen, his transactions were so colossal, his courage so dauntless, that he stands out among men who have dealt in old literature as a Napoleon or a Wellington stands out among generals’.

The business was continued by Quaritch’s son Bernard Alfred until his early death, aged only 42, in 1913, when it passed to his two sisters, with E. H. Dring as their manager. In 1917 it was converted into a private limited company, with Mrs C. Quaritch Wrentmore, the founder’s eldest daughter, and E. H. Wales, husband of his younger daughter, as directors. In 1928 E. H. Dring, the company’s first managing director, was succeeded by F. S. Ferguson, a bibliographical scholar of worldwide repute, who had joined the firm in 1897 and was to be the last person who could remember working for the founder himself. E. M. Dring, the son of E. H. Dring, became managing director in 1960 and remained a senior director until his death in 1990: between them the Drings had worked for Quaritch for some 113 years. Quaritch’s descendants continued to serve on the board, notably Dr H. G. Quaritch Wales, the founder’s grandson and a distinguished orientalist, who was chairman from 1950 until 1971, when the family finally decided to relinquish ownership of the company. From then until 2004 it continued under the chairmanship of Milo Cripps, Lord Parmoor. The company’s centenary was celebrated in 1947 at 11 Grafton Street, and its 150th anniversary in 1997 (by now at Golden Square, our premises until September 2009) was marked by a special issue of The Book Collector with articles about the history of the firm.

Quaritch is one of the original members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association, founded in 1906 and the oldest professional body of its kind in the world.

From left to right:
1) F. S. Ferguson (1878-1967) joined Bernard Quaritch in 1897 and enjoyed a successful career, not only as a bookseller but also as one of the foremost bibliographers of his generation. His outstanding contribution to scholarship was his work on ‘STC’, the Short-title catalogue of books printed in England 1475 to 1640, the standard authority, now in its second revised edition.
2) E. M. Dring (1906-1990) joined Quaritch in 1925 and was a senior director from 1956 until his death. His father, E. H. Dring, joined the firm in 1877 and was managing director from 1917, when it became a private limited company, until his death in 1928. (Quaritch archive)