Jasper began to buy and sell second-hand books on art and design while he was a student at Kingston, to earn money. He continued as a bookdealer for about five years, until he graduated from the Royal College, selling to fellow students and others.
His friends Paul Kasmin and Danny Moynihan hired a space in Kensington Market, a mall of underground culture on Kensington High Street in London. Jasper joined them and they split the £75 rent three ways. From The Space Gallery, as it was called, Danny sold paintings, Paul sold photographs and Jasper sold books. Openings were Jasper’s best time for book sales, and the other two showed friendly frustration at his success. When The Space closed after nine months, Jasper briefly moved his bookselling to shelves at the back of the Chenil Gallery on the King’s Road. He made a ‘pamplet of Books’ (above) to advertise his new location and his stock. Inside the pamplet was a list of highlights from his stock.
I started selling books during my second year at Kingston. I knew a few booksellers: George Lawson at Bertram Rota in Covent Garden and David Batterham, who was the boyfriend of Paul Kasmin’s mother, Jane. She was as big an influence on me as Eileen Gray, owing to her natural ability with interiors, the wonderful atmosphere of her house in Chelsea and an extremely simple and sophisticated approach to life. Batterham himself was and is a superb character with super dry wit and a rather vague manner. He published a fantastic book of his letters to the artist Howard Hodgkin. His shop, open by appointment, was round the corner in Alexander Street from our house in Westbourne Park Road, and I used to tap on the glass shop front to distract him from his typewriter, where he’d be surrounded by mountains of the books and catalogues he’d gather on long, mostly European tours, scouring French, Italian and Spanish bookshops for rare illustrated trade catalogues and journals on fashion and exceptional art books which he’d sell to art school libraries, which in those days had massive budgets.
In one of his notebooks from his time at Kingston, Jasper wrote lists of books for sale and their costs, among sketches, poems and lecture notes.
David introduced me to a trade magazine called the Bookdealer, an A5 stapled weekly newsprint issue which arrived by post. It was divided into two sections. The first advertising books for sale, offered by all the dealers who subscribed to it, and the second with advertisements from all the specialist dealers who were advertising for things they wanted to find. It was a pre Abe Books analogue system for connecting dealers. I would head out of Kingston at lunchtime on my scooter and ride around south London bookshops scouring the shelves for lost and undervalued treasures, and I was quite active in advertising in the Bookdealer. The dealers who had the things I wanted would send little slips with details of what they had and telephone numbers and addresses. These would all be gathered at the Bookdealer offices and sent on in batches as they arrived, so each day I’d receive a bunch of these slips and sort through them for the best offers. Occasionally if someone had a lot of books at a good price I’d go and visit them and go through the whole stock, often stored in their garages or spare bedrooms. It was a grubby but exciting existence.
Jasper put regular notices in the ‘Books Wanted’ section of Bookdealer in 1980 and 1981.
The year after I started, Paul Kasmin and Danny Moynihan opened a gallery called The Space, upstairs in Kensington Market. There were some shelves built in to one of the walls and they offered them to me to sell books from. We split the rent three ways, £25 each. Danny chose artists, Paul was a photo dealer. To give you a few examples of how it went, I’d find a copy of a book like Brassai’s Paris par Nuit for a few pounds, David Batterham would buy it from me for £20, then someone would come in and ask if I had it and I’d have to go back to Batterham and pay him £50 to get it back and sell it to the second customer for £80. Another time David Hockney bought a rare 1920s Japanese monograph on Picasso. I sold an architectural book to Bernard Tschumi, who was teaching at the AA at the time. The art dealer Robert Fraser offered me three tea chests of art books for £300. Then he came back to the gallery while I was at college and reclaimed some of the best of the books saying he’d made a mistake including them. Robert Fraser was always short of cash and looking for a way to make a bit by buying and selling. His main customer was John Paul Getty II, the one who lost his ear to Italian kidnappers. Robert would call me up and ask if I had ‘anything on Hitler for JP’.
This was a phase when I learnt to really look, and it was partly by trying to find books to sell. In trying to find books you look very quickly at the shelf. You become very quick at judging, not even judging a book by its cover but judging a book by its spine. And it’s not a superficial way of looking at things, but it is more a kind of instinct for judging and deciding whether a book was worth a look or not worth it. This quick decision would lead to the next stage: you would look through a book very quickly and see what was interesting about it. By selling second-hand art books I got to know a lot about art, architecture and design, what I liked and what I didn’t like.
Jasper’s ad in the ‘Books Wanted’ section of Bookdealer in November 1980. At the time he was gathering stock for his bookshop in The Space.