Early into Jasper’s bookdealing years, 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 rent. From The Space Gallery, as it was called, Danny sold paintings, Paul sold photographs and Jasper sold books. It opened towards the end of 1980. The trio closed the gallery for a summer break in 1981 and never reopened.
Barbara Denny wrote about The Space in a local Kensington newspaper in January 1981 (below). She portrayed it as being ‘created from a derelict shabby room approached by a sleazy staircase over a pin table and amusement arcade’. But ‘the walls are white, the floorboards are bare, the fireplace is empty, the furniture only a trestle table and another small one for the visitors’ book’. In ‘one corner there are shelves of books for sale, mostly art, and modern art especially, some rare or unusual, and on the walls a display of some of Europe’s most brilliant photographers’. The gallery’s three founders, Denny wrote, took it ‘in turns to man the gallery keeping warm with a bottle of wine and some paper cups, wearing their overcoats, and themselves vaguely resembling the characters in a surrealist “happening”’.
A review of The Space in a Kensington newspaper.
In November 1980, Jasper placed an ad for his bookshop in The Space in Bookdealer.