Clive Farahar Rare Books and Manuscripts

Clive Farahar joined the old established firm of Antiquarian Booksellers Francis Edwards Ltd. during his Gap Year in 1969. Finding the business intriguing and exciting, he turned his place down at the Guildhall and decided to make the Antiquarian Book world his life. In the 1980’s he joined the team of the successful programme Antiques Roadshow, as their very first Book and Manuscript Expert.

Until that time no books or manuscripts had appeared, and over the next 20 years he made that area one of the most popular aspects of the programme. He has had some notable finds from Love Letters of the artist Henry Moore and an extraordinary cache of unpublished illustrations by Beatrix Potter to a remarkable collection of Presentation volumes by Lewis Carroll with some private photographs, to letters and notes from J.K. Rowling.
Apart from Roadshows all over the British Isles, he has visited Australia, Jamaica, Canada, Gibralter, France, Belgium and Holland with the team, and with it’s worldwide franchise reaches over 100 million viewers. He has lectured on Travel Books at the UCL Course on Antiquarian Books, and has written the chapter on Travel Books in the Scolar Press’s Antiquarian Books A Companion for Booksellers, Librarians and Collectors, 1994. He has written for the Listener, and Homes and Antiques, and recently contributed an article on Gustave Dore and Westminster Abbey for the Old Chorister Magazine, Summer 2013. He has lectured for NADFAS and given talks all over the country.
Clive is a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, and has served on the ABA Council. He has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Franciso and New York, and regularly at the Olympia and Chelsea Antiquarian Book Fairs. He issues catalogues, recently on the Indian Ocean, Manuscripts and Inscriptions, and a World War I Collection of over 800 Propaganda Pamphlets.