Episode 24. “Life with Books” (Interview with John Windle)

March 25, 2026 in Uncategorized

“The Research Group Speaks”

Episode 24 (Saturday 18 April 2026)
“Life with Books”
An Interview with
John Windle, Antiquarian Bookseller

[CANCELLED]

For Episode 24, we invite our friend John Windle to reflect upon his life with books and share stories about experiences with them and their readers, makers, collectors, and devotees.

See:

As an indication of range, dedication, and expertise, the scope of John’s antiquarian bookshop, based in San Francisco (About), demonstrates clear focus:

We buy and sell books and manuscripts in all fields, especially medieval illuminated and text manuscripts; material on California, Hawaii, and Pacific voyages; illustrated books and fine bindings from the 15th through the 20th century; children’s books from 1750 to 1950; and fine press printing. William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin remain special interests.

We hope you will contact us for any of your book needs: restoration and repair of books and manuscripts; bibliographical information and up-to-date retail and auction prices; informal valuations to formal appraisals of single items or entire collections; auction purchases worldwide (including eBay); and of course, purchases for and sales of your own collections. We guarantee every transaction unconditionally and, as members in good standing of the ABAA, ILAB, and PBFA, we subscribe to the code of ethics endorsed by reputable antiquarian booksellers worldwide.

About the person and the life, we quote from his website (About John Windle):

John Windle was born in England in 1945. Educated at St. Ronan’s, Wellington College, the Université de Poitiers à Tours, Sussex University (B.A. hons. English and European studies), and the University of California Berkeley (Ph.D. fellowship in the library school — incomplete with honorable withdrawal), he moved to California after training with Bernard Quaritch Ltd. in London. He worked for John Howell-Books in San Francisco from 1971 to 1974, and opened his own business at 68 Post Street in partnership with Ron Randall to form Randall and Windle on April 1, 1975. That business later moved to 185 Post Street before Ron left for Santa Barbara in 1980 (where he ran Randall House until 2020) and John took the decade off to move to Venice CA, write and publish two bibliographies, travel around India studying Tibetan Buddhism and traverse America (on foot), finally reopening his shop in 1989 in San Francisco where he maintains his bookshop and gallery to this day. He has published or contributed to numerous books and articles including studies of William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, William Morris, and the Grolier Club “100 Books Famous in Children’s Literature”, along with two slim volumes of poetry from his own press. . . .

We look forward to learning more.

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Word and Image Combined

London, British Museum, Asset number 38787001, Full: Front. William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794). Frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, copy D, plate 1. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

About the Image

London, British Museum, Asset number 38787001, Full: Front. William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794). Frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy, copy D, plate 1. Colour relief etching and white-line etching in blue, black, red and yellow; with added hand colouring. depicting a bearded nude male (probably Urizen) crouching in a heavenly sphere, its light partially covered by clouds, reaching down with a pair of compasses in his left hand, and measuring the surrounding darkness with them.
Image © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

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