00:00 My name is Richard Axe, I'm a bookseller or sort of a bookseller collector and I
00:08 own this building which is the old youth hostel in Aysgarth and over the 19 years
00:16 that I've been here it has become completely full of books of generally
00:23 not ordinary second-hand books but a lot of antiquarian and more unusual books
00:28 and when I bought the property my plan was to live in this big house but it's
00:36 become so full of books that I actually live in what used to be the manager's
00:42 house when it was a youth hostel. There are some modern books but not
00:47 sort of run-of-the-mill modern novels but the majority of the books are much
00:54 older and I would say a quarter of them at least are at least 150 years old. In
01:00 total it would be about 125,000 books. These books have been bought all over
01:07 the place including New Zealand, the Philippines, all over Europe and America
01:14 over my career as a bookseller which started in 1981 in London. It's been a
01:20 lifelong job/hobby but now I'm not only 73 but I'm in somewhat failing
01:30 health. It will be with regret but I can no longer manage such a huge building
01:36 with forever climbing up and down stairs so regrettably I'm hoping to pass it on
01:44 to somebody else. The books are arranged in subject. Generally speaking there's a
01:52 room for each subject. There are more than 30 rooms. There's a whole room of
01:58 good Yorkshire books, there's a room for architecture, there's a room for natural
02:05 history, there's a room for travel books, there are several rooms of antiquarian
02:13 books for English literature. So everything is ordered. It's not
02:19 ordered precisely but it is ordered by subject. One of the interesting things
02:29 about bookselling is that nowadays ephemeral items, autographs, photograph
02:38 albums have become very popular and one of the effects of the internet is that
02:46 things that are one-off, unique items like letters have become more sought
02:55 after. If you meet five booksellers you'll get five different stories about
02:59 how they operate. As you can see I've become a stock holding bookseller. Most
03:07 of the, this is private premises, it's not retail, and most of the books buy and
03:15 never really make any attempt to sell. I collect them but I do have a few trade
03:24 customers who will visit and there are areas which I do sell books in. The
03:34 books range in dates from the 16th century right up to the 21st century
03:41 although there aren't many 21st century books. But the core collection
03:50 would probably be 19th century of which there are, I would guess, out of the
03:57 125,000 books probably 20,000 of them would be 19th century or earlier.
04:05 We're now on the third floor up which is, this is the Yorkshire room. There's
04:11 probably about 5,000 Yorkshire books relating to all aspects of Yorkshire
04:19 history, natural history and some Yorkshire literature. In addition to
04:27 this on the ground floor there's a huge number of further Yorkshire books which
04:35 are less specialised. These tend to be specialised. This one in front of
04:42 me now is actually a history of Leeds published in 1816 and as you can
04:56 see it's a very weighty volume and this is only volume one. Volume two is still
05:03 on the shelf. Most of these books would be, probably more than half of them
05:11 would be over a hundred years old and there are histories of all
05:17 sorts of small places, Ripon and Fountain's Abbey, Maresborough, Harrogate,
05:28 also quite small villages. I think this is an 18th century
05:40 book published in York in 1717 and it's about Yorkshire inscriptions and also
05:55 includes details of some of the noble houses around York.
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