Rare Book Monthly
Ken Leach Reflects On Over<br>35 Years Of Bookselling
Two of the many catalogues Ken Leach has published plus an entire auction of material he sold in 1984.
Selling is the other part of the equation, but this came surprisingly fast to Leach. He began running lists of books for sale in A.B. Bookman’s Weekly, then a major vehicle for book sales (the venerable publication finally ceased printing a few years ago, victim to the internet). Meanwhile, his mailing list for the catalogues began to grow, and these catalogues proved very successful for selling books. In his first year, sales were $16,000. The second was $40,000, and by the third year, Leach rang up $100,000 in sales.
Along the way Leach met Richard Mills, an antiques dealer from Exeter, New Hampshire, and probably the most influential person in his career. “He was the most knowledgeable man I ever met,” Leach says of his friend. He learned much from Mills. One day Mills came back with a library of 18th century works he had purchased in Boston and Leach put out one of his most successful catalogues using Mills’ purchase. Sadly, Mills died while only in his 50s.
While Ken Leach’s catalogues have sold all kinds of primarily American books over the years, he has had a few special collections. One was of early transportation broadsides, which he sold to the American Antiquarian Society. He has a particular interest in broadsides from 1800-1830. “They used to advertise everything that way,” he points out. They are not as uncommon as one might think as merchants would post these flyers all over the place. Perhaps the most notable variety of these broadsides is the slave sale announcements as they so starkly display the terrible cruelty of this practice.
Another unusual collection that Leach sold, this time at auction, was of pre-1900 dust jackets. Leach had put together a substantial collection, with the earliest dating back to 1849. He says that there are a couple that predated this but they were more wrappers than real dust jackets. He still buys these when he can find them, but says that he can no longer find the really early ones.
Leach did not come by the business because of any particular personal involvement with books. He noted that when he was starting out, “I never read the books I bought. I just put a price on them and sold them.” Nor was he ever much of a collector. Ken Leach has only one personal collection, and it is a most unusual one. He collects odd volumes. Specifically, they are odd volumes printed in the U.S. before 1860 and in top condition. Odd volumes are single volumes from a set of two or more and they are not often collected until the set can be completed. In 1983, Leach brought in $17,000 on a sale of odd volumes in their original boards. “It’s amazing,” he comments. Today, Leach has 1,100 of these odd volumes in his personal collection. “There’s a million dollars up there if I can find the other volumes.”
