Where is Caxton and what are Kew Books?  Well, Caxton is probably not the birthplace of William Caxton, founder of printing in England (a few years after Gutenberg in Germany).Highwaymen tended to swing from the Caxton Gibbet, a few hundred yards along the road, going north. It’s a medium-sized village on a Roman road, now brutally sliced in two, with juggernauts crashing through its heart. That may change, now they’ve finished making a by-pass. We’ll see.

 Before I founded Kew Books in the early 1970's I had lived in a Queen Anne house on Kew Green with a  garden sloping down to the Thames.  It was impossible, in those surroundings, not to get absorbed by plants and gardens and the books which described them. I turned myself into a botanical bookseller.

 Since those days Kew Books has reflected the changing tastes and interests of its owner, following him geographically to one part of the world after another: Austria - Germany - Switzerland - New York - Spanish Caribbean (eg Puerto Rico & Santo Domingo) - Venezuela, finally to settle in Caxton, South Cambridgeshire, half-way between, Cambridge and St Neots, Huntingdon and Royston.

 All these peregrinations have left their mark on my stock: botanical and natural history books now rub shoulders in the old stables and attic with books of travel, English, French, Spanish, German and Italian literature, biography; art, music, philosophy, physiology, the exact sciences and maps.

 You never know what you’ll see next offered for sale on the Kewbooks-Caxton web-site. Just click on this link , for example, and you’ll find yourself in the world of Charles Dickens.   You will also find some original letters, written by Dickens himself.

 By clicking on the various catalogues, you’ll get an idea of the variety of my stock, a far cry from those days of a single catalogue featuring only botanical and hortcultural books.