Bryan Maggs is one of the key people responsible for Maggs’ continued success. Joining the firm after National Service in the airforce he specialised in early English books. Having studied bookbinding under William Matthews at Guildford College of Art, he turned this to practical use, becoming one of the senior authorities on historical bookbindings, writing a definitive series of catalogues on the subject and helping to form the great library at Wormsley, where he is still librarian, as well as remaining a director of Maggs. He did a great service to the ABA some years ago, by negotiating the use of the splendid cricket pitch at Wormsley for the annual ABA PBFA cricket match. He remains a distinguished member of Designer Bookbinders, and his bindings are executed with the greatest skill and classically modern good taste: to add to their desirability they’re also very rare.

He is one of the great stealth booksellers, never one to make a fuss, never one to trumpet successes, so would probably be embarrassed at the roll call of trophy books he has handled over the years. Nevertheless, blushes aside, he has handled the Ellesmere copy of the Caxton Chaucer, the finest copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio sold in recent times, an astonishingly beautiful manuscript from Ottobeuren Abbey, a fragment of a manuscript life of Thomas a Becket with a miniature of Beckett and the Bradley Martin Ulm Ptolemy on vellum.