Richard Axe Book collector Aysgarth Old Youth hostel
Richard Axe, 73, the owner of The Old Youth Hostel, Aysgarth, North Yorkshire, an antiquarian bookseller, and collector has created a unique library in a former Yorkshire Dales youth hostel in Aysgarth for the last 19 years - with over 125,000 books on over a mile of shelving filling over 20 rooms of the old hostel. Due to failing health Richard is going to have to give up his life's work and his livelihood but would be willing to act as a mentor to anybody who had the means and the interest to take it on.
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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.