K Books: Barrie and Susan Kaye's decades of bookselling from Waplington in East Yorkshire

It was delivered at a railway station stop in Austria, 1962, on a journey towards towards a ski trip in St Anton.

Barrie Kaye, born in the Derbyshire pit village of Barlborough, knew to warn future wife Susan of the offending fruit because he had previously run a remote banana plantation in west Africa.

This discombobulating moment was the first which led not only to their marriage the year after, but the founding of a second hand book business which has been going for more than 60 years.

In two sections of Waplington Hall, a former manor house found in woodland at Allerthorpe in East Yorkshire, Barrie and Susan Kaye – now 90 and 84 – continue to run K Books Ltd, first set up in 1964.

Some 70,000 books, portraits, prints and maps are kept in its high, lengthy hallways, and about 10 parcels taken to the Post Office on a Monday for customers who are eagerly anticipating their precious antiquarian titles.

There is little money to be made buying and selling old books these days, yet the couple – now helped by their daughter Jane and her partner Steve Carter – find fulfillment in collecting, cataloguing and keeping up with their loyal customers.

“It’s a raison d'être for us to be,” says Barrie. “It’s the first thing we do in the morning, is look on the computer, and the last thing at night.”

Not that they like computers much – IT, still, is a bit of an albatross for a pair who started many decades ago and the internet, says Barrie, makes it less fun. They have, however, acquiesced to having a website and Jane does the odd social media post.

Back in the early 60s, Barrie was working for the National Farmers’ Union, while the couple also had a small farm in Nunburnholme, near York. But his big love was for books.

One day they went to a pig sale, and though the equipment there was of no use, a pile of decorative old books caught their eye during an auction. They were outbid, though, at £130. A few days later, Susan did some research at the library. “A lot of these books were £1,500, maybe more,” she says. “So we realised we’d missed a bargain.”

An opportunity squandered, but a new one was formulating: why not set up a little sideline buying and selling books? That’s what they did, but it became their full-time profession.

“All the family thought we were totally mad,” says Susan.

Barrie adds: “It was quite a prestigious job, working for the NFU, with a good salary. To suddenly change from that to buying and selling second hand books seemed quite a stupid career move.”

For a while they lived in Swaledale but eventually they moved to Waplington – where Barrie had coincidentally lodged while working for the NFU - after they had seen a Yorkshire Post notice about the sale of its contents. Finding it was perfect for book storage, they enquired about the building itself, whose various parts are shared with other owners.

While K Books has always been a ‘generalist’ dealer – though they may provide specialist titles – what set them apart was being primarily a mail order business prioritising overseas customers. They have run shops in Chesterfield, Hull and York, but it was not their preference. It was boring, says Barrie. Instead, much effort was put into cataloguing their collection and making sure their descriptions of books were detailed and accurate, while a lot of their custom was based on years of establishing relationships around the world.

Susan says: “Everything was on credit. We’d send books to Japan and we’d be paid six months later.”

Barrie adds: “We have the same philosophy as farmers. To be a good farmer, all the time you're looking to improve the quality of your land and the quality of your stock. And we're like that with book buying - all the time, we look to improve the quality of our stock and the quality of our reputation.”

They were marked out for their quality early on after being accepted into the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association, Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association, but also in the 1970s by taking on the bibliographer John Morris, who had worked for the highly-regarded bookseller Charles Traylen. “It pushed us from being really sort of a third league football team into the Premier division,” says Barrie.

The couple frequently travelled to America, where – particularly in New England – they could find English language titles which were no longer of much interest to readers in the States and worth much more back home.

Among their more prestigious titles on offer are those from the Aldine Press, which was started by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1495. They also have books by the Elzevirs Press, Benjamin Fawcett of Driffield, Folio Society Editions and works on gardening, history, biography, travel and much more.

Barrie, who can sometimes read 10 books a week (his favourite author is Rudyard Kipling), has a penchant for well-made tomes. Jane says: "Dad likes to buy books that are leather-bound and we've got a friend who's another bookseller, he calls them roast beef because they're made of leather skin. So he always says, ‘Oh I've got some roast beef for your dad’.”

Jane – who has a younger brother, Julian, in the wine business – previously worked for children’s services at Leeds City Council for about 20 years, but has a degree in American Literature from the University of Sussex.

“I'd always wanted to be in the book business, but mum and dad had always said, ‘Oh no, there isn’t any money to be made’.”

She came on board after the Covid-19 lockdowns and lives part-time upstairs at Waplington with Steve and their two cats.

One of the privileges of dealing books for so many decades is collecting not only rare titles but human stories.

Perhaps the most remarkable was when they were exhibiting in the USA. There was a book in German, which a man opened and quickly clutched to his chest, asking how much it would cost. Barrie had trouble even getting it out of his hands to check the title and inform him that it was $50. Asking the man why the book was so important, he opened it to show Barrie the bookplate – a label kept in the front showing ownership. The man said it was his father’s book and Barrie remarked what a coincidence it was.

“He said: ‘It's much more than a coincidence because it's the only thing I've got which belonged to my parents.’”

Howcome? Barrie recalls him saying: “‘Well, in 1934 we lived in Hamburg and my father was a jeweller. I was 14, I was going back to my house and I saw this grey van outside the house and these three men loaded my family into this vehicle, and I knew what was happening. And I went to some friends of the family who made provisions for such things happening. And I got smuggled out and came to America and of course never heard anything more about it. Here’s my father’s bookplate’.”

There are numerous such stories the Kayes could tell, including one about the man Barrie met in a public toilet who spotted some Aldines he had bought and took him to his council flat where there was a Georgian bookcase filled with them – books which had inspired him to learn Latin and Greek. “That collection must have been worth a quarter of a million pounds,” says Barrie. “Everybody asked us: ‘Why didn’t I try and buy it?’ But it would have been so insulting. He was an authority on it.”

As if reading, buying, collecting, cataloguing and selling books weren’t enough, Barrie and Susan have also written a number of autobiographical works themselves.

And Barrie, of course, believes that life is a much deeper experience with books.

“If you don’t read books,” he says, “your whole philosophy, your whole outlook, is much shallower than those people who’ve read”.

For more information, visit: kbooksltd.co.uk