Collecting the Counter Culture - Maggs’ Carl Williams pays a visit to Harvard’s Houghton Library

- By Susan Halas

Carl Williams heads the Counter Culture Department at Maggs, London (courtesy Dazed Digital).

Carl Williams is “stoked” to be speaking at Harvard.

The London based Maggs Bros. specialist is making a visit to Houghton Library on Wed., November 14 to give a talk on collecting the counter culture. (See event details at the end.)

Though the American surfer slang sounds unlikely overlaid with a broad English accent, there is no denying his enthusiasm for his subject and his pleasure at being asked.

Equally unlikely is the pairing for two of the book world’s most venerable and posh institutions to focus on popular culture in all its many low-brow manifestations.

Edward Maggs, the head of the firm himself, strongly refuted the idea that there is anything stuffy, much less retro or backward about the high end booksellers founded by his ancestor in 1853. “We do cutting edge things all the time,” he said on the line from London.

Mr. Maggs (“Call me Ed”) pointed out the company issued catalogs of the avant-garde in the 1920s and “offered the French symbolist poets in the 1930s.”About the same time it was a leader in the collecting of Women’s Literature." “At Maggs, we look forward, not back,” he said. 

It’s the Boomer Demographic

Guest and host agree there is broad and growing interest in the field where punk and posh meet. “It is demographic…and only likely to get stronger as the boomers age,” Williams said. “Like other generations they’re collecting what they remember of their youth.”

Leslie Morris, Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Houghton Library said the impetus for the invitation came from the deposit of more than 50,000 items related to psychedelics, chemistry and botanicals in all forms assembled by Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a Columbian businessman. The collection was deposited by the family with Harvard after his death in 2009.

“This is a major collection,” she said, “and it will definitely fill in many of the gaps in our holdings.”

Collecting the Counter Culture - Maggs’ Carl Williams pays a visit to Harvard’s Houghton Library

- By Susan Halas

Leslie Morris Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at Harvard's Houghton Library -Harvard Gazette

“Williams found his niche with a little help from Edward Maggs,” Daze continues, “the man who inherited the family firm. 'There might have been something brewing in Ed’s mind that we needed to cover this demographic,’ says Williams.”

“It really began when I started cataloguing all this proto-counter-culture American Beat stuff from the 50s and it did really well – I sold about 80 per cent of it. I designed a catalogue based on Ginsberg’s Howl, the same size and typeface. It did well, people liked it and I realised I had the right skills for the subject.”

Asked by AE Monthly how he arrives at valuation for the items he sells, Williams acknowledged it was not an easy call because, “It’s rare to sell the same thing twice.”

“At Maggs,” he said the bottom prices start at “about 35 pounds.” They go up from there to “as much as a million Euros.” And though the field may be of enormous popular interest at the moment, he can count his “serious customers” on the fingers of two hands. For him, that’s an improvement, “I only had one before.”

As for future trends, Williams said predictions are not his specialty, but it wouldn’t surprise him if one day he started offering “hard drives and email transcripts.” That day has not yet arrived, but quoting Hegel, “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.”

That means we only know in hindsight what’s hot (and stayed hot), seldom in advance.