Fold the Corner Books

This month we have been talking to two young booksellers Rebekah Cron and Mark Baczoni, who founded Fold the Corner Books. We discuss their processes for working on their catalogues, combining both old and new.

1. Rebekah and Mark, you recently started Fold the Corner Books and have published four catalogues so far. You have both been working in the rare book world, so you are not exactly new faces, but tell us a bit more about your backgrounds and expertise.

Rebekah: My introduction into the world of rare books was through my grandfather. He bought his first medieval manuscript during the Second World War, and by the time I was born he had amassed a considerable collection of books, manuscripts and other curios. Many of my early childhood memories were of being in his library, where he would supervise me handling 13th-century psalters, prayer books, manuscript fragments and fossils. 

While I was studying for my BA in Philosophy at the University of Exeter, I was accepted onto the fantastic internship scheme at Bernard Quaritch, where I worked for two months under the watchful eye of Barbara Scalvini and Andrea Mazzocchi, primarily cataloguing a collection of political titles. By the time the summer had ended, I had decided that I never wanted to do anything else. I took a year out travelling in South America and Antarctica in 2014, and in 2016 I completed an MA in The History of the Book at the University of London, where my dissertation focused on my grandfather’s collection and his circle. 

Between 2018 and 2024, I worked as Head of Literature at Henry Sotheran, where I learned a huge amount about the intricacies of the trade. The department at the time was very wide-reaching, encompassing ‘General Antiquarian’, and ranging from around 1700 all the way up to Modern First Editions. My personal interests included Philosophy (of course), Modern First Editions and Counterculture, and I spent a lot of time organising events and running Book Fairs, including in New York. 

Mark and I met in 2021 when we were both writing novels – mine still unfinished – and we decided to take the plunge with Fold the Corner just a few years later!

Mark: I was lucky enough to start out in the Book Department at Christie’s King Street straight after university, where I had read History and History of Art. I think it was the absolute perfect place to be young and impressionable in the book world – because you got to see so much of so many different kinds of things, and were surrounded by incredibly knowledgeable people who were very generous with their very scarce time. 

From there, I went to Simon Finch, which at the time was in Maddox Street, and was again privileged to work with incredibly sharp and funny bookmen and women, and then – following another brief stint at Christie’s – I went to work for Christopher Sokol, which was a very multilingual experience (everyone there spoke some ‘odd’ language for a variety of different reasons) and got a thorough grounding in printing pre-1640! 

Then I dropped off the face of the earth and did translation and interpreting for a number of years – not to mention writing an equally unfinished novel – before coming back (slowly) to my first love. 

2. I particularly like that most of your catalogues have an old and new section, which makes total sense, but how do you go about working on the catalogue?

Mark: Most of the ‘old’ stuff is me and most of the ‘new’ stuff is Rebekah, but there is a good deal of crossover. We both have wide-ranging interests and eclectic tastes, so one of the pleasures of working for ourselves is being able to indulge those interests and having the other’s expertise to count on. Sometimes, one of us will do the physical description of a book and the other the catalogue note, wherever the greater expertise lies. 

Once that’s done, we generally do a little introduction to put the catalogue into context, proof everything carefully, add images, and then Rebekah magically does something with software to make it look amazing. 

Rebekah: As Mark says, I generally focus on newer material (1900 to present day) and he on incunables up until around 1700, but this isn’t always the case! When we first started, I remember buying rather a lot of 17th-century medical texts, and even back in 2021 Mark was already talking about amassing a collection of Peter Fleming.

I am sure as the business develops we will discover new areas of interest and perhaps hone our focus down, but for now we are very much enjoying the generalisation, and the many different customers we are meeting as a result. 

3. For your Christmas catalogue you celebrated, very appropriately, the work of Charles van Sandwyk – who is also one of your friends. Tell us more about his work and how you got to know him. 

Rebekah: I first met Charles van Sandwyk while working at Henry Sotheran. At the time, they had an incredibly extensive and well-curated Children’s department, and when the company began to stock the work of an author and illustrator many referred to as ‘The New Arthur Rackham’, I was instantly taken by the skilful drawings, hand-stitched bindings and whimsical storytelling. I began to collect his work myself, as well as sell the books in the shop, and always relished being able to speak about him to customers. 

A few years in, and a very smiley man with a wiry beard and a striped waistcoat walked through the doors of the shop. We were running a small event that evening, where Charles gave a series of readings to an audience of around fifteen in the basement of the Piccadilly premises. One of the books – about a ‘Little Elephant’ – is due to be released later this year. We ran several more of these readings during my time at Sotheran’s, during which time we became good friends. When he heard that Mark and I had set up independently, he reached out to us, asking whether we might be interested in stocking some of his titles – of course I said yes. 

We are very excited to be working together going forward, with a series of upcoming projects in 2025 which we hope will include another event, along with some original artworks focusing on animals and fairies.

4. Your Anais Nin catalogue shines a light on a 20th-century feminist icon who deserves to be more widely known. When did you first come across her and was it difficult to find all the material for your list?

Mark: This project actually came out of a collecting interest of mine in my twenties. I became fascinated with Nin after reading Henry and June, which at the time was available in Penguin Paperbacks, and started – in a very small way, being an undergraduate at the time – collecting her. You are absolutely right to say she deserves to be more widely known, and I have always preferred her writing to Miller’s (though I am informed this opinion is a subjective one!). Luckily for me, at the time I was collecting, although she was not unknown, her works were not hugely expensive and there was quite a lot of decent material out there; so it was just a case of being on the lookout and spending whatever I could spare on new acquisitions. The ‘collection’ then sat for some years, simply as a collection. 

The idea of putting it together as a catalogue came much more recently, and we were fortunate in that a very good friend of mine wrote his PhD thesis on Henry Miller and knew someone who was intimately connected with the whole circle of Nin, Miller, George Whitman and the rest, who in the end provided us with a lot of scholarly help in writing the catalogue. 

5. Mark, you wrote a hugely interesting article on Peter Fleming for us recently and we are hoping for more. I hear you are planning a catalogue on his work and would love to hear more.

Mark: Thank you, that is incredibly kind. My ears are burning slightly. Peter Fleming has been an interest of mine for the last few years since I read Brazilian Adventure after a friend sent me a postcard from Berlin of an incredibly dashing chap in a parka somewhere on the Sino-Siberian border in the 1930s, grinning nonchalantly and smoking a pipe. I then got hooked and remember laughing out loud at several points in News from Tartary. 

I set about reading up on him and trying to put together a collection. I wondered why, given his literary and comic talent, and the fact that he was handsome, rich and married to a movie star, he wasn’t better known; I still do. The little collection I started putting together has by now somewhat outgrown itself and we were lucky to find some really good material, as well as the incredibly generous help and advice of James Fleming. 

We’re hoping to have our catalogue ready for the spring. I think it will be interesting both to people who know him already and, hopefully, to those for whom this will be an introduction. Watch this space! 

6. And going back to ‘old books’, you are also planning a catalogue on Elsevier. Can you share some of the highlights already, please?

Mark: Absolutely. We have some really nice things, including a first edition first issue of the 1635 Caesar in a contemporary binding, as well as the 1635 Terence, a lovely set of the 1629 Ovid, and some more philosophical works by Descartes, Erasmus and Francis Bacon. We have some really nice bindings, as well, both in vellum and very fine morocco. As well as plenty more – a real range from under £100 up, so there should be something for everyone!

Rebekah: We are just finalising this list, which we hope will be released at the beginning of February. We have enjoyed working with these little books, which have a complex bibliographical history, and we have some real gems in there. My favourite is perhaps unsurprisingly Descartes’s Tractatus de Homine, which has some fabulous diagrams based on his Cartesian principles. 

Visit Fold the Corner Books (www.foldthecornerbooks.co.uk) to shop for old and new books, and view Mark and Rebekah's current catalogues.