DAVID WHITTAKER was born and bred in Drogheda, Ireland. On moving to London in 1973, aged 18, he soon got a job in the bibliographic paradise of the Charing Cross Road (Watkins Bookshop). In 1978 he set up his own business dealing in second-hand books from a bookstall in Camden Passage, Islington (with the novelist Iain Sinclair acting as tutelary exemplar). He has been dealing in books ever since. In fact, book dealing has been David’s unique university over the decades, providing him with a well-stocked & eclectic mind!

Along the way David has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, managed an art gallery in Woodstock, and acted as freelance copy-editor. He also co-managed, for many years, the last surviving independent bookshop in Oxford. In 2001 Oxford University Press commissioned him to value their out-of-print library of 40,000 books, a huge undertaking!

David has often been heard on Radio Oxford. In 2009 he appeared in a BBC TV Arena documentary about the life of the musician Brian Eno. In 2015 the University of Venice invited him to give an illustrated talk (in the 16th-century Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore), alongside many of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, as part of the Shylock Project. David is a member of the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association,   Fine Press Book Association & The Society of Authors. He has been shortlisted twice for a Holyer an Gof Award – finishing a close runner-up on both occasions!

For 37 years David has lived quietly in Charlbury, on the edge of the Oxfordshire Cotswolds (in a house bursting at the seams with books), with his wife Penny and daughter Alice.