When the British Library was drawing up its wish list of interviewees for the Book Trade Lives oral history project, the industry grandees on the advisory board were unanimous in recommending Michael Seviour. I was lucky enough to record his account and their reasons were instantly clear. Michael, who has died aged 85, was a warm, unpretentious and observant man who managed some of the most distinctive bookshops of his time. He loved handling books as well as reading them, especially ones that were well designed; and he made lasting friendships everywhere he worked.
He began his career as a collector at Bumpus in Oxford Street, central London a Dickensian shop whose customers included Edith Sitwell going out with a sack every morning to fetch books from publishers' counters. He then moved to the warehouse of the publishers Chatto and Windus, where the poet and editor Cecil Day-Lewis came down to chat; and where Michael and colleagues knew the stock so well that for fun they would switch off the lights and find books by touch: "Virginia Woolf down one side, Lytton Strachey down the other, and then Proust."
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