Who are second-hand booksellers? These are people who know everything about rare and ancient books, including they know at what price this or that rarity can be sold. This area of trade has its own authorities with a special flair and encyclopedic knowledge of their business.
Antiquary Mikhail Klimov is one such authority. He has a lot of weight among second-hand booksellers in Moscow. We can say that he devoted his whole life to rare books. In addition, Mikhail himself became a writer: to date, ten books have been published from his pen.
Biography
Mikhail Mendeleevich Klimov was born in the city of Pavlovsky Posad, Moscow Region, where he spent his childhood and youth. The Klimov family was intelligent, hence, apparently, Mikhail has a love for literature and books.
However, after leaving school, he went to Moscow, entered GITIS and successfully received a diploma of higher education. Even then, he was reading books on philosophy, which were very difficult to get. They had to be bought from buyers or speculators. Then the thought came to Mikhail that he could also sell books in order to buy those that he wanted to read.
On this path, he gained quite a lot of knowledge about books - that not all publications are valued equally, that there are rare copies that you will not find in the daytime. So interest in this business arose and Klimov realized that he wanted to deal with the sale of rare books professionally.
Then for a young man who adores books, this activity was an opportunity to get to know the world of second-hand books more deeply, to understand it, and then it became something like inspiration and real creativity.
Second-hand bookseller career
And Klimov began to study this unfamiliar type of occupation, and over time became the best of second-hand booksellers.
He started by looking for books everywhere: at friends, in stores, at book-stores. And often quite interesting specimens came across. And then Mikhail worked out his own concept. If earlier his colleagues tried to intercept and buy books from people who donated them to a second-hand bookstore, then he bought what they did not take in the store. Thus, he wanted to prove that he knew books better than the store's merchants.
And his theory worked - for a week of this practice, he earned a monthly salary of a highly paid employee of a large enterprise. Then things went even better, this work completely captured Klimov.
Writing
We can say that the famous second-hand bookseller loves his work, otherwise he would not have started writing books about it. For example, in the book "Notes of an Antique Dealer" he writes, why now people buy rare editions. How can you spend over eleven million dollars on a book about birds? It turns out that there are such obsessed people who want to have this rarity even for that kind of money.
In addition to buying and selling, today the antique market offers services of searching for books and their evaluation, and Klimov is also engaged in this.
He has quite a lot of interesting acquaintances, he has an interesting profession, about which he even began writing detective stories. For example, the stories about the adventures of the antique dealer Pasha "I Don't Leave Enemies Alive" and "Death in Leather Bound" and others.
