About us

We are Ann and Michael Sims and we have been buying and selling books by mail order for over 20 years. We have had a site on Internet since 1996.

We are based in Lowestoft, the most easterly town in England, on the coast of Suffolk. Our household comprises the two of us and a dog, a German Shepherd called 'Tess'.

Until 1998 we also ran our three storey eight bedroomed house as a small private hotel, concentrating on bookselling in the winter. After nearly twenty years of that we decided that we wanted a home of our own again and converted most of the bedrooms to book-rooms.

Ann was born in Lowestoft but her paternal roots are in Co. Cork. I was born in Newbury, Berkshire but both of us have family connections locally and have spent most of our childhood and adult life in Lowestoft.

We are both the wrong side of 50, and I am rather more in error than Ann. We don't have recent photographs but the image below gives you an idea of what we might look like if, in my case, you imagine the hair colour to be grey, the complexion more pallid, the bags under the eyes more pronounced and the style of dress much less formal. Tess is the one with the longest ears.  

We started trading in the early 1980's, selling mainly by catalogue and we put the business on a more formal footing in 1994. We have had a website since 1996 since when printed catalogues have become a thing of the past.

We always carry a reasonable level of stock in Military and Naval History (mainly World War II), in Local (to us) History and Topography, and in a number of early 20th century popular authors of Fiction, and we have a fluctuating stock in a number of smaller interest areas. Our total stock is in the region of 10,000 books.

We have been involved with the Independent Booksellers Network (Ibooknet) since its inception in January 2000 and we became members of the Provincial Booksellers' Fairs Association in November 2004.

We provide a separate site for links called Resources for Booksellers and Book Collectors which we try, usually unsuccessfully, to keep up to date.