Book dealer John Lawson joined EM Lawson & Co, the firm that his father had started at Sutton Coldfield in 1921, when he was demobbed from national service in the RAF in 1952.
For more than 60 years, without ostentation but with an amazing range of knowledge, he put together and sent out several hundred catalogues on subjects as diverse as English literature (especially seventeenth-century), science and medicine, geography and travel to all the remoter parts of the world.