Posted on Monday 14 January 2008
It is extremely sad to report that, Alfred Frederic Wallis, former member of the A.B.A. and a respected
bookseller for forty years, died on December 23rd 2007, aged 85.
Alf Wallis began his bookselling in the early 1950’s, in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, and rapidly expanded from a small shop in the commercial centre to a much larger property further out.
During his career Alf always operated on a large scale, never to be shaken from his ardent belief that a bookseller can never have enough books - even when the flood of stock threatened to overwhelm him.
Chance visitors ringing the bell of the warehouse at six, seven or eight in the evening would often find him still busy, cataloguing, quoting, cleaning and arranging. This insatiable appetite for hard work meant Alf welcomed such challenging customer requests as, ‘any books in Hungarian, published in Paris, between the wars, by women writers.’
Not just a knowledgeable bookseller, Alf Wallis was also an exceptionally well-read man, with deep interests in literature, art, philosophy, psychology and politics. Blessed with an encyclopaedic memory, he would often recall some obscure detail about a book that greatly added to the interest or importance of the work.
Over the years, the acquisition which most pleased Alf was that of the collection of material by and concerning the notable literary eccentric, Amanda Ros. Alf’s enthusiasm for Ros, illuminated another aspect of his character, which was a sympathetic impulse towards the quirky and the odd, the outsider and the marginalised. It was this same feeling of sympathy, which years later led Alf to house a homeless drug addict for in the basement of his shop.
Lastly and most importantly, Alf was a loving husband to wife Berthe, and stepfather to children, Nicholas and Damaris, who both have now chosen to settle in Bulgaris, the country of Alf’s birth.
Alfred Frederic Wallis will be dearly remembered.