Rick Gekoski

Richard Abraham (“Rick”) Gekoski (born 25 August 1944 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA) is a writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer and a former member of the English Department at Warwick University.

Early life and education

Gekoski was raised in Alexandria, Virginia, where his father, Bernard, worked as an attorney for the Rural Electrification Authority, and his mother Edith was a social worker. He has a sister, Ruth Greenberg. The family moved to Huntington, Long Island in 1954. He graduated from Huntington High School in 1962, and received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He subsequently took a B.Phil and D.Phil in English at Oxford University, where he attended Merton College, Oxford and won a tennis blue.

Academic career

In 1971 Gekoski joined the English Department at Warwick University, where he was joint convenor of the B. A. degree in Philosophy and Literature, and served for some years as Chairman of the Faculty of Arts. He resigned from the Department in 1984 to open a business as a rare book dealer.

Rare books

The Guardian put Gekoski's book-selling activities succinctly: “Gekoski likes to be around a better class of book than the rest of us and by skill, luck and chutzpah has managed to.” He has founded two private presses, The Sixth Chamber Press and (with T.G. Rosenthal) The Bridgewater Press, which issue limited editions by well known writers.

Writer

Rick Gekoski has published a trilogy of books which trace three of his major enthusiasms: football, book dealing, and reading. Staying Up, Tolkien’s Gown, and Outside of a Dog are written in an approachable personal voice, and combine high spirits with wry honesty and modest erudition. Colm Toibin has called their author “a master story teller,” and Tatler described him as the Bill Bryson of the book world.

Broadcaster

Gekoski regularly appears on radio as a guest commentator on topics relating to rare books and the book trade. He has written and produced three series of Rare Books, Rare People for BBC Radio 4 – called “one of the gems of Radio 4” by critic Gilliam Reynolds - which he followed with two series of Lost, Stolen, or Shredded: The History of Some Missing Works of Art also for BBC Radio 4.

Personal life

In 2005 Gekoski was a Man Booker Prize judge, and a strong advocate for John Banville’s The Sea, which was a controversial winner. He is currently Chairman of Judges for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize. He now divides his time between dealing, broadcasting, writing and lecturing, and teaches Creative Non-Fiction for the Arvon Foundation.

Gekoski and his wife Belinda Kitchin, share a Mews House in The Hyde Park Estate, London, a converted Wesleyan Chapel in the New Forest, and a house in the Tuki Tuki Valley, New Zealand. He has two children by a previous marriage, Anna Ruth (b. 1974), a forensic psychologist, and Aaron Edward (b. 1980) who is training as an underwater videographer. In 2008 Rick Gekoski became a British Citizen (as well as an American one) remarking that he now felt “equally ill at ease in both cultures.”

Books

• R.A. Gekoski, Joseph Conrad, The Moral World of the Novelist Paul Elek and Barnes and Noble, 1978.
• R.A. Gekoski, William Golding: A Bibliography (with P.A. Grogan), André Deutsch, 1994.
• Rick Gekoski, Staying Up: A Fan Behind the Scenes in the Premiership Little Brown, 1998.
• Rick Gekoski, Tolkien’s Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and *Rare Books Constable and Robinson, 2004. Published in the USA as Nabokov’s Butterfly, Carroll and Graf, 2004.
• Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog: A Bibliomemoir Constable and Robinson, 2009.

Articles and interviews

• A Ghost Story (www.granta.com)
• It's the critics at Sea (www.theage.com)
• At last, the best Booker book won The Times
• Catherine Keenan interviews Rick Gekoski

External links

• Gekoski.co.uk
• Rogers, Coleridge and White Literary Agents
• Constable and Robinson Publishers
• Antiquarian Booksellers Association