Bernard Shapero

Bernard John Shapero was born in August 1963,[3] and started dealing in books in the late 1970s, while still a pupil at Highgate School.[4][5] His father was a collector of armour and gold coins.[2]

In October 2005, Shapero purchased the Doria Atlas for £1.46 million, the highest price ever paid for an atlas, although this record was surpassed by the Cosmographia the following year.[6] In April 2004, the atlas had been saved from a fire at Wardington Manor in Oxfordshire, when local residents formed a human chain to remove items from the library.[7]

Shapero Rare Books owned about 6,000 books, ranging in price from £50 to over £200,000, and £6,000 on average. The business was sold by Shapero to Philip Blackwell, a director of the family business Blackwell Publishing, which had been sold to the US John Wiley & Sons in 2007 for £572 million to become Wiley-Blackwell.[8]

In 2012, Shapero bought Dutch businessman Joost Ritman's collection of 300 old religious books and 60 manuscripts for €9.5million, with finance coming from a Ukrainian oligarch.[8]

Shapero lives in Hampstead, London, in a house which is half Victorian and half an "ultra-modern" extension,[1] with his wife Emma Lewis, and their three children: Louis, Clara and Hugo.[9]