Introduction

Were a ‘Companion to Modernist Intersections’ ever to be compiled, Dan Rider and his bookshop would surely be the prototypical entry, the common splicing of the two into a single entity, ‘Dan Rider’s bookshop’, being a case in point. Together, man and place illustrate the crossing point where authors and artists, material production, economics, individual personality, local and international history, anecdote and fluke intersect; they also show up the loopholes and blind spots of academic periodisation and disciplinarity.

Precise landmarks in the biography of Daniel J. Rider are hard to come by. He was born and educated in Southwark, London, later claiming that the flagrant disjunct between local working-class slums and the doctrines of late nineteenth-century evangelism prompted him to prefer an apprenticeship in the book industry to a scholarship at Oxford. He was trained in various sectors of printing, engraving and binding, before becoming a publisher’s assistant at the Librairie Hachette, on the Strand, while actively engaging in local politics. He was notably an early member of the Fabian Society and the Bermondsey Social Democratic Federation (a ‘fellowship’ that lasted a lifetime), both of which were perceived as radical and hot-headed at the time. In Rider’s words, ‘In those days it required some pluck to be a Socialist, as the police force was openly used to stop meetings and imprison speakers upon any trumped-up charge.’

Rider’s move from employee in the publishing sector to running his own ‘little shop’ at 36 St Martin’s Court, an alley connecting St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, dates from the 1890s. His activities for the twenty years to come were henceforth organised around second-hand book-dealing, printing and publishing a number of little magazines and catalogues (including The Library World) in the cellars below, which served as a craftsmen’s workshop, and organising small exhibitions of contemporary artworks, including in the ‘den’ itself, as its band of devotees referred to it. These varied activities opened up perspectives of their own: the second-hand trade prompted him to offer his services for house clearance, the most spectacular of which was in Fitzroy Square in 1907.