Thomas Heneage Art Books

Found them via googling for a rare book. They had it in stock at a good price (better than ABEBOOKS were offering) and were really pleasant to deal with. Very helpful assistant went to double-check it was the edition I needed, it was posted the day I called to order it and arrived beautifully packed in very good shape. Recommended.

Fine selection of titles, but the service is unfriendly and I was not at all impressed by my experience – my friend and I purchased two rare jewellery books for over £1000; the books are very large in size and when both wouldn’t fit into one cotton tote bag, the staff scrambled around to find a plastic bag for the second book instead of just giving us two cotton tote bags. In the end they reluctantly gave up a second bag, but having spent over £1000 this struck me as extremely stingy and didn’t make us feel appreciated as a customer.

Incredibly condescending.

Well done with book collection.

Condescending owner and generally unprofessional environment regardless of efforts to tidy up/reorganize their space in the current circumstances. On top of that, they did not respond to my thanking them on my way out.

Piggish owner - both in terms of his ignorance about history and art, but also in terms of his lack of charm.

As a graduate student of art-history, when he greeted us and asked our interest, I felt comfortable and informed enough to ask him about books on a niche subject of historical art - the kinds of books one can only expect to find at a store such as this.

The older man then explains to me how my subject was not actually so interesting, referencing an account from nearly two thousand years AFTER the art style of which I had inquired ceased to exist, to say the area was 'a pile of mud'.

Wasn't this part of London something like a stinking mud-bank if we choose to give or take two thousand years?

Seemed an irrelevant and oddly philistine comment coming from someone like him, who was so well-spoken and so well-dressed, but this reply was given context as we left.

Seemingly, he personally didn't care about the subject I had asked about, and so felt the need to validate his disdain through an embarrassing display of chauvinism.

Having a date in the city, we left after 10 minutes, since we had immediately confirmed what a great store this seemed to be.

As we turned to the door, the owner summoned the courage to remark to our backsides that he "wasnt surprised" that we hadnt bought anything.

This was his own self-fulfilling prophecy.

He could not have known that we'd made plans to return to the store with our friends. In the end, we didn't bring them back, despite what a nice assortment of over-priced collectables the store offered.

To be more specific to potential visitors, this store specializes in objects which have value mainly as a commodity, suitable as a gift, rather than as sources of knowledge to be read.

But I will not pay the greatly inflated prices that you see here from owners who are apparently in the business of books, not out of a genuine interest in knowledge itself, (since the owner apparently cannot control his disgust even talking about art made by foreigners, let alone in attempting to be polite to non-Britons like us) but because of those superficial aspects which give books higher monetary values and social status.

Really nice art book store with helpful and friendly staff

Rude and unprofessional service.