There's a man at the Sheung Wan end of Hollywood Road who admits he recently handled a pair of Lolitas - a thrilling experience, by his telling. 'Exquisite,' he says. 'Simply beautiful, and I know where they live.' But before you call the police, it should be explained that, as the proprietor of Lok Man Rare Books, Lorence Johnston is a specialist in first editions. The subject of his passion is not flesh and blood but Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1955 with a first-edition print run of just 5,000 copies and subsequently banned in almost every English-speaking country. Fifty years ago, it could be bought in a plain brown wrapper for 900 francs. Today, it's worth an estimated HK$300,000.
Johnston, who had been working in his family's leather business, opened Lok Man Rare Books in June last year after a colleague suggested the company's B Felix showroom, with its hand-crafted leather chairs but empty shelves, could do double duty as a bookshop. It was the perfect environment for Johnston's bibliomania and a way to test what he believed was happening at the luxury end of the Hong Kong market. Since then, his shop has become part of a nascent synergy developing on Hollywood Road, already an established destination for antiques and art - Lok Man Rare Books, IndoSiam Rare Books and the long established Wattis Gallery have found common cause in the ongoing education of an increasingly sophisticated customer base.
Having lived in Hong Kong since 1994, arriving from Essex via Spain and Singapore, Johnston, who is married with two young children, is confident his local knowledge, his MBA from the University of Cape Town and passion for books can turn a profit from what people have tossed aside after the final page. There is no hard-sell to his style. He knows how to read a potential buyer, how to probe for likely interests and how to nudge them towards an often pricey title that might take their fancy. 'That's one of the biggest hurdles in retail,' he says, 'resisting the hard sell. There's too much of it in Hong Kong. I don't think it was a conscious decision for me. I just don't think I would enjoy myself if I did business that way.'
To build on his knowledge acquired over the years as a 'serious amateur' collector and to gain tips on the highly competitive book trade, he attends major book fairs in London and New York - the capitals of the book business - important auctions, where he first got to know of Hong Kong map dealer Jonathan Wattis, and visits influential bookshops such as Peter Harrington or Nigel Williams in London.
Johnston's eclectic tastes range from modern first editions and contemporary authors - he sold a signed first edition of Brett Eason Ellis' first novel Less Than Zero recently for HK$2,200 - to Graham Greene - fine copies of the The Quiet American are increasingly scarce - and T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). He likes Antarctic explorers Ernest Shackleton and Robert F. Scott, former British prime minister Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, of course, and has a copy of Jack Kerouac's Beat era classic, On the Road (HK$35,000). A few weeks ago he sold a first edition of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for HK$10,000.
His shelves hold a set of Joseph Conrad, a first edition of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, with the writer's pseudonym 'Boz' on the title page, and which the extremely informative Johnston has traced back to the first week of printing, and some nice Winnie the Pooh books by A.A. Milne, which may find a home on the mainland (China has put Piglet on a postage stamp for the Year of the Pig).