I played squash rackets and lawn tennis for 30 years, and have played real tennis for the last fifteen years. In addition, I have organised many lawn tennis and squash tournaments from club up to international level, and have written the internet ball-by-ball reports on several of the recent world real tennis championship eliminator matches. For the past three decades I have worked on the Centre Court at Wimbledon overseeing the arrangements for the writing journalists and the competitors, and in that time I have amassed hundreds of journalists and competitors as friends and acquaintances.

The Tennis Bookshop philosophy is that only very good condition books are acceptable to my customers, and even now, I stock no titles published after 1935 that are not in their original dust-wrappers. Whereas in the early days from 1988, I issued occasional multi-paged catalogues, for the last few years I have promoted the business by the issue of over fifty quarterly Newsletters, each of six pages. These are mailed to customers in around sixty countries, and these Newsletters are the mainstay of my business. The last five years have seen a colossal growth in the use of the internet and e-mails; and e-mails now constitute about 75% of my order business.

I also stage several exhibitions each year at major tennis events here in the UK and occasionally on mainland Europe. My very first exhibition in 1988 was privileged to receive a visit from HM The Queen. Venues where I have exhibited, usually for a week at a time, include Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bournemouth, Brighton, Eastbourne, Frankfurt, London Arena, Nottingham, Olympia, Queen’s Club, Royal Albert Hall, Southampton, Stockholm, and Wembley. By the summer of 2004, the total exhibitions staged was at sixty-four. These exhibitions give me excellent chances actually to meet my customers, which as mainly a postal business, is a rare pleasure. Some clients will only buy books in person, and the exhibitions also give me opportunities to buy tennis books.