For the past 30 years, Iconastas at 5 Piccadilly Arcade, London SW1 has been specialising in Russian art, antiques and ephemera, and they have built up a huge stock, much of which they cannot fit into their West End gallery.
So they have just produced their first catalogue, by no means a definitive stock list but a glossy production which gives their customers, and potential customers, a taste of what is on offer. And it will also remind the Americans just what they are missing.
Christopher Martin-Zakheim, a partner at Iconastas, tells me: “We will send our first catalogue especially to all those Americans who gave up visiting us with the onset of the Foot and Mouth crisis and have never returned.”
Taking the shop to stay-at-home US collectors
EVEN if it means shipping their stock across the Atlantic, there are more and more of the British trade who are determined that the Americans reluctance to travel over here is not going to stop us selling to them over there.
