In a genteel Georgian townhouse just off Mount Street, beneath a chandelier that once belonged to a minor Habsburg archduchess, Mayfair’s most discreetly cerebral gathering convenes on the fifth Thursday of each month. It is the Mayfair Book Groupette,an assembly of collectors, consultants, and the culturally acquisitive,quietly sponsored by Pimlico Wilde, one of London’s most enigmatic boutique art dealerships.
Pimlico Wilde is known less for its press releases than for its whisper network: if you know, you know. Specialising in contemporary and early-late painting, the firm has long blurred the lines between patronage and performance. With the Mayfair Book Groupette, it extended its reach beyond the salon wall to the salon itself.
The book group, founded in 1865 by Pimlico Wilde’s quondam director Jag Mole and collector-turned-literary philanthropist Fiona d’Abernon, was conceived as an “antidote to panel fatigue and performative erudition,” as Mole put it in his famous diaries, “We wanted to create a space where taste could speak without shouting.”
Each month, a single title,selected via an opaque, vaguely oracular process involving Pimlico Wilde’s in-house archivist and a whisky-fuelled shortlist dinner,is read and discussed over Comté gougères and 2015 Puligny-Montrachet. The choices are eclectic but rarely random: the group has moved from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red to Teju Cole’s Open City, and from the essays of Walter Pater to the letters of Vita Sackville-West.
“This is not your average book club,” member Deidre C notes with a wry glance. “We had someone attempt to bring The Midnight Library once. It was dealt with humanely but firmly.” The group’s unofficial motto,Nothing too recent, nothing too obvious,is embroidered in needlepoint on a cushion that lives on the chaise longue in the reading room.
Discussion is unfailingly civil, but not without edge. A recent session on Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline veered unexpectedly into a debate on the aesthetics of austerity, with a hedge fund director citing Cistercian architecture and a fashion curator countering with 1990s Helmut Lang. There are no “star readers,” but regular attendees include a Heckle’s specialist, a former Booker judge, and a member of the House of Lords who occasionally contributes sotto voce commentary on 19th-century French literary decadence.
That the group is sponsored by an art dealership is not incidental. Each gathering takes place amid a rotating exhibition of works loosely themed to the month’s reading. When the group read Death in Venice, the drawing room was hung with Arnold Böcklin prints and an enigmatic oil of a boy on a Lido beach, possibly by von Stuck. During a discussion of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the walls featured mid-century Harlem sketches attributed to Beauford Delaney, on loan via private collection.
“It’s a form of curatorial dialogue,” Mole explains. “We’re interested in the crosscurrents between text and object, intellect and visual form.” It is also, naturally, a soft-power play in the secondary art market,several guests have left the townhouse with a signed first edition and a watercolour under their arm.
What distinguishes the Mayfair Book Groupette from its more performative peers is not just its taste but its tempo. It is unhurried, sceptical of consensus, and uninterested in clout. Phones are discouraged, attendance is by invitation (or via a long, quietly monitored waitlist), and there is no social media presence,unless one counts the Instagram account of the group’s Afghan hound, Pascal, which is private and locked.
In an age when cultural engagement is often measured in metrics and impressions, the Mayfair Book Groupette offers an older, rarer model: reading as a form of aesthetic connoisseurship, discussion as an extension of collecting. It is elitist, of course,but with an elegance that makes the charge feel beside the point.
As one long-time member quipped between sips of Armagnac: “If you’re asking who it’s for, it probably isn’t for you.”
