Stefan Baer
Stefan Baer is a Bookseller and Antiquarian Bookdealer with 18+ years of experience. He started his apprenticeship 1988 in a Swiss Bookstore. He first specialized in producing customer catalogs. The layout was done in the old tradition: gluing different pieces of paper on a larger sheet. But other than that the bookstore had the latest gadgets: It was the first in the city to use a fax machine and was among the first stores that ordered books by Datamail, an email forerunner.
Stefan's bookseller specialties during his apprenticeship were world travel as well as cooking and wine books - later followed by the newly established genre of computer books.
From 1996 - 2001 he managed Buchhandlung Madliger AG, the Anthroposophical Bookstore in Zurich and organized numerous lectures and readings with philosophical and spiritual background both in the bookstore as well as in larger venues.
In New York Stefan switched to the rare book business. He worked for the online book dealer www.juliansbooks.com with 20,000 titles online and managed to expand the market to Europe. Later he worked for a magic bookstore. From 2003 to 2009 he was manager of the Complete Traveller Antiquarian Bookstore (www.ctrarebooks.com) where he dealt with catalogs, search engine optimization, websites, but first and foremost with customers.
Back in 2002 Stefan was asked by a German customer to find signed first editions by Dean Koontz. The customer wanted to buy them from one reliable source rather than pay each book dealer for international shipping. She didn't have the time, patience and knowledge of the English book lingo to compare prices and quality with different dealers. That's when the idea of the Worldwide Booksearch Service was born - thanks to Marion, the first customer. She still gets her books from us. Her collection is now almost complete.