Howard Lewis, cultured, creative and curious, brings a multifarious box of tricks to the table. After five years of spectacular underachievement at St Pauls, he entered the stock market straight from school, joining the patrician firm of Cazenove as a valuations assistant and thereafter extending his repertoire as a trainee at R Layton. He subsequently built a private client business with various brokers, who have now largely departed for that great trading floor in the sky, before cofounding Thesaurus, a pioneer in the provision of electronic information services to the art and collectibles world. Thesaurus acquired Trace which was focused upon the identification and pursuit of stolen art and the databases of each scoured one another daily seeking potential matches.

Contemporaneous with the above activities, he concentrated increasingly upon the supervision of private family interests which encompassed investments, property and art. He is now the director of the Schorr Collection which, though dominated by Old Master Paintings, includes many diverse categories. Howard, for example, was instrumental in the evolution of a collection of very early toys, games and educational material for children, such as alphabets, harlequinades, battledores and chapbooks, some of the greatest rarity.

Over many years, he wrote investment reports for private circulation that touched upon issues such as infrastructure, demographics and the vagaries of markets. He broadened his horizons by reflecting too upon aspects of the art market and life in general but, more importantly, started sending articles to friends, clients and associates on subjects that they were interested in or which he felt they should be aware of. The response to this was overwhelmingly positive and led to the genesis of OFFLINE. The fundamental premise behind it was that in a wired world people needed more than ever to engage in physical interaction with one another. The articles were mere props but they reinforced the fact that the simple acts of talking, laughing, eating, thinking and so forth had most impact when widely shared.