Simon Harcourt Nowell-Smith, M.A.

Simon Nowell-Smith was born on 5 January 1909 in Winchester and educated at Sherborne School, where his father was headmaster, before going up to New College, Oxford, to read Greats. He joined the editorial staff of The Times in 1932, was assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1937-9 and spent the war years in the Intelligence Division of the Naval Staff, working in Whitehall. In 1950 Nowell-Smith accepted the appointment of secretary and librarian of the London Library, urged to take up the post by Sir Harold Nicolson and others who were disturbed by the post-war Slough of Despond into which the library had sunk. His sponsors felt that Nowell-Smith possessed the qualities of scholarship and personality to resuscitate the library, though he had no training or experience in librarianship, unlike his predecessor, C. J. Purnell. Nevertheless, Nowell-Smith carried out some much needed administrative reconstruction and re-focused the library's acquisitions policy. It was during his tenure of office at the London Library that he was elected to Fellowship. His resignation in 1956 surprised the library's members but he parted on amicable terms with the trustees to pursue his own interests as book collector and bibliographer, while remaining a consultant to the library. He was a regular reviewer in literary journals and cultivated a taste for unfashionable authors such as Mark Rutherford (an uncle by marriage), Robert Bridges, T. E. Brown and Hawker of Morwenstow, though he never collected an author whom he did not enjoy reading. He loved parodies, doggerel, limericks and clerihews, which he wrote. A result of his more conventional interest in the novels of Henry James was his book, The Legend of the Master (1947). Once his collection of a writer's work was complete Nowell-Smith would lose interest and dispose of his holdings to various institutions and collectors, often in the United States. He concentrated latterly on nineteenth-century poetry, and an exhibition of a selection from his library entitled `From Wordsworth to Robert Graves and Beyond' was mounted at the Bodleian in 1983. Nowell-Smith was also knowledgeable on the history of publishing and was commissioned to write The House of Cassell in 1958 and Letters to Macmillan in 1967, based on the firm's archives which were to be deposited elsewhere. He held the Lyell Readership at Oxford in 1965-6, and his major historical study, International Copyright Law and the Publisher, a highly accessible rendering of a technical subject based on the Lyell lectures, was published in 1968. He was president of the Bibliographical Society, 1962-4, and of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, l972-6; a trustee of Dove Cottage Trust 1974-82 and a member of the Roxburghe Club. In recognition of his work as secretary of the Hospital Libraries Survey (1958-9) he was elected a member of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. He died in Oxfordshire on 28 March 1996.