Alan Noel Latimer Munby

Alan Noel Latimer ('Tim') Munby (1913–1974) was an English author, writer and librarian.

Life and career

Born in Hampstead, Munby was educated at Clifton College[1] and King's College, Cambridge. He is best known for his five-volume study of the eccentric nineteenth-century book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, and for his slim volume of ghost stories, The Alabaster Hand, which includes three tales written in Oflag VII B, a German prisoner-of-war camp near Eichstadt, during World War Two. These stories – 'The Topley Place Sale', 'The Four Poster' and 'The White Sack' – featured in a prison-camp magazine, Touchstone, edited by Elliott Viney, which was produced on a printing press owned by the Bishop of Eichstadt, Michael Rackl.

Munby worked in the antiquarian book trade with Bernard Quaritch, Limited (1935–37) and Sotheby & Company (1937–39, 1945–47). He became Librarian at King's College, Cambridge in 1947 and Fellow in 1948; he was J. P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography, University of Oxford (1962–63) and Sandars Reader in Bibliography, University of Cambridge (1969–70).[2] He was elected President of the Bibliographical Society in 1974 and died during his term of office.[3]

Reception

Boucher and McComas praised the stories in The Alabaster Hand as "quietly terrifying modernizations of the M.R. James tradition".[4]

Personal life

Munby married twice. His first marriage was to Joan Margaret Edelsten; and his second to Sheila Rachel Crowther-Smith.[5]

Works
  • (ed.) Letters to Leigh Hunt from his son Vincent (Cloanthus Press, 1934)
  • (with Desmond Flower) English Poetical Autographs (Cassell, 1938)
  • "Some Caricatures Of Book-Collectors - An Essay" (printed for private circulation by William H. Robinson Ltd, Christmas 1948)
  • The Alabaster Hand and other Ghost Stories (Dobson, 1949)
  • Phillips Studies, 5 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1951–1960)
  • The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (London: Athlone Press, 1962)
  • Connoisseurs and Medieval Miniatures 1750-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)
  • Essays and Papers (ed. Nicolas Barker) (Scolar Press, 1977) ISBN 0-85967-349-9

See also

References
  1. "Clifton College Register" Muirhead, J. A. O. p. 439: Bristol; J. W. Arrowsmith for Old Cliftonian Society; April, 1948
  2. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt2f59q0js/
  3. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 4 August 2009. Retrieved 17 August 2012.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. "Recommended Reading," F&SF, April 1951, p.113
  5. The Author's and Writer's Who's Who (4th ed, 1960)


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