George Ramsden
Yorkshire bookseller who created meticulous catalogues, particularly of Edith Wharton’s library
GEORGE RAMSDEN, who has died aged 65, was a Yorkshire bookseller and publisher who devoted many years to reconstructing and selling the library of the American novelist Edith Wharton.
Ramsden once described bookselling as, for him, a long procrastination. He was much better at accumulating stock than persuading customers to buy, lacking the gift of small talk as much as salesmanship: “Things tend to go better if I walk away from the customer.”
At his Stone Trough bookshop in York, shared with a sheet music dealer, he could give the impression that a potential buyer was not worthy of a book, and one fellow bibliophile went as far as to describe Ramsden’s premises as “an anti-bookshop”.
But Ramsden enjoyed selling books in catalogues, which he produced with meticulous care, and was fascinated by author’s libraries, which “can add so much to one’s understanding and appreciation of their writing, their interests being reflected in the books on their shelves”.
The library assembled by Edith Wharton at Hyères in the south of France was “a key to her intellectual journeys”; he described as “heart-stopping” the news that the London bookseller Maggs had acquired the bulk of the collection from her godson Colin Clark – son of the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, and brother of the politician Alan – to whom it had passed on her death in 1937.
Maggs retrieved the somewhat bat-stained collection, including inscribed works by Henry James, from the Clarks’ Saltwood Castle in Kent, and in 1984 Ramsden offered to buy it, subject to financial backing from his family. His father’s reaction was that he could have bought 15 horses for the same money, but the cheque for some £45,000 was written nevertheless.
Ramsden then embarked on a decadeslong project of filling gaps in the library, including more volumes from Saltwood. His diffident but persistent manner of doing so earned him a barbed mention in Alan Clark’s Diaries: “Little oh-so-meek George Ramsden was here, yet again, on Saturday. We finally ‘dealt’ … I would have settled for less; he might have paid more. In the end I found him quite sympathetic.”
The obvious potential buyer for the complete 2,600-volume library was the Edith Wharton Restoration – the foundation that maintains The Mount, the author’s mansion in Massachusetts. The former politician Lord Tugendhat was deployed as an intermediary to persuade Ramsden to sell: unpredictable in money matters, he held out for £1.5 million, which was well above some experts’ valuations but, as he put it, would have been achieved “in two bids for a middle-ranking Impressionist painting”. Finally he agreed to accept a million upfront with the balance to be paid over 10 years.
This and other restoration projects eventually drove the Wharton foundation into financial crisis. But the acquisition was celebrated in 2006 with a visit to The Mount by the First Lady, Laura Bush, with whom Ramsden was quietly proud to have had his photograph taken.
George Edward Ramsden was born on June 12 1953 into a West Riding family of brewers and politicians. A descendant of Thomas Ramsden, who became proprietor of the Stone Trough brewery in Halifax in 1881, George was the second of five children of Thomas’s great-grandson James Ramsden and his wife Juliet, née Ponsonby.
James Ramsden was elected Conservative MP for Harrogate in 1954 and served as a defence minister under Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-home until 1964, when he was the last person to hold the office of Secretary of State for War.
George was educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he began reading Modern Languages but switched to English Literature. As a boy he preferred carpentry and fishing to books, and at Cambridge, though he lived above the college’s Pepys Library for a year, “it never occurred to me to go in,” he recalled in The Bookdealer. “I was a full-time trombonist in those days.” A natural musician, he played in university orchestras and trad jazz bands; he also rowed in a winning coxless pair at Henley and ran with the Trinity Lake Hunt.
After Cambridge he embarked at his father’s insistence on reading for the Bar, but dropped out after a year and worked for a care charity in Bermondsey until a growing interest in “poking around in second-hand bookshops” led him, in 1977, to a job at the Heywood Hill shop in Curzon Street.
Though never at ease selling to “the carriage trade”, Ramsden found his métier – much encouraged by the shop’s manager, John Saumarez Smith – on the buying side, sourcing valuable editions of Wharton, among others. In 1981 he opened his own first shop, named Stone Trough after the long-gone brewery, in Camberwell Grove.
Leafy south-east London was “ideal for quiet bookselling” – but in 1990 he and his wife decided to move their young family to an old rectory with literary connections at Settrington in North Yorkshire. There he amassed thousands more books in his barn and launched the Stone Trough publishing venture, which produced elegant editions of letters, memoirs, commonplace books and other texts that caught Ramsden’s eclectic eye, including a new translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman.
His beautiful catalogue of the Wharton library – published in 1999 with an introduction by Hermione Lee – was a model of its kind. He was also the author of a 2009 history of Leith School of Art, founded by his younger sister Charlotte and her husband Mark Cheverton, who had both died in a road accident in 1991.
Ramsden was generous with his time in cataloguing private libraries and advising on publishing ideas. He could be an engaging companion, with an appetite for gossip and a fondness for pubs. But the uncomfortable disposition encountered by bookshop browsers was symptomatic of deeper troubles: a long struggle with bipolar depression finally drove him to take his own life.
He married Jane Wynn, née Thompson, in 1986; she survives him with their son and two daughters, and both his parents.