Histories

The noted American critic and book collector Michael Dirda once paid a visit to George Ramsden’s bookshop in York, which was a den of prized editions.

With a novel by Ronald Firbank in his hands, Dirda told Ramsden, who had been hovering around him in the way a stagehand might in the presence of a great actor, that he had many editions of Firbank but not all. “Have you seen the collected?” asked Ramsden quietly. “No,” replied the American. “The collected is in five volumes — Duckworth — I don’t have it of course, but it’s a rather nice thing,” Ramsden said.

It was vintage Ramsden: understated, almost the opposite of a salesman. If people wanted to buy books, that was fine, but mainly their concern, not his. Bestsellers and literary prizes were not generally his thing.

Ramsden’s fascinations were often with marginal, sometimes clandestine figures, with anecdote, aphorism and aristocratic memoirs — and he lived self-effacingly on the margins of literary life, more or less camped out at his shop, Stone Trough Books. Yet the shy and softly spoken Ramsden, who suffered severe depression, was more than just an eccentric and inquisitive bookman. He was also a talented collector, cataloguer and publisher.

His greatest coup was spotting an opportunity to buy the personal library of the American novelist Edith Wharton, who had been the first woman to win the Pulitzer prize for literature, in 1921, for her novel The Age of Innocence.

After Maggs Brothers, the antiquarian specialists, had bought some 2,000 books once owned by Wharton from the family of her friend, the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark, Ramsden immediately began negotiating to take them over. After an outlay of £45,000 (about £150,000 today), he spent 15 years finding out all he could about her life, her writings and her collections, and was able to fill gaps by buying 600 further volumes that had strayed.

Several of the missing books were owned by Alan Clark, the Tory MP and diarist who was Sir Kenneth’s son. Over several visits to Saltwood Castle in Kent, Ramsden negotiated the purchase of a number of books for the Wharton collection, while the acerbic Clark made notes in his diary about their last meeting in April 1999. “Little oh-so-meek George Ramsden was here, yet again, on Saturday,” wrote Clark. “We finally ‘dealt’ and I exchanged some more of the Wharton books for a selection of my father’s ‘personal’ library and a cheque for £2,000. I would have settled for less; he might have paid more. In the end I found him quite sympathetic.”

He also recalled Ramsden’s thoughts on books and their presence in his life. “He said that suiting books, bindings and ‘runs’ to shelves was ‘like arranging flowers’,” wrote Clark. The politician was amused, but he underestimated Ramsden’s business acumen. He played his cards close, not revealing his larger scheme to those from whom he was buying. He went on to sell the library for a nominal £1.5 million (about £2.6 million today), to the Mount, a cultural centre in Massachusetts based at Wharton’s home.

In 1999 he published Edith Wharton’s Library, a bibliographical investigation, in the words of Hermione Lee’s introduction, of “her education, her inspiration, and her workshop”. The library includes not only books annotated by her, and others presented by Henry James and Teddy Roosevelt, but books she inherited from her father and acquisitions on a huge range of subjects.

In an interview with the Bookdealer in 2000 Ramsden said: “I have always been excited by libraries, and Edith Wharton’s library is a thrilling thing to possess. An author’s library can add so much to one’s understanding and appreciation of their writing.”

George Edward Ramsden was born in 1953, the son of James Ramsden and his wife, Juliet (née Ponsonby). His father was a former MP for Harrogate and is the last British politician to have held the title of secretary of state for war, from 1963 to 1964. His mother has been a tireless worker for the Carr Gomm Society, which offers care and housing for disadvantaged and lonely people.

George was brought up at Old Sleningford Hall, the family seat at Mickley in North Yorkshire, which is an imposing early 19th-century house with a 350-acre working farm and noted gardens. He was one of five children, three boys and two girls. The youngest, Charlotte, was an artist who, with her husband Mark Cheverton, set up the Leith School of Art in 1988. Both were killed in a car accident in 1991.

A natural countryman, the young Ramsden loved to walk on the land around the house or on the moors. He enjoyed fishing as well as cooking and eating his catch and, as a boy, was often to be found standing in a pile of wood shavings in his carpentry workshop. He was also a fine shot. On one occasion, finding himself without any money at a pub, he paid for his beer with rabbits.

He attended St George’s School, Windsor, and then Eton, where he cut an eccentric figure. His English master, Michael Meredith, was a significant influence.

Another master at Eton wrote of Ramsden in 1967: “When I go on my rounds in the evening it is a rare event if I do not sometimes meet George, wandering about with a rather lost and vacant look on his face. He generally forgets to wear braces and a large hiatus of white shirt appears between his waistcoat and his trousers. He mooches around in a genial, affable but decidedly unmilitary manner. George has become something of a character about the school. I notice that practically everybody he passes seems to greet him.”

After school Ramsden initially read modern languages at Magdalene College, Cambridge before switching to English literature. Here, he founded a trad jazz band, the Baggy Chords, and played trombone as they toured the country. In one eight-week term he was said to have played 55 concerts. He also played tennis and was a talented rower, winning the coxless pairs at the Henley regatta.

As one friend described him at this time: “He came across as a mix between Charlie Chaplin and Lord Peter Wimsey, with romantic, handsome looks, a shock of hair and sparkling ebony eyes.”

His father’s plan for him after Cambridge was that he would go to the Bar via Inner Temple. He spent an indolent year there, delighting in the language of the law, but failing to turn up for his tutorials. His destiny was among books, not barristers.

In 1977 he took a Christmas job working for the bookseller John Saumarez Smith at Heywood Hill in Mayfair. He stayed for three years learning his trade at the foot of the master in a shop once memorably described as an “eight-hour cocktail party without any drink”.

Reasoning that south London was under-provided with bookshops, he set up his own in Camberwell and called it Stone Trough Books after the long-defunct family brewery, but also because it was considered an attractive name without being too vulgar.

A friend recalled popping into his shop to find Ramsden lying on his back as a customer stepped over an outstretched leg. “What are you doing George?” she asked. “Reading!” came the deadpan reply.

After his marriage to Jane Wynn (née Thompson) in 1986, he moved the shop to the bibliophile city of York. She survives him along with their three children: Laura, who is a tutor; Edward, who is a tour operator; and Juliet, who works in an arts bookshop.

Ramsden became an occasional publisher, with titles including a translation of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman. In 1997 he edited Christopher Isherwood’s letters home from school, which he entitled The Repton Letters in sly tribute to The Upton Letters, the fictional correspondence written by AC Benson in 1905.

In 2009 he published Leith: Scotland’s Independent Art School Founder and Followers, a heartfelt and beautifully researched tribute to his sister and brother-in-law.

He had perhaps 5,000 books at home in Settrington. The shop in York’s Walmgate was not economic, but became his true home, where he would often sleep.

Despite his melancholia, Ramsden had an infectious laugh and a dry wit. Arriving at a dinner party once, he handed a box of chocolates to his hostess, who later noticed that it had been opened. “George, there are three missing,” she pointed out. “Yes, well,” he replied. “The A1 is a very dull road and I got peckish.”