Remembering Edwin Gilcher

Remembering Edwin Gilcher WE LOST a generous friend and superior scholar earlier this year. Ed Gilcher was not from the Academy, though many in the professoriate here and abroad relied on his authoritative work. He was a man of various interests and trades. Before the Great Depression he studied at New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts. His long life's journey carried him from actor to puppeteer, from newspaper correspondent to wire editor, from Town Justice to proofreader, from bookmobile librarian to book reviewer, story-teller, and bibliophile. It was the role of bibliophile that remained Ed's passion from the 1930s forward. He dedicated himself to the refined work of the bibliographer . In particular, he studied the life of George Moore and gathered the finest private collection of his books in the world, now housed at Arizona State University's Hayden Library. Moore posed a great challenge. He revised his works more than any figure of the 1880-1920 period. To "estimate the true value of an author's art," said Moore himself, one must "study his revisions." This Ed did with patience and the rigorous skills of the evidentiary researcher and bibliographer in A Bibliography of George Moore (1970) and Supplement to A Bibliography of George Moore (1988). His scholarly study and learning was a vocation in the true sense of the word—from vocatio summons, from vox voice. In the too-oft overprofessionalized scholar-business of our time, Ed remained a Knight of Faith, steadfast to his calling, reminding us always of the purity of learning, and of the intelligent heart that shares that learning. In his early 90s he was still active, during his final days helping a young man from Oxford who sought his expertise in confirming a belief that in the spring of 1886 Moore wrote an unsigned article on Balzac for Dublin's Freeman's Journal. He came to agree with Brendan Fleming, and we publish this recovered essay by Moore, dedicating it to Ed Gilcher. "We do not grieve for the dead because they have been deprived of the pleasures of life," said Moore, "but because of our loss." We grieve, Ed, and we remember. You made a difference. Robert Langenfeld 355 ...