Remembering George Edward Ramsden: 12 June 1953–7 April 2019

It was with great sadness that we received the news of George Ramsden's passing on 7 April 2019. George, a bookseller based in Yorkshire, England, was the driving force behind the reconstruction of Edith Wharton's 2,700-volume library, housed, since 2006, at The Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, Massachusetts.

George attended Eton and Magdalene College, but confessed in a 2000 Bookdealer interview with Sheila Markham that, as a young man, he preferred carpentry, fishing, and other country pursuits over books. A gifted trombonist and crew member during college, it wasn't until 1977 that his "poking around secondhand bookstores" resulted in his first job in the book trade, at Heywood Hill in London. Edith Wharton was highly regarded by Heywood Hill, and it was during these years that George first collected several of her books. In 1981 George opened his own London bookshop, Stone Trough Books (named after the long-gone family brewery), where his penchant for book collecting grew into a lifelong passion. In 1990, George and his family left London and moved into the old limestone rectory in Settrington, Yorkshire. George moved Stone Trough Books to the historic city of York nearby, where he shared the shop with a sheet music dealer.

In 1985 George learned the "heart-stopping information" that the antiquarian booksellers Maggs Brothers had acquired a significant portion of Edith Wharton's library, and George was determined to buy it from them. Although his father observed that he could have bought fifteen horses for the price of the library, George acquired them nevertheless, and thus embarked on his most ambitious and passionate undertaking: reconstructing and cataloging Edith Wharton's personal library.

For the next two decades, George would tirelessly hunt down, collect, and meticulously catalog books from Wharton's library. This involved approaching the family of Colin Clark (son of Sir Kenneth Clark), who was one of two young men to inherit Wharton's library in 1937. Many books from Wharton's library had remained in the Clark's family home, Saltwood Castle, and George was determined to acquire them to make Wharton's library as complete as possible. As his brother Tom fondly recalls, "George was such a nuisance to the Clark family that they eventually gave in and made a deal with him." In the end, the Clarks sympathized with and supported George's mission.

Although he was a rather understated and modest bookseller, his skill and passion for writing book catalogs was universally admired. George's catalog Edith Wharton's Library, published in 1999 with a foreword by Hermione Lee, is a masterpiece and labor of love. At The Mount, we affectionately refer to it as "the Ramsden." He writes in his introduction, "Edith Wharton's library, her palace of dreams, the scene of her 'aloneness' but the key to her closest friendships, is the expression of a supremely imaginative life. The process of reconstructing it has been absorbing, each find an advance and a cause for rejoicing." Filled with meticulous, knowledgeable notes, the catalog is a lasting testament to George's dedication, persistence, and intelligence.

In 2005, George sold Edith Wharton's library to The Mount. He and his family traveled to Lenox in 2006 to join the celebration, which included a visit by First Lady Laura Bush. With a keen organizational eye and a deep understanding of the books' aesthetic purpose, George arranged the leather-bound volumes on Wharton's library shelves, creating a rich tapestry effect of which she would have surely approved.

George understood the trove of insights into Edith Wharton the library contains, sharing in his Markham interview that "an author's library can add so much to one's understanding and appreciation of their writing, their interests being reflected in the books on their shelves." Today, hundreds of students, visitors, and Wharton aficionados from around the world are enriched and informed by entering the library, perusing the books, and researching specific volumes.

Thanks to George Ramsden, Edith Wharton's...