Obituary: Dennis Rhodes, F.S.A.

Dennis Everard Rhodes, Gold Medallist of the Bibliographical Society in 2007 and staunch contributor to The Library from 1952, died on 7 April 2020, aged 97. He was born on 14 March 1923 at Stourbridge in Worcestershire, the only child of Nelson Rhodes and Ida Rhodes (née Sutton). When Dennis was still very young his father became a headmaster and the family moved to East Bridgford near Nottingham. Dennis was educated at Nottingham High School from where he won an open scholarship in Classics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His studies began in 1941 with classical Greek, but he soon switched to Italian language and literature. When a year later they were interrupted by military service, he was already fluent enough in Italian to join the Intelligence Corps as interpreter during the Italian Campaign, stationed mainly in southern Italy. In this role he not only perfected his use of the language, but it opened up to him a country, its culture and its people that he came to love and where he felt at home. He carried this association seamlessly over into his later professional life. Thus, unusually, he had the good fortune that his military experience turned out to be a perfect complement to his academic education. Italy in all its great cultural variety remained one of the two poles between which he conducted his life, the other being the British Museum, not less so when it was transformed into the British Library (neither of them a monoculture either).

On demobilization he returned to Cambridge and graduated in 1946. After less than happy years as a schoolmaster he successfully applied for the post of Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum Library. When he took up the post early in 1950 his mentors were Victor Scholderer and Leslie A. Sheppard. Both were deeply immersed in the cataloguing and investigation of early printed books in the collection, and Dennis followed them in the same direction. He thrived in the Italian section, dealing with material of every century of printing, but his particular interest was in incunabula, later extended to Italian printing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Meanwhile, he was awarded in 1956 his doctorate from University College, London, for his thesis on 'Vivaldo Belcalzer and the Mantuan dialect of c. 1300', supervised by Professor Roberto Weiss.

Dennis remained utterly loyal to his two mentors; his commitment to the library lasted his lifetime, through its separation from the Museum and becoming the British Library in 1973, his appointment as head of incunabula in 1974 as successor to George Painter, his promotion to Deputy Keeper on merit in 1978, his retirement in 1985, and the move to the new building in 1998; almost to the end of his life he simply stayed on, most of those years continuing with work behind the scenes. In the early years his library duties, apart from acquisition of Italian materials and cataloguing for the General Catalogue, included a memorable stint as Superintendent of the North Library in the late 1950s. It brought out the ebullient side of his personality, which disguised his discerning eye for people and their research values. Not only did he keep readers of rare and early books in good order with bonhomie and good humour, he also generously shared with them his already impressive knowledge of the collections. His assistance to readers seeking support was gratefully acknowledged by a generation of scholars, many of whom became friends, not least among the overseas visitors who returned every year.

There are obvious milestones in his long career in the form of the publication of books. Presiding over a reading room is conducive to long-lasting projects that may entail such chores as reading through the General Catalogue from beginning to end. The first such feats of endurance Dennis accomplished (together with his colleague Anna Simoni) resulted in the publication of two revised volumes of Halkett and Lang's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature (1956, 1962). Later, the short-title catalogues of seventeenth-century Italian and early Spanish books in the British...