Anthony Hobson (book historian)
Anthony Robert Alwyn Hobson, FBA (5 September 1921 – 12 July 2014) was a British auctioneer and historian, specialising in the history of books.[1]
Hobson was born on 5 September 1921. His wealthy father, Geoffrey Dudley Hobson (1882–1949), had purchased the auction house Sotheby's in 1909 (with Sir Montague Barlow and Felix Warre) and was a renowned historian of books. After Eton, Anthony went to New College, Oxford and then served in the Scots Guards in the Second World War, including a period in Italy. Demobilised in 1946, he joined Sotheby's in 1947 to work in the book department. From 1949 to 1971, he was head of the department and was also a director at Sotheby's.[2]
Hobson was a member of the Roxburghe Club from 1982 until his death, received the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society in 1992 (he had been its president from 1977 to 1979), served as president of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie from 1985 to 1999, was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1992, and in 1979 was appointed Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy. He died on 12 July 2014.[2][3]
Publications[edit]
- French and Italian Collectors and Their Bindings (Oxford: The Roxburghe Club, 1953)
- Great Libraries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970)
- Apollo and Pegasus: An Enquiry into the Formation and Dispersal of a Renaissance Library (Amsterdam: Gerard Th. Van Heusden, 1975)
- Humanists and Bookbinders: The Origins and Diffusion of the Humanistic Bookbinding, 1459–1559 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
- Renaissance Book Collecting: Jean Grolier and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, their Books and Bindings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
References[edit]
- ^ Nicolas Barker, "Hobson, Anthony Robert Alwyn", The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed., Oxford University Press, 2018). Retrieved 28 January 2024.
- ^ a b David McKitterick, "Anthony Robert Alwyn Hobson", Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, vol. 15 (2016), pp. 55–67.
- ^ "Anthony Robert Alwyn Hobson", The Roxburghe Club. Retrieved 28 January 2024.