Julian Roberts

Julian Roberts was a leading librarian, a notable bibliographer and a book historian. He could also be modest to the point of self-deprecation despite his remarkable achievements as an administrator and as a scholar.

Throughout his working life, in the face of the ever increasing administrative demands on his time, and despite the enormous changes brought about by electronic cataloguing, Roberts never lost touch with his primary reason for becoming a librarian: his passionate interest in early printed books. He was dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts and never happier than when handling them or helping in the acquisition of collections or items which would otherwise be dispersed or lost.

His rare historical sense enabled him to discern what might be of interest to future scholars, a sense which informed his own bibliographical research. When he joined Andrew Watson in the early 1970s in editing John Dee’s library catalogue, Dee’s reputation as a magician and astrologer made him seem a marginal figure.

Their edition, published in 1990, was critical in establishing Dee’s central position in the intellectual life of Elizabethan England.

Similarly, the patient work of years, undertaken in stolen hours working on the Port Books in the Public Record Office and the Plantin archives in Antwerp, enabled him to establish the outlines of the important trade in Continental books imported through London in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Richard Julian Roberts was born in 1930. He was educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, where he received a grounding in the Classics and discovered a lifelong passion as a birdwatcher. In his first year at Magdalen College, Oxford, he switched from Classics to English. An interest in contemporary British poetry, and in collecting it, was to last throughout his life, but his flair for languages proved invaluable in his subsequent career, which began in Lambeth Palace Library in the early 1950s. Not only was he involved there in the daily handling and cataloguing of books, but, characteristically, his work as a librarian led to scholarly publication. His discovery of the manuscript poems of an unknown follower of George Herbert, the clergyman Cardell Goodman, appeared in a limited edition, Beawty in Raggs, or, Divine Phancies putt into Broken Verse, in 1958.

In the same year Roberts was appointed assistant keeper at the British Museum, where he remained for the next 16 years, becoming deputy superintendent of the Round Reading Room and responsible for the selection and cataloguing of early English books and modern Greek materials. One of his duties was the supervision of trainee librarians.

During his time at the Museum he made substantial contributions in the planning of the 20th-century volume of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1972), edited by his colleague Ian Willison, to which Roberts completed almost the whole of the Poetry section.

In 1961 Roberts became, jointly with Sir Frank Francis, secretary of the Bibliographical Society, a post which he was to hold for the next 20 years: his connection with the Society, including its presidency from 1986-88, lasted for the rest of his life. In 1974 Roberts returned to Oxford as the Bodleian’s Keeper of Printed Books. Once there he was elected Fellow of Wolfson College, where he was to serve as the College’s second-in-command, its Vicegerent (1983-84), and to which he remained warmly attached. He set up home with his wife, Anne, and their two children in the Oxfordshire village of Tackley, where over the years he and Anne developed a beautiful and extensive garden.

The 1980s in university libraries were marked by cutbacks, administrative reorganisation and the introduction of computerised cataloguing, all of which increased his responsibilities. The premature death of John Joliffe, Bodley’s Librarian, in 1985, meant that Roberts became Acting Librarian, and then Deputy Librarian, a post he held from 1986 until his retirement in 1997. During his time there acquisition of, in particular, the Dunston Collection (1981), the Marlborough Vicars Library (1985), and especially the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature, owed a great deal to Roberts’s interest and support. He represented the Bodleian Library and the University nationally and internationally on an assortment of organisations.

During these years he continued to publish, and to undertake new research, while maintaining his involvement with the Bibliographical Society. In 1983 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and from 1994 acted as consultant to the British Academy-backed edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (OUP, 2001, continuing online).

After his retirement, he continued to give conference papers, write reviews, publish articles, and, despite his impaired mobility in later years, to participate in the London meetings of the Bibliographical Society. Notable among his later publications are his contributions to the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 4 (2002), and the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volumes 1 and 2 (2006), and the 14 biographies he contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Most recently he gave a lecture on the 17th-century polymath John Selden at an international conference held at Magdalen College in June this year.

Roberts will be remembered not just for his contribution to the development of two national libraries, the British and Bodleian, but for his erudition, his enthusiasm and his intellectual generosity to others. It is fitting that earlier this year he was invited to the dinner arranged by the University of Cardiff to celebrate its notable acquisition of the Rare Book Collection from Cardiff City Council; invited not in any representative capacity, but for his timely intervention as a Welsh citizen.

He is survived by his wife, Anne Ducé, whom he married in 1957, and a son and daughter.

Julian Roberts, librarian, bibliographer and scholar, was born on May 18, 1930. He died on October 20, 2010, aged 80