University of Virginia Library

British Museum Library

Foxon joined the British Museum Library staff in 1950. After a few
months training, he became involved in the Library's major project, the

revision of the general catalogue. This work had begun in the 1930s
and Foxon came in at the beginning of the letter D. Much of his time
was spent on Defoe, where the experience with first editions, chapbooks,
and cheap reprints proved invaluable. Subsequently he became involved
with Dickens before the revision was brought to a halt. His attention
then turned to the Ashley Library, T. J. Wise's collection of English
literature. The Ashley Library had been bought en bloc by the Museum
in 1937, and its printed books were being added to the catalogue as it
was revised. With the major project abandoned, the Ashley books had
to be incorporated into the current catalogue, and Foxon was given that
responsibility. In 1957 he was put in charge of antiquarian purchasing,
and Julian Roberts, who became his colleague a year later, has praised
the energy and enthusiasm Foxon brought to this side of the Library's
work after the financial difficulties and fierce competition from American
libraries of the inter-war years. Roberts has also paid tribute to
Foxon's general influence on the Library in the late fifties and early
sixties, quoting a comment from the Principal Keeper of Printed Books
on Foxon's leaving, `We are all Foxonians now.'[12]

The Library brought Foxon into contact with the Bibliographical
Society. Frank Francis, then Deputy Keeper of Printed Books but later
to become Director of the Museum, was Secretary of the Bibliographical
Society and editor of The Library.[13] He encouraged Foxon to become
involved in the Bibliographical Society, and he soon became its librarian,
spending lunch-hours and Saturday afternoons in the library at the top
of a spiral staircase over the British Academy offices, then at the back
of the Royal Academy. Foxon served ex officio on the Society's Council,
and started to write for The Library and the Book Collector on points
he came across in his cataloguing. Francis also made a helpful suggestion.
He pointed out to Foxon that a post at the Library opened up the possibility
of undertaking some major research project—a seed that was
later to bear fruit in the catalogue English Verse, 1701-1750.

Foxon saw his early years at the Library as marking an important
change in British bibliography, with many of the important influences
coming from America. He looked on the Cambridge Bibliography of
English Literature (1940) and John Hayward's catalogue of the Rothschild
library as the last gasps of a dying world.[14] The CBEL had great
value as a handbook for literary scholars, but it worked by listing books

rather than by identifying and describing them. It was a fine example
of enumerative bibliography, but it was bibliographical only in a thin
sense. Hayward's folio two volumes were more sophisticated in analysis,
but their chief aim was to promote the trophies of a rich collector and
the number of copies examined was consequently restricted. The catalogue
was useful to scholars but it addressed their interests, literary or
historical, indirectly. Foxon felt a sympathy for both these forms of
bibliography—the scholarly handbook and the detailed record of copies—
but he thought the future of bibliography lay in the fusion of the two.
He was excited by the new bibliography, mainly centred in the United
States. In conversation he singled out the founding of Studies in Bibliography
by Fredson Bowers in 1948 as a central event; he was conscious
that Bowers's emphasis on physical evidence and on the wide consultation
of copies was a continuing influence on him. Other work that greatly
impressed Foxon in this period was Allan Stevenson's essay on paper in
the first number of Studies in Bibliography and his `Watermarks are
Twins' in volume four, and Bill Todd's work on press figures in his
thesis. The Americans exposed weaknesses in the gentleman collectors,
and these Foxon was determined to avoid.