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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.