Paul Quarrie

Continental Books & Illuminations

Paul Quarrie has been working in the field of rare Books for over fifty years, as librarian (notably at Eton College), lecturer at UCL, Senior Director of Sotheby’s Department of Books and Manuscripts, and at Maggs. At Sotheby’s he dealt mostly with early continental material, but also was involved in the sale of the Paul Leon-James Joyce collection to the National Library of Ireland. Primarily he worked from 1996 on the library of the earls of Macclesfield and masterminded the dispersal of this celebrated collection, beginning with the sale (1999/2000) to Cambridge University Library of scientific letters and papers of Newton, William Jones, and others, and encompassing 12 auction sales (2004-2008) as well as since then a many sales through Maggs to a number of institutions and private collections in the UK, Europe and the USA.

He has been a frequent lecturer on the subject of books and book collecting in Europe and America and has organised exhibitions at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York (1990), at Dulwich Picture Gallery (1991), at Eton, and in 2011 at Winchester College. Most recent publications are two anthologies for the chairman's Everyman Pocket Poets series, one of English translations of Horace, and the other of translations of less well known Greek poets,  Poems from Greek Antiquity. At present he is working on a similar anthology of English Rural Poetry, his memoirs and a collection of essays on library history.