E. Gordon Duff

Liverpool, 1863 - 1924, Oxford

BiographyLC name authority rec. n50026938
LC heading:Duff, E. Gordon (Edward Gordon), 1863-1924

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Duff, Edward Gordon (1863–1924), bibliographer.
Duff, Edward Gordon (1863–1924), bibliographer, was born on 16 February 1863 in Liverpool, the youngest of four sons (there were no daughters) of Robert Duff, merchant, of Prince's Park, Liverpool, and his wife, Jane Gordon. He was educated at Cheltenham College, entered Wadham College, Oxford, in 1883, and took a pass degree in classics in 1887. While at Oxford he began to draw up a catalogue of the fifteenth-century books in the Bodleian Library. Neither the Bodleian nor the British Museum, however, would offer him a place, and in 1889 he began to read for the bar.

Duff had to wait for more congenial work until 1893, when Mrs Rylands appointed him her librarian. He had the task of cataloguing her books (including the Spencer library) advising on new purchases, organizing the collection, and supervising its transfer to the new John Rylands Library in Manchester. The library opened in 1900, but Duff resigned shortly afterwards, having quarrelled with the trustees. He never took another permanent job, but supported himself with freelance work (he catalogued books for the London booksellers Pearson & Co.), with academic appointments (he was Sandars reader in bibliography at Cambridge in 1899, 1904, and 1911), and with the income from his books.

Duff's first work, Early Printed Books, was published in 1893, followed by Early English Printing in 1896. His works on early printing included two textbooks, The Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of Westminster and London from 1476 to 1535 (1906) and The English Provincial Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders to 1557 (1912), a biographical dictionary, A Century of the English Book Trade, 1457–1557 (1905), and a bibliography, twenty-eight years in the making, of Fifteenth Century English Books (1917). A work on armorial book-stamps remained unpublished.

Duff regarded bibliography as a science: his work set new standards of accuracy. He was scathing in his criticism of colleagues whose work did not match these standards. A Liverpool friend remembered him as ‘a tall spare man with alert eyes and a very beautiful voice, but with an ironic and often unkind humour about his contemporaries’.

Duff never married. He lived in Liverpool until 1915, and thereafter in Oxford. He died at his home, 293 Woodstock Road, Oxford, on 28 September 1924.

Arnold Hunt, rev.
(Hunt, Arnold . “Duff, Edward Gordon (1863–1924).” Robert Brown In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman, 2004. Accessed July 20, 2015. www.oxforddnd.com).

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Last Updated8/7/24

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