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Wharton, Edith

the library of, [11] 42; The Custom of the Country, [77] 16

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20060901143828 George Ramsden with Laura Bush - George Ramsden on Edith Wharton's library. Photography by Kevin Sprague

Collecting Edith

George Ramsden on Edith Wharton’s library

In March 1984, full of the joys of spring and possibly slightly mad, I bought the library of the American novelist Edith Wharton from Maggs Bros., the London booksellers, and subsequently discovered that it was incomplete. Maggs had purchased about two thousand books from Edith Wharton’s godson, Colin Clark, which for forty-seven years had been at Saltwood Castle in Kent. Here his father, the art historian Kenneth Clark, Edith Wharton’s friend, had completely integrated them into his own library, which complicated the process of identification and extraction. This had been supervised by Colin’s brother Alan who was by then the custodian of Saltwood.

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