Obituary of John Harthan

John Plant Harthan (1916–2002) was a librarian with a special interest in bookbindings and illuminated manuscripts. He joined the Library of the Victoria & Albert Museum (now the National Art Library) in 1948 as an Assistant Keeper. He attended classes in bookbinding to back up his academic knowledge with practical experience, and, as a member of the Designer Bookbinders society, ensured he remained up to date with modern developments in bookbinding. In 1957 he became Keeper of the Library.

From The Times, 21 February 2002

Librarian of the Victoria and Albert Museum, who published standard works on aspects of the history of the book
John Harthan, librarian, was born on April 15, 1916. He died on January 9, 2002. aged 85.

John Harthan was one of the generation of senior curators who joined the V&A shortly after the Second World War and guided the museum's fortunes through the relatively calm, expansive and prosperous period before culture became a competitive business in the Thatcher years.

John Plant Harthan was one of four sons of a doctor in Evesham, a place for which he always had a strong affection. He was educated at Bryanston, a school famous for its cultivation of the arts, and he played the flute there and for the rest of his life. After taking a first in history at Jesus College, Cambridge, he took the librarianship diploma at University College London. He became a Fellow of the Library Association in 1939.

As part of his training he compiled a bibliography of Baroque and Rococo architecture in Potsdam and Berlin, an early signal that his chief interest lay in art history and that his tastes were pretty up-to-date. His first posts were at Southampton University library (1940-43), the Royal Society of Medicine library in London (1943-44), and Cambridge University Library (1944-48). In 1948 he found his niche in the library of the Victoria and Albert, which is not just a library for museum staff, but a public library devoted to art history.

Harthan's features could be somewhat forbidding until they were illuminated by a droll smile. The next thing one noticed was his bad stammer. This must have affected his way of dealing with the world at large, but in personal relations it never inhibited his sociability or his sympathetic, humorous interest in others. His friends were mostly from artistic circles, and included Charles Handley-Read, the distinguished collector of Victorian art. Harthan was active in the Georgian Group and an enthusiastic traveller.

He joined the V&A as an Assistant keeper in the library. The keeper was the avuncular Arthur Wheen, and the Deputy Keeper James Wardrop, an internationally renowned expert on Italian humanistic calligraphy. In those relaxed days, museum departments were run by their keepers with the help of general factotums of lower rank, leaving others in the keeper grade to devote themselves to scholarship rather than administration. The V&A library was, and is, not only an art history library, but the museum's collection of the 'art of the book'. Harthan devoted himself, therefore first to the study of bookbindings, following in the footsteps of the great Victorian keeper W H J Weale in cataloguing the library's collection.

Later he devoted similar care to compiling detailed catalogue descriptions of the library's illuminated manuscripts. His learning was condensed into two short books published by the museum, 'Bookbindings' (1950, with revised editions in 1961 and 1985), and 'An Introduction to Illuminated Manuscripts' (1983), produced after his retirement for the series of V&A, 'Introductions to the Decorative Arts'.

He attended classes in practical bookbinding to ensure that he knew what he was talking about, and through the Designer Bookbinders society, he was in touch with modern developments in artistic - or at least imaginative - bookbinding. Works by members of the society were bought for the library, and exhibitions were held in the museum in 1971 and 1974. Harthan's interest in binding combined with his predilection for heraldry and genealogy in his studies of the Clements Collection of Armorial Bindings, published in three articles in Apollo in 1960-61.

When was due to retire in 1962 and Wardrop was his natural successor. Wardrop, however, went into hospital for a trivial operation in 1957 and died unexpectedly, so Harthan look over as Keeper. He was, perhaps, an unwilling administrator but he was a conscientious one, starting each day with a neat list (he had librarian's handwriting: scrupulously legible, if not quite elegant) of things to be worked through.

Gentle and conservative by temperament, he advanced only with great caution into changes. All the same, his period of office saw considerable developments in the library. It is situated in the heart of the V&A, which seems symbolically appropriate and has the advantage, as Harthan gleefully pointed out to a new member of staff, that if one is feeling stale one can easily wander out into the galleries to recuperate one's spirits. But this location makes it difficult to find space for expansion. When Harthan joined the library its suite of three august reading-rooms was flanked at each end by remote bookstacks in the attics. These were replaced in 1963 by a larger but more compact slack, built into the upper parts of a lofty gallery and opening from the centre of the library. This rearrangement, which at once made the library more effective was carried through during the directorship of Sir Trenchard Cox, who became a close friend of Harthan's.

The library then catered for a comparatively small community of scholars. (If students used it they were practical art students who came to make copies of illustrations and for whom jam-jars full of water were laid on - a risky procedure now abandoned.) But the 1970s saw a great expansion of the study of art history which brought ever-increasing numbers of readers to the library. Having once been known as the National Art Library, it has adopted that title today. Many did not use it in Harthan's time, but it was a national library nonetheless, and attracted the passing notice of the Dainton Committee on National Libraries in 1969. The then director. Sir John Pope-Hennessy, held Dainton at bay, however, and it took some time for the V&A library to assume its natural position of leadership among art libraries in Britain (and, perhaps, the world).

Harthan may have been grateful for his director's protection in this respect, but he was less grateful in 1970, when Pope-Hennessy, without consulting him, accepted the gift of a huge library of children's hooks, the Renier Collection. Although the library already had a collection of children's books, and suitably expert librarians on its staff, there was no room for this collection of more than 50,000 volumes, and, when Sir Roy Strong became Director in 1974, Harthan persuaded him to outhouse it and hand it into the care of the V&A's branch museum. the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. (The revolution of fortune's wheel brought it back to South Kensington in 2000.) Harthan argued tenaciously and successfully for the increase of the library's purchase grant to keep up with the rapidly expanding literature of art history. He continued the custom of running the library through a factotum, John Fuller, on whom he greatly relied. The keeper-grade staff would meet each day in his office for tea and free-ranging conversation, which would take wing when the company included the Assistant Keeper Robert Kennedy, the poet and critic, and the polymath Charles Gibbs-Smith, one of the V&A's great eccentrics.
When retirement came in 1976, Harthan did not lapse into exhausted obscurity, but produced the big books he had always wanted to write. In his last working year he was busy with 'Books of Hours and their Owners', published in 1977 by Thames & Hudson. They also published 'The History of the Illustrated Book: The Western Tradition' in 1981. These two standard works are his principal memorial.
For much of his life he lived almost across the road from the museum, in a small, tastefully ordered terrace house. Later he went into a residential home in Hampshire, and then to the nursing home in Burford, Oxfordshire, where he died. He was unmarried.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
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