Percy Muir

Percy Horace Muir (1894–1979) was a "distinguished" English antiquarian bookseller, book collector and bibliographer. He became "one of the most respected figures" in the rare books scene, serving as president of both the Antiquarian Booksellers Association and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers.

Career

Percy Horace Muir was born on 17 December 1894 in London, United Kingdom. Muir became the managing director of Elkin Mathews in 1939. He was the chair of the inaugural conference of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) in Amsterdam in 1947 and became a major role player in the evolution of the League. Ian Fleming, who would be later known for his James Bond novels. Muir would select books for Fleming who "put himself in Percy’s hands", who said he "wanted to "collect 'books that made things happen', and he left it to Percy to suggest suitable titles".

Muir authored numerous books and essays on bibliography and on book collecting. He also regularly contributed essays to periodicals such The Colophon, A Book Collectors' Quarterly, the Bibliographical Society's journal The Library, and The Bookman's Journal. He was member of the editorial board of The Book Collector and over several decades he wrote "many reviews for this journal".

He wrote pioneering works about historical children's books which "helped define the subject as worthy of serious attention". which, according to the critic Andrew Immel, succeeded F. J. Harvey Darton's Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1932) as the standard work on the genre. He compiled and co-edited Printing and the Mind of Man: A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization During Five Centuries.

Muir's Victorian Illustrated Books (1971) was among "sympathetic reappraisals of a traditionally undervalued era". They had two children, Helen and David. Online copy at Wayback Machine