Education: Mr. Cox

The guest list read something like a combination of Who’s Who and Burke’s Peerage. E.M. Forster was there; so was Novelist Rose Macaulay and Viscount Jowitt and the Earl of Ilchester. The man they had all come to honor, neither peer nor poet, was known to most of the guests as plain Mr. Cox.

Last week Mr. Cox was Starting his 70th year on the staff of the famed London Library. Though he has become a familiar figure among London’s great and near-great, few know where he lives, or what he does after he pads out of the library each evening at closing time. But there is scarcely a scholar in London who has not at some time sought his advice. “His name,” said the London Times last week, “is said to have come more often than that of any other man alive in the paragraphs of thanks in the prefaces of learned works.”

Frederick James Cox first popped up among the shelves and stacks of the London Library when he was a lad of 16. In those days, the library was only 41 years old—a private place of study, established by men like Thomas Carlyle who wanted something more convenient and less crowded than the British Museum. Mr. Cox never knew Mr. Carlyle; nor did he know such early readers as Napoleon III and Lord Macaulay. But he used to chat with Gladstone (“When you opened a door for him, he always raised his hat”), and he remembers Herbert Spencer struggling over his Principles of Sociology and Lord Granville queueing up for a book on the Irish Parliament.

As the years passed and the library grew in fame and riches, Londoners learned that Mr. Cox was no ordinary librarian. Perched in portly majesty on his chair behind the big librarian’s counter, he seemed to know the 500,000 books as if they were personal friends. He knew each one’s virtue, and lamented each one’s fault; and if he happened to love a book (as he often did), he knew how to pass his affection on. Whoever sought his help—from Winston Churchill to Somerset Maugham to the little daughter of a member asking for a book on witches—was never disappointed. Mr. Cox would merely turn his head, fold his hands in front of him, and let the titles come rumbling out from under his white mustachios.

Last week, his party behind him, Mr. Cox was back on his perch again. At 85, that was where he wanted to be.