Theodore Besterman

Theodore Besterman

Theodore Deodatus Nathaniel Besterman (born November 22, 1904 in Lodz , † November 10, 1976 in Banbury ) was a British author who was known for his occupation with Voltaire . He also dealt with parapsychology and bibliography .

Besterman came to London as a teenager , where he pursued self-taught studies, particularly in the reading room of the British Museum . In 1925 he became chairman of the British Federation of Youth Movements and from 1927 to 1935 he studied parapsychological phenomena for the Society for Psychical Research, for example on Annie Besant , about whom he published a biography. His criticism of a book by Gwendolyn Hack about an Italian medium prompted Conan Doyle to withdraw from society.

He then turned to bibliography in particular, was a lecturer at the London School of Librarianship, worked on bibliographical issues at UNESCO after the Second World War (as head of the information exchange department) and was the first editor of the Journal of Documentation in 1945 . He has achieved general fame primarily through his work A World Bibliography of Bibliographies .

From the 1950s onwards, he dealt primarily with Voltaire. He lived in Voltaire's former estate in Les Délices near Geneva , where he founded the Institut et Musée Voltaire. He edited many of Voltaire's works, translated them into English and was editor of his correspondence from 1953 (in 107 volumes). Besterman was editor of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (from 1955) and wrote a biography of Voltaire in 1969.

He also collected art books and photos and was editor of the Printed Sources of Western Art (29 volumes).

Fonts

• Crystal gazing. A Study in the History, Distribution, Theory and Practice of Scrying . Rider Ltd., London 1924.
• Mrs. Annie Besant. A modern prophet . Kegan Paul & Co., London 1934.
• The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography . Oxford University Press, London 1935 (Oxford Books on Bibliography).
• A World Bibliography of Bibliographies . Oxford University Press, London 1939–1940 (later editions by Societas Bibliographica, Lausanne 1955 ff.).
• Voltaire . Winkler Verlag, Munich 1971 [translated from English by Siegfried Schmitz]
• A Bibliography of Sir James George Frazer , OM, London: Macmillan, 1934

literature

• The Age of the Enlightenment. Studies presented to Theodore Besterman , Edinburgh / London 1967 (Festschrift)
• Francesco Cordasco: Theodore Besterman, bibliographer and editor . Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ 1992, ISBN 0-8108-2497-3 .