
Arthur Freeman
Rare Books & Manuscripts
It is with great sadness that I must announce the death of my husband and partner Arthur Freeman, at home in London on 30 May 2025. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1938, he spent ten years at Harvard as an undergraduate, graduate student, and Junior Fellow, studying with Alfred Harbage, Douglas Bush, William A. Jackson, Archibald MacLeish, and Robert Lowell. His first book of poetry was published in 1959 (nine more followed, most recently a retrospective collection in 2020), and by the mid-1960s articles and books principally relating to Tudor and Jacobean literature and history also began to appear. At the same time Arthur was developing what he sometimes called a ‘shadow career’ as a bookseller: in America he was a co‑founder of both Ximenes Rare Books and Hofmann & Freeman, and in 1975 he left a professorship at Boston University to move to London, where he enjoyed a long and pleasant consultancy with Bernard Quaritch Ltd. We married in 1987 and ten years later set up Arthur Freeman Rare Books and Manuscripts, offering books by direct quotation, through catalogues, and since 2024 by way of the present (deliberately minimalist) website.
In the coming months I shall be issuing at least two catalogues of books described by Arthur over the past year or so, and hope also to be able to add further notes to our ‘Literary Miscellanea’ page.