Nowell-Smith had been getting rid of many minor items in order to buy into his new enthusiasm, first edition inscribed or association copies of the very best and greatest poets.The idea of change in any collection was for him the signal fascination. A collection is an infinitely perfectable entity; the work is never quite done; the appetite is always whetted by the prospect of tracking down desiderata and of establishing their strange bibliographical histories, anomalies and absurdities. On this occasion he decided to offer his very best and most covetable inscribed volumes, under the punning title “Wordsworth to Robert Graves and Beyond”. This sepulchral wit was confined to the catalogue, however; the collection itself was at this time inspired with new life and immediately began to recreate itself.In the years following the Bodleian exhibition, during which he had been buying and selling vigorously, visitors to his house were taken aback not only by the uncharacteristically huge gaps in the once-thronged shelves, but also by a bare wall where once a giant cabinet bookcase had stood, now summarily dismissed from service. In those days he would be equally gleeful in the possession of Hwomely Rhymes by William Barnes, the Dorset dialect poet; Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants in pompous morocco-bound quarto; and Eliot’s signed dedication to Virginia and Leonard Woolf who had printed his Poems (1919) and bound it in raucous homemade Bloomsbury wallpaper at the Hogarth Press.The emphasis became rather more grand after 1983, the year he was asked to exhibit a selection of his books at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Later positions included the presidency of the Bibliographical Society (1962-64); the Lyell Readership in Bibliography at Oxford (1965-66); and trusteeship of Dove Cottage (1974-82).His lasting avocation, however, was rare books: the focus of his collection shifted over the years, and he would as readily sell ranks upon ranks of his treasures as buy them if a new interest took hold and he required cash to finance it. In the late 1970s, for example, he aimed to acquire first editions of the early volumes of most English poets from the Romantics to the present. Although he will be remembered as a great bibliophile and bibliographical scholar of the highest order, his career was varied. His longest tenure was with the Times, where between 1932 and 1944 he was a member of the editorial staff, including two years as Assistant Editor of the Times Literary Supplement; during the Second World War he was a member of the Naval Intelligence Unit.
He was appointed Secretary and Librarian of the London Library in 1950, a post from which he retired in 1956. Each morning Simon Nowell-Smith’s first order of business was scanning the daily newspaper obituaries. He would explain that he was checking to be sure he hadn’t died without knowing it. That such a confusion might arise is not surprising, for if he had any views on the next world he must have imagined heaven as a place much like earth: a comfortable, hospitable house, filled with superb rare books, a serious cellar, set in a well- tended and abundant garden, and above all presided over by someone quite a lot like himself.

At his trial he appeared in a wheelchair, pushed by a young aide. It looked like a bid for sympathy, but Kanemaru’s career really was beyond salvation; in his last years he suffered increasingly from diabetes, which contributed to his final stroke yesterday morning.Shin Kanemaru, politician: born Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan 17 September 1914; twice married (three sons); died Yamanashi 28 March 1996.. Electoral rules barred political donations of more than 1.5m yen; Kanemaru, it turned out, had received as much as 500m yen. Investigators raided his offices and removed boxes of share certificates and gold ingots. Even before the charges were formally filed, he resigned his party post and soon after his party seat and leadership of the faction.Almost as shocking as the vastness of the corruption was the leniency of the sentence: Kanemaru was fined just 200,000 yen. In 1992, the head of the Sagawa Kyubin trucking company was arrested for political presents worth 40 billion yen (some pounds 250m by today’s exchange rates of 160 yen to the pound).