Theodore Besterman

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

Besterman came as a teenager to London, where he pursued autodidactic 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 investigated psychic phenomena for the Society for Psychical Research, for example, via Annie Besant, about which he published a biography. His criticism of a book by Gwendolyn Hack an Italian medium was the reason for Conan Doyle to withdraw from society.

Then he turned especially to the bibliography, was a lecturer at the London School of Librarianship, worked after the Second World War in bibliographic questions at UNESCO ( Head of the Department for Information Interchange ) and in 1945 was the first editor of the Journal of Documentation. He has attained primarily through his work A World Bibliography of Bibliographies notoriety.

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

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

Writings

  • 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 in the Societas Bibliographica, Lausanne 1955 et seq.)
  • Voltaire. Winkler Verlag, Munich 1971 [ Translated from English by Siegfried Schmitz ]
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