Known as one of the most successful British booksellers, Norman Colbeck practiced this trade from 1923 to 1967 in London and Bournemouth, on the south coast of England. But Colbeck was "more than a bookseller, and it was widely known that bookselling was for him little more than an avocation designed to support his true vocation: the collecting of books.
"From the outset his area of special interest was the literature of the 19th century, in particular poetry; and among his colleagues in the British booktrade, whom he served as a kind of wholesaler of second-hand and antiquarian books, he achieved an enviable reputation as a bibliographical wizard" (1).
Colbeck was known to haunt even the most obscure places of opportunity for book buyers. His preface to A Bookman's Catalogue describes the auctions of the 1930's, when a number of the great English houses were being emptied of contents. "And in the 1950's the apogee of the country auction and the golden moment of the Esher sale. These were also the days before the destruction by bombs of Paternoster Row ... and of the absurd book drives of the war in which numerous books and manuscripts of some literary importance were dispersed and/or pulped. But up to 1960 at all events rare or valuable books could be found still in junk shops, silverfish rural booksellers and on the barrows of Farringdon Road" (2).
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Collections & University ArchivesNorman Colbeck attended "most of the many country sales that took place then. Indeed [bookseller] Harry Mushlin once commented wryly that Colbeck seemed to be an ubiquitous presence at the smallest sales which had little publicity and those held in the most out-of-the-way places ... and I think he was a little piqued to arrive in say, Leominster to attend a country house sale and find Norman Colbeck's old Armstrong Siddeley parked there" (3).
Colbeck was guided by not only his exceptional specialized knowledge and omniscient knowledge of literary families, but he also subscribed to an agency which publicized all auction sales.
Colbeck stored a portion of his stock at his house at 54 Ophir Road in Bournemouth. Writer George Sims describes the location after his first visit in the early 1950's: "The house itself was fascinating but tantalizing, since there Mr. Colbeck kept his personal collection of nineteenth century English literature, particularly the poets and essayists, which could be seen but not purchased. {And it was well worth seeing, for though Mr. Colbeck's resources had never been large, his knowledge was vast, his opportunities over several decades of bookselling extensive, and his devotion to collecting unmatched.) Luckily there was also a large outlying storeroom..." (3).