THERE ARE not many country houses which can boast modern art collections of the quality and rarity of

THERE ARE not many country houses which can boast modern art collections of the quality and rarity of that at Dudmaston in rural Shropshire. He served for three years as Director of its College of Further Education and was Acting Vice-President of the university in 1989-90.He also took on joint editorship of the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, and was Associate Editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography for the book trade from 1660 to 1820.John Michael Treadwell, English scholar and historian of the book trade: born Ottawa 5 July 1942, Professor of English, Trent University 1974-99; married 1969 Florence Cochez (one son, three daughters); died Peterborough, Ontario 24 April 1999.. He never sought what would have been his for the asking, a prestigious chair in any university in the English-speaking world His first loyalty was always to Trent. He never shirked any duty to which it called him, even if that took him from his proper work. His widow and colleagues intend to transfer it all to computer, so that it can be safely stored, and eventually published, in the form and to the same high standard that he would have wished.He was not an ambitious man. He promised a full edition of what had been omitted, a promise he has not been allowed to fulfil.What Treadwell published was only the tip of an iceberg of solid, well- documented research over 30 years that his perfectionism would allow no premature disclosure. He kept his work in ring binders, written up and footnoted in his neat hand, each methodically colour-coded.

Part of his papers had already been published, but it was Treadwell who found that the previous editor had left out all the passages that dealt with the book trade. The short account that he wrote for a volume of studies dedicated to Robin Myers, archivist of the Stationers' Company, revealed the wealth of information thus concealed. He had a special gift for seeing the larger implications in the detail from which his carefully constructed papers were built.Almost his last published work was a paper on Richard Lapthorne, the confidential agent and book-finder for a Devon family at the end of the 17th century. But already he had seen in print some 40 papers and reviews, all written with the same exemplary grace and care, on subjects as diverse as the origins of Gulliver's Travels and the business of type-founding in 17th-century London. Although he returned to Canada in 1974 as full Professor of English, which he remained till his death, we continued to meet on his almost annual return visits to Europe, where the material of his research lay, notably and increasingly, in the records of the Stationers' Company of London.Self-deprecatingly, Treadwell was apt to say that he had never published a book, as if this was some kind of threshold that had to be crossed before you could lay claim to the title of scholar.

Rogers), a by-product of his own research, and published in the TLS, was on Young. We also shared an interest in the Huguenot immigrants to England, for whom he had, through his wife's Bordeaux connections, a special feeling. They went back to England from 1971 to 1974, Treadwell researching Swift at King's College London. Their first daughter was born in 1973, and it was not long after that I first met him.I had just published Harold Forster's monumental bibliography of that now forgotten 18th-century poet, Edward Young, in translation, and Treadwell's first article (with J.P.W.

He also got married, to Florence Cochez of Bordeaux, in 1969. Both of them stayed on, although in Treadwell's case, when the first two years that it took to set the new university on its feet were over, he left to read English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he got a second degree in English in 1968.He returned to Trent for three years as assistant to the President and special lecturer in English, becoming assistant professor of English. He knew their names, their places of business, their customers and families, as well as their stock in trade, with the familiarity of an old friend. He brought the same modest but single-minded strength to his career as to the research that had to be pursued only in his vacations. He was born in 1942 and brought up in Ottawa, got his degree in Philosophy and English from Trinity College in the University of Toronto in 1964 and was immediately appointed as assistant to the Dean of Men and College Tutor in English at Trent University, which had been founded the same year at Peterborough, Ontario.In that capacity it fell to him, a natural athlete (he played rugby, soccer and tennis with equal success) to appoint one of his classmates as first head of what was then a small athletics programme. Modest but pertinacious, Treadwell had an unequalled gift for entering the world that the printers and booksellers of the past inhabited. Michael Treadwell's untimely death has taken from this pursuit one of its ablest practitioners.