Alan Noel Latimer Munby
Alan Noel Latimer ('Tim') Munby (1913–1974) was an English author, writer and librarian. Life and career. Born in Hampstead, Munby was educated at Clifton College and King's College, Cambridge. He is best known for his five-volume study of the eccentric nineteenth-century book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, and for his slim volume of ghost stories, "The Alabaster Hand", which includes three tales written in Oflag VII B, a German prisoner-of-war camp near Eichstadt, during World War II. These stories – 'The Topley Place Sale', 'The Four Poster' and 'The White Sack' – featured in  a prison-camp magazine, "Touchstone", edited by Elliott Viney, which was produced on a printing press owned by the Bishop of Eichstadt, Michael Rackl. Munby worked in the antiquarian book trade with Bernard Quaritch, Limited (1935–37) and Sotheby & Company (1937–39, 1945–47). He became Librarian at King's College, Cambridge in 1947 and Fellow in 1948; he was J. P. R. Lyell Reader in Bibliography, University of Oxford (1962–63) and Sandars Reader in Bibliography, University of Cambridge (1969–70). He was elected President of the Bibliographical Society in 1974 and died during his term of office. Reception. Boucher and McComas praised the  stories in "The Alabaster Hand" as "quietly terrifying modernizations of the M.R. James tradition". Personal life. Munby married twice. His first marriage was to Joan Margaret Edelsten; and his second to Sheila Rachel Crowther-Smith.