Newspaper Article

Obituary of Arthur Crook Convivial editor of the Times Literary Supplement who understood the superiority of unsigned journalism

2005

Overview

A convivial figure on the literary scene, [Arthur Charles William Crook] was a dogged defender of editorial standards who would pounce on a howler, and ruthlessly excise any clichs or redundant verbiage. When he started work on the paper, Sir Bruce Richmond, the founding editor, was still at the helm; but whereas Richmond was a product of Winchester and New College, Crook had began life as a messenger boy on The Times. While Richmond rarely descended from the Olympian heights of his office, two floors up, Crook, known as \"Arthur'' by everyone, enjoyed the hurly-burly of production, and liked nothing better than regaling colleagues with the latest gossip gleaned over lunch at the Garrick. When DL Murray succeeded Richmond as editor, he made Crook an editorial assistant in 1941; and Murray's successor, the typographer Stanley Morison, also thought well of him. But although Morison, too, had started at the bottom, he became an authority on Renaissance printers and a prolific writer, whereas Crook was reluctant to put pen to paper. Not a line of his projected history of the paper, which he claimed to have loved \"as people loved a woman'', was ever written. Loyal to the TLS to the end, Crook left office in March 1974. In a profile of Crook published at the time of his retirement, Richard Boston wrote that he was \"exceptionally affable, sociable, convivial, and extrovert, altogether not the sort of person one might expect to find editing a paper as learned and sometimes drily academic as the TLS can be''.

• Publisher: Daily Telegraph
• Subject: Crook, Arthur Charles William / Morison, Stanley / Pryce-Jones, Alan