Jean Touzot, 1921-2008
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WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Spring 2009 > Jean Touzot, 1921-2008
Librarians in Western European studies are fortunate to have as partners our export dealers in the major countries of interest. After the Second World War there developed a number of export firms that have met the bibliographic needs of research libraries in North America and elsewhere. These were largely family-owned and some were an outgrowth from previously existing book shops. We lost one of the pillars of this world of transatlantic exchange when Jean Touzot passed away last summer. Born in Paris on September 22, 1921, he studied at the Lycée Buffon, where he received a double baccalauréat. His university studies in chemistry abruptly stopped by the war, Touzot went underground to avoid being transported for compulsory labor in Germany. But he was still able to help his parents, Antoine and Alice Touzot, in the book shop they had founded in 1930, in the 7th arrondissement. It was during the war that he definitively chose his career in the book trade. In 1944 Touzot married Denise Hérelier, mother of Jean-Denis Touzot, his son and successor. She was secretary to Hachette’s Directeur étranger du livre. In the 1950s, Touzot published four antiquarian catalogs that he sent as an experiment to North American libraries on the advice of Frédéric J. Grover, professor of French at the University of British Columbia. The first clients of Jean Touzot Librairie Internationale, as it is now known, were Toronto University, McGill, UC Berkeley, Indiana-Bloomington, and Chicago. In 1960 the firm took on responsibility for "Farmington Plan" cooperative acquisitions and began to serve the Library of Congress and New York Public Library. Jean Touzot was an avid collector of literature and rare books. One of his closest friends was Professor Pierre-Olivier Walzer, of the Universität Berne, a specialist in 19th-century French literature, the decadent poets, and of the question of "Jurassian" autonomy. After his retirement in 1992, Touzot had the leisure to catalog his inventory of books in his château in Perigord. Jean-Denis Touzot recalls that his father had “a passion for the observation of nature, which he imparted to me from my earliest childhood” and that “he liked landscapes, voyages, and observing minerals, trees, and beetles”. The elder Touzot had an important collection of beetles that he had gathered himself or that scientists had sent him for observation. Jean Touzot passed away 29 August 2008, a few weeks short of his 88th birthday. He was a man of deferential manner, tenacious attention to bibliographic information and thorough application to customer service. While each of us has his or her own memories of Jean Touzot, we are reassured by the succession of his son, Jean-Denis: the firm, housed in the bookstore across the street from Saint-Sulpice, continues to serve clients in libraries around the world.
(I would like to thank Jean-Denis Touzot for providing information about his father.)
Jeffry Larson
jeffry.larson AT yale.edu
WESSWeb > WESS Newsletter > Spring 2009 > Jean Touzot, 1921-2008
