Ernst Philip Goldschmidt was born in Vienna on 1 December 1887, and died in London on 18 February 1954 in his sixty-seventh year. His reputation as one of the most distinguished booksellers of his age could have been based on nothing more than the series of over one hundred catalogues issued during the last thirty years of his life with their descriptions of tens of thousands of rare books -- "descriptions used and adapted by collectors, librarians and booksellers all over the world." The obituary notice which appeared in the Times the day after his death stated that: "Much of his work was done at night, fortified by draughts of black coffee. He was an unorthodox bookseller. 'Bookselling,' he said, 'would be an ideal existence if there were no customers.' His ideal customer was one who 'lived 2000 miles away and occasionally ordered by postcard a very expensive book.' No bookseller's catalogues were given more care than Goldschmidt's. His learned annotations contributed much to the education of librarians all over the world. A highly unorthodox item was his Catalogue no. 100, which was a list, with notes, of all the rarest books that had passed through his hands, and were now on the shelves of discriminating collectors and libraries ...."