by My friend Barbara Cavanagh, who has died aged 86, was an antiquarian theatrical bookseller who dealt in manuscripts, ballet ephemera and opera materials. Self-taught, immersed in the arts, pre-cinema optics and 19th-century theater, she researched, classified and cataloged many collections, from costume designs by Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to a 25,000-strong archive of theater programs.
Barbara was born in Mumbles, Swansea, the daughter of Fred Davies and his wife Edna (née Annetts), who ran a bakery. They lived on a hill above Mumbles lifeboat station and were struck by the Samtampa steamship disaster in 1947, when Barbara was six. In elementary school, she would run home at lunchtime to get a big bowl of gold ham soup, usually going to Oystermouth Library. In 1950 she attended Brynmawr Secondary Modern School and returned regularly for the rest of her life to walk the area’s cliffs and swim in the Gower Bays.
She got her first job at the age of 18 as a library assistant at Swansea University, and a year later she was working in a bookshop in Westminster, London, run by theater historian Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, co-founder of the Society of Theater Research.
In 1962 she married one of the store’s customers, John Cavanagh. Together they founded Motley Books in 1963 – collecting stock across the continent and selling it by catalog to academic institutions, public publishers and private collectors, including the aspiring filmmaker Bill Douglas.
They left London in 1972 to live at Mottisfont Abbey, a country estate in Hampshire which they rented from the National Trust with the agreement that they would allow the public access to and tours of the building. Barbara also set up a small elementary school in the huge house and employed a teacher there. Over the next two decades she and John also used the building for performances by the touring company Theater Set-Up, the local Maskers Theater Company and King Alfred’s College, which hosted outdoor theater, fetes and garden parties.
Her marriage to John didn’t last long, and after their separation in 1993 (they never divorced), Barbara devoted herself to trading ephemera – ephemeral documents of everyday life, such as sheet music, playbills and letters. While selling at an ephemera fair in 1997, she met conceptual artist David Troostwyk and they became partners until his death in 2009.
In 2012 Barbara moved to Hastings, East Sussex to help raise her newborn granddaughter and so my growing family became friends with her. She was elegant and graceful and loved life – for both the simple and unusual things it had to offer. She appreciated the vibrant local music and arts scene in Hastings and enjoyed being back by the sea and sharing her beach cottage with other family and many friends.
Barbara continued to trade in theatrical supplies until the end of that summer, recently selling rare prompt books for La Perouse, an early 19th-century play about a supposedly shipwrecked Pacific explorer, to the Garrick Club library in London.
She leaves behind two daughters from her marriage, Catherine and Olivia, her granddaughter Erin and her brother Peter.
