Nicolas John Barker OBE FBA FSA (born 1932) is a British historian of printing and books. [2] [3] He was Head of Conservation at the British Library from 1976 to 1992.
Barker was editor of The Book Collector from 1965 to 2016 [4] and edited The Pleasures of Bibliophily: Fifty Years of the Book Collector, an Anthology. [5]
He was elected to the Roxburghe Club in 1970. [6] In 2000 The Great Book of Thomas Trevilian. A Facsimile from the manuscript in the Wormsley Library. With a Study by Nicolas Barker was published for presentation to his fellow members of the Roxburghe Club. [7] [8] It was printed in red and black by Susan Shaw at the Merrion Press. Sir Paul Getty commissioned the reproduction. [9]
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998, and is also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He held the Sandars Readership in Bibliography in 1999–2000 and lectured on "Type and type-founding in Britain 1485–1720".
In 2002, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. [10] [11]
Barker gave the 2002 Panizzi Lecture at the British Library and was the A.S.W. Rosenbach Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002.
A bibliography of his work was published to mark his 80th birthday in 2012. [12]