Besterman, Theodore, 1904-1976 (Personal Name)

His Crystal-gazing ... 1924.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, December 6, 2017 (Besterman, Theodore Deodatus Nathaniel (1904-1976), psychical researcher and bibliographer; born on 22 November 1904 in Łódź, Poland, and named Nataniel; probably grew up in Britain; largely self-educated, especially at British Museum Library; investigating officer to the Society for Psychical Research, 1927-1935, and published widely on associated matters; publications in bibliography, 1930s-1940s, including A world bibliography of bibliographies in 1939; established his own private press, the Guyon House Press, which was destroyed in the air raids of December 1940; in World War II, served in Royal Artillery and the Army Bureau of Current Affairs; postwar, held position as head of the department for the exchange of information in UNESCO. "Around 1950 he turned to publishing the correspondence and works of Voltaire ... Living, by agreement with the city of Geneva, in Voltaire's former house Les Délices, he founded the Institut et musée Voltaire there (1952), while editing that writer's correspondence (107 vols., 1953-65) as well as the equally multi-volume series Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century ... Following disagreements with the Genevan authorities he moved in the later 1960s, first to London and then to Banbury, where he died ... on 10 November 1976, having arranged with the University of Oxford for the bequest of his scholarly research interests (the Voltaire Foundation) to the Taylor Institution there")