GARNETT, RICHARD (1835-1906), English librarian and author, son of the learned philologist Rev. Richard Garnett (1789-185o), priest-vicar of Lichfield cathedral and afterwards keeper of printed books at the British Museum, was born at Lich field. He was educated at home and at a private school, and in 1851, just after his father's death, entered the British Museum as an assistant in the library. In 1875 he rose to be superintendent of the reading-room, and from 1890 to 1899, when he retired, he was keeper of the printed books. In 1895 he was made a C.B. In the history of the British Museum library his place is second only to that of Panizzi. Besides introducing the "sliding press" in 1887 he was responsible for reviving the publication of the general catalogue, the printing of which, interrupted in 1841, was resumed under him in 188o, and gradually completed. He married (1863) an Irish wife, Olivia Narney Singleton (d. 1903) ; his son Edward (1868-1937), a well-known author, married Con stance Black, known under her married name as the translator of the works of Turgeniev, Tolstoy and other Russian authors.
Dr. Garnett's chief publications in book-form were: in verse, Primula (1858), Io in Egypt (1859), Idylls and Epigrams (1869, republished in 1892 as A Chaplet from the Greek Anthology), The Queen and other Poems (19o2), Collected Poems (1893) ; in prose, biographies of Carlyle (1887), Emerson (1887), Milton (189o), Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1898) ; a volume of remark ably original and fanciful tales, The Twilight of the Gods (1888) ; a tragedy, 1 phigenia in Delphi (189o) ; A Short History of Italian Literature (1898) ; Essays in Librarianship and Bibliophily (1899) ; Essays of an Ex-librarian 0900. He was an extensive contributor to the Encyclopcedia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography, editor of the International Library of Famous Literature, and co-editor, with E. Gosse, of the elaborate English Literature: an illustrated Record. This list represents only a small part of his published work.