Bin | Tony Simcock

Tony Simcock

is a historian, poet, and short story writer. His poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Thames Poetry, Ore, PN Review, and Critical Quarterly. He has been responsible for many articles and other publications in the fields of local history, museum history, history of photography, and history of science. Among them, he contributed a series of four articles entitled "Mow Cop and the Erstwhile Realm" to The Congleton Chronicle (1980-81); wrote the best selling historical booklet The Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science 1683-1983 (1984); compiled a historical anthology of poems Poet's England 8: Staffordshire (1987); edited and expanded the third edition of Beeson's Clockmaking in Oxfordshire 1400-1850 (1989); and was the principal contributor to Physics in Oxford 1839-1939 (2005). Having been Curatorial Assistant at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Longton, he was then for 36 years Librarian and Archivist of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. His many museum exhibitions have included (at Eastbourne, jointly with Jack Simcock) Simcock Mow Cop (1979); and at Oxford the critically acclaimed Photography 150: Images from the First Generation (1989), Scientific Books and Instruments from Robertus Anglicus to Leonhard Zubler (1994), and (jointly with Jim Bennett) Eccentricity (2011). For some years he was also a highly unsuccessful second-hand bookseller. Born in Biddulph, North Staffordshire, he grew up on Mow Cop, which remains the main focus of his historical studies; though he lives in reclusive exile in Oxfordshire