Janet Frances Clayton, B.A., Dip.Lib.

Janet Clayton was born on 24 September 1940 in Palmers Green, north London, and educated at Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead Garden Suburb. She read medieval and modern history at the London School of Economics and went on to take the postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship and Palaeography at University College London, where her dissertation on Richard III included a bibliography illustrating the changing attitudes towards him. Janet was appointed cataloguer at Lambeth Palace Library in 1964, and in 1966 she came to the Antiquaries as library cataloguer under the benign regime of Tom Tremlett, Assistant Secretary, and John Hopkins, Librarian.

Those were leisurely days in the late sixties, before the explosion in publishing resulted in a plethora of books on the same topics competing for reviews in Antiquaries Journal, and for a year or two, between bouts of cataloguing, Janet was able to savour the delights of the library from her desk in the tiny office she shared, eyeball-to-eyeball but never a cross word, with the Assistant Secretary's secretary. The shelf list of volumes published before 1700 in the Society's collection, compiled by the Misses Barrett and Brown and completed in 1967, revealed that fifty-one were incunabula, and these claimed Janet's especial attention when time could be spared from day to day routine. However, not enough time could be spared and when Janet left in 1970 to start a family her projected handlist had not been completed. But the thought of abandoning the project never entered her head and, on the rare occasions when she could find a baby-sitter, she came to the library to work on it and the hand list of incunabula was finally published in Antiquaries Journal lx (ii) (1981).

As was the norm in those days, Janet stayed at home in Boxmoor with her two young sons, Rupert and Marcus, until Marcus was at school full-time, and then began to think of resuming her career. No suitable vacancies appeared in librarianship and, encouraged by her editor husband, Peter (who had been elected a Fellow in 1969 for his Egyptological and numismatic work), she, too, entered publishing, working on a freelance basis as copy-editor for the humanities division of Macmillan. She joined Allen & Unwin (subsequently Unwin Hyman) in 1980 as a copy-editor and left as editorial manager in 1990 when the company was taken over by HarperCollins. She then joined Prentice Hall as production editor in the academic division which, as the title implies, required both editorial skills and expertise in typesetting, estimating, book design, etc., techniques which she quickly mastered.

Janet never lost touch with the Antiquaries throughout her time in commercial publishing; John Hopkins remained a firm friend and she always kept abreast of events through Peter, so that when, in 1994, the Society decided to appoint a managing editor to deal with its huge backlog of research report commitments, she was the natural choice for the job. She was delighted to be back and, though her fantasies of lunchtimes spent in the Royal Academy or window shopping in her beloved Bond Street fashion shops and jewellers were soon shattered, she happily settled for a sandwich at her desk and got on with the chores. Janet's primary task was to secure joint publication with commercial publishers or other organizations such as the National Trust in order to reduce the Society's financial outlay and, during the short time she was managing editor, seven such titles appeared: The Remains of Distant Times, with the National Trust; William Morris, Art and Kelmscott, St Mary's Church Deerhurst, The Rolls of Arms of Edward I, 2 vols. and A New Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Square-Headed Brooches, with the Boydell Press; and The Changing Face of Dalmatia, with Leicester University Press. She produced The Dictionary of British Arms, vol. 2, under the Society's sole imprint and had done solid work on Heraldic Badges, The Inventory of Henry VIII and Nicopolis ad Istrum at the time of her death. Her organizational and managerial skills were such that one was hardly aware that she was frequently (more often than not) coping with any number of difficult tasks and people. Her charm, serenity and poise could disarm the most irate of authors, as her tenacity and sheer professionalism could overcome most obstacles. Privately, Janet was a romantic soul; she and Peter went to Venice every February for the Carnivale, donned eighteenth-century costume and masks and attended the baroque concerts in the lovely Venetian churches. She adored the extravagant palazzos of Italy, the splendid chateaux of France, all the trappings of nobility and monarchy though she was herself essentially reticent. Her courage during the last few months of her life was enormous; though obviously in great pain, she refused to admit that anything was seriously wrong; she remained elegant and stylish, professional to her immaculate fingertips. Janet died on 12 October 1997.