TOBY English died from cancer shortly after closing the Wallingford bookshop he ran for more than three decades.

Mr English and his wife Chris jointly ran Toby English bookshop in St Mary’s Street, and in April switched the business to a nearby office, which is still trading.

The father-of-two from Wallingford died aged 58 on July 25, and his funeral was held at Oxford Crematorium on Monday last week.

Family and friends of Mr English, colleagues from the book trade, fellow traders and customers attended the crematorium for a celebration of his life, led by his widow and their two children, Hattie, 28, and Edmund, 25.

Tobias Reginald Dunstan English was born in Ulverstone on the edge of the Lake District, on September 12, 1956.

Obituaries

The family moved to Ceylon –now Sri Lanka – when Toby’s father, Bunny, was working in pharmaceuticals.

After a couple of years, during which Toby’s first sister Lucy was born, the family returned to England and settled in the London suburbs, first in Ruislip and then Eastcote, where more sisters arrived, Mary, Emily and Katy.

Aged seven, Toby travelled by bus to St Benedict’s School, Ealing, where he developed a passion for collecting, ignited by his maternal grandfather, whose house was filled with exotic items from time spent in Hong Kong.

Mr English went to Birmingham University where he made several important friendships.

He attended the English department’s fresher’s break at Attingham Park, Shropshire in 1975, where he sat up all night in the library talking about books to another student.

At the end of their degree course he married Chris, so that he could continue the conversation. He stayed on at university as a postgraduate, working for three years on Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

He loved being a dad, and grandpa to one-year-old Noah, and was proud of his children’s independent minds, and enjoyed sharing new music or film finds with them.

Edmund paid tribute to his father, depicting a bright-eyed man in the centre of his piles of books.

Mr English said: “I have a memorable image of dad, one where he is scurrying through piles of books in house clearances, jumping along the shelves saying ‘this one’s rubbish, this one’s rubbish, bin that one, not worth a penny, unsaleable, then ‘I’ll keep that one,’ while furiously calling out prices for me to note down, with a boyish excitement over every kind of odd book.

“He was such a funny and interesting dad, a tad of an old hippy, a little bit eccentric but that’s what made him great.”

Mr English added: “He loved all culture, always taking me to galleries, films or gigs, though I’m not sure he had much quality control as he would famously say after every single one ‘that was the best show I’ve ever been to in my life!’”

Music was enormously important in Mr English’s life and he loved going to Womad Festival.

The final piece of music at the funeral was The Incredible String Band’s Big Ted, which Mr English had posted on Facebook shortly before he died, with: “Right! Enough of all this lacrimosity, think happy thoughts! “Here’s a song about death, and although I have never done the boogaloo-jive, I (and you) can swing our trotters to the beat.”