My husband, Michael Asser, who has died aged 80, was a librarian who rose to be head of Oxfordshire county council’s large multi-disciplinary department of museums, arts, libraries and leisure before, in retirement, turning to translating religious works connected with his newfound faith in the Greek Orthodox church.
Michael was born in Tottenham, north London, to Lillie (nee Campbell), a cleaner, and Edward Asser, a factory worker, but grew up in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. After leaving Dunstable grammar school at 16 he was accepted by Rada, but his parents refused to give their permission for him to attend, and so he went to work at Luton library, later qualifying as a chartered librarian at Loughborough library school. He became a fellow of the Library Association, and in 1976 was appointed county librarian of Berkshire at the relatively young age of 34.
It was in 1987 that Michael became director of leisure and arts at Oxfordshire. The scope of his work there was wide, and he embraced it enthusiastically until taking early retirement at the age of 54 in 1997, when the council made cuts.
We met in 1987 in Oxfordshire, where I worked in the school library service, and married in 1997, shortly after which both of us converted from Roman Catholicism to Greek Orthodoxy, Michael later becoming an ordained reader at the Holy Fathers of Nicea church in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. After retiring he spent two years brushing up his Latin and Greek, completing a classics degree with the Open University and then beginning translations from the old Greek of two religious tracts that were published as The Psalter of the Prophet and King David With the Nine Biblical Odes (2008) and The Old Testament According to the Seventy – Prophetical (2017).
As a librarian he was naturally a lover of books and reading, and he also adored the theatre, especially Shakespeare. In 1985 he had set up the Berkshire library service’s poetry festival in Bracknell, through which he established a friendship with the author Elspeth Barker and her husband, George.
Michael loved fashion, gardening, singing, cooking, cinema, walking, playing CDs, listening to Radio 3’s Met opera, watching athletics on TV (especially when Gabby Logan and Michael Johnson were presenting), and he was marvellous at ironing.
He is survived by me and by two daughters, Rosalind and Katherine, from his first marriage to Valerie (nee Staley), which ended in divorce.
