Foxon's civil service career began with a short period in the
Ministry of Town and Country Planning, he was appointed an assistant keeper of printed books at the
British Museum Library. Remaining there until 1965, he was then a professor of English at Queen's University in Ontario from 1965 to 1967, and then a
Guggenheim Fellow for the 1967–68 year. Foxon moved to the
University of Oxford in 1968 to be the
Reader in
Textual Criticism Foxon was eventually succeeded, in 1986, by
Donald McKenzie. In an obituary in
Studies in Bibliography, James McLaverty described Foxon as "perhaps the most distinguished British bibliographer of the second half of the twentieth century." His
English Verse, 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions (1975) was ground-breaking. Foxon's research into English pornography in the late 17th and 18th centuries appeared in a series in
The Book Collector in 1963 and were published in a limited edition as
The Origins of Pornography in England. These culminated in his book,
Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745. He wrote
The Technique of Bibliography (1955) and, with James McLaverty, he authored
Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (1991). For Gregg Press, Foxon edited reprints of 22 entries in the English Bibliographical Sources series from 1964 to 1968, which included 16th- and 17th-century catalogues of printed books, printers' manuals, and catalogues of new publications from 18th-century periodicals. He held the
Lyell Readership in Bibliography at the University of Oxford for 1975–76 and the
Sandars Readership in Bibliography at the
University of Cambridge from 1977 to 1979. Foxon had met his wife June while they were both serving at Bletchley Park; she was the daughter of the cinema proprietor Sir Arthur Jarrett. They divorced in 1963, having had a daughter. Foxon died on 5 June 2001. ==Selected publications==