His father Philipp Heymann Goldschmidt (1839-1905) was Dutch and worked in Vienna and his mother was Clara Edle von Portheim (1853-1932).
In 1909 he returned to Vienna and temporarily assisted the incunabulist Konrad Haebler in "describing thousands of fifteenth century books in Austrian monastic libraries" for the projected Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (English, "The Union Catalogue of Incunabula"), which he also helped finance.
[5] "Hard hit financially in the post-World War I period", Goldschmidt left Vienna for the United Kingdom and started anew in the bookselling business by founding an antiquarian bookshop, E. P. Goldschmidt & Co., located in Laurence Sterne's old house[2] at 45 New Bond Street, London and specializing particularly in "manuscripts, early printed books, and bookbindings".
[6] In 1948 Jacques Vellekoop[7] became his assistant and after many years in that role continued to run the firm after Goldschmidt's death until its closure in about 1993.
[10] In addition to his scholarly output, he was one of a generation of refugee booksellers from Europe who arrived in London in the 1930s, including Ernst Weil,[6] H. A. Feisenberger,[10] Bernard H. Breslauer, Heinrich Eisemann,[11] Maurice L. Ettinghausen,[12] and Albi Rosenthal,[13] and "widened the range and greatly improved the scholarship of bookselling" in the United Kingdom and who introduced English and American collectors to books that had previously been "overlooked or undervalued".