He introduced and popularised the "Cosway" binding and commissioned the opulent edition of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that was lost when RMS Titanic sank in 1912.

He became a specialist in manuscripts and acquired a previously unknown collection of Dickens material relating to a youthful romance between the author and Maria Beadnell, his notes on which were turned into a book published in the United States.

He also acquired 37 volumes of material relating to the prophetess Joanna Southcott, and a collection of "intimate" letters between the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.

[4] In 1884, Stonehouse joined the London book dealers Sotheran's as an apprentice, ultimately rising to the position of managing director through his skills of literacy, invention, and marketing.

In 1906 he acquired 37 volumes of material relating to the prophetess Joanna Southcott, and in 1908 purchased the "intimate" letters between Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.

[5] In 1933, he began to produce Piccadilly Notes, a continuously paginated publication that combined offers from Sotheran's stock with a column penned by Stonehouse titled "Adventures in Bookselling" featuring romantic recollections from his career and observations on the book world.

As Stonehouse later recalled, he told Francis Sangorski:[18] Do it and do it well; there is no limit, put what you like into the binding, charge what you like for it; the greater the price, the more I shall be pleased; provided only that it is understood, that what you do, and what you charge for, will be justified by the result; and the book when finished is to be the greatest modern Binding in the world; these are the only instructions.The book, based on the large 1884 American edition illustrated by Elihu Vedder, took two years to complete at Sangorski & Sutcliffe's bindery in Southampton Row and included 1,050 jewels of topaz, turquoise, ruby, amethyst, garnets, and olivines.

[20] Despite the book not being finished, Stonehouse made it the centrepiece of Sotheran's shop display for the Coronation of George V and Mary in June 1911.

He was confident it would sell as there was already strong demand for jewelled bindings, particularly in the United States, but despite wide publicity it failed to find a buyer.

[19] The back cover showed an innocuous Persian mandolin, but inside the front doublure was a snake (or serpent) in an apple tree, evoking the story of the temptation of Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden which introduced evil into the world, while the back doublure showed a skull with teeth made of ivory.

[6] After a number of visits to the owner, a daughter of Maria Winter,[30] Stonehouse managed to obtain 18 letters which he transcribed with notes sufficient to form the basis of a book that for the first time identified Beadnell as the model for Dora in Dickens's autobiographical novel David Copperfield [6] and as Flora Finching in Little Dorrit.

They were refused by John Pierpont Morgan but accepted by the industrialist and collector William K. Bixby of St Louis who also agreed to publish Stonehouse's book.

It appeared in 1908 as Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell: Private correspondence, published for the members of The Bibliophile Society of Boston, Massachusetts, with a preface by Henry H. Harper and edited by George Pierce Baker of Harvard University.

[6] Despite the book being substantially based on Stonehouse's work,[6] his name did not appear anywhere, the only possible reference to him being in the preface as "one who realized their [the letters] worth".

[34] Probate was granted to his widow Mary Martha Stonehouse on an estate of £604[4] but in November that year she wrote to Sotheran's asking for financial assistance as she had little money left and was unable to work.