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Updated: June 9, 2025
It was chiefly through the generosity of Laud that the Bodleian obtained its wealth of Oriental learning. But it was not only in the East that the Archbishop devoted himself to book-collecting. Like Dr. Dee, he saw the value of Ireland as a hunting-ground, and employed his emissaries to procure painted service-books, the records of native princes, and the archives of the Anglo-Norman nobility.
To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house. And with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently exhausted itself.
The Bodleian Club is composed of gentlemen of culture, who are interested in books and book-collecting. It was named, very obviously, after the famous library of the same name, and not only became in our city a sort of shrine for local worshipers of fine bindings and rare editions, but was visited occasionally by pilgrims from afar.
He arrived with a discreet tap on the window at midnight, to spend the evening. Mrs Brindley had gone home and Mrs Colclough had gone to bed. The book-collecting doctor refused champagne; he was, in fact, very rude to champagne in general. He had whisky.
"Life holds a good many harmless enjoyments, which I am afraid you are putting away from you in your prime, for the sake of a mere chimera. But after all, what does it matter! One must have a hobby! Some men like horse-racing, others book-collecting, others pictures, and so forth you like the religious question! Well, no doubt it affords you a great many opportunities of studying character.
But he put up his pen and spoke with something of the old cordial manner that had won the heart of Gouverneur some years before. "I'm glad to see you again, Philip. I began to think you were not coming any more. Sit down," said Millard. "How is book-collecting? Anything startling lately?" he added by way of launching the talk, as he usually did on the favorite subject of his companion.
My second piece of advice is equally important, particularly at the present time, when the world is too much with us, and it is this never convert a taste into a trade. The moment you become a tradesman you cease to be a hobbyist. When the love of money comes in at the window the love of books runs out at the door. There has been of late years a good deal of sham book-collecting.
He hoped, with his curious insistance on the point, that there were 'some few copies on large paper. It is a mark of the changes in book-collecting that Dibdin praised the index as excellent, 'enabling us to discover any work of which we may be in want'; but it is now regarded as remarkable for its poverty, and especially for the extraordinary carelessness that left eight noble specimens from Grolier's library without the slightest mark of distinction.
In his treatise on Fortune, Petrarch has left us a study on book-collecting in the form of a dialogue between his natural genius and his critical reason. He argues, as it were, in his own person against the imaginary opponent. A paraphrase will show the nature and the result of the contest. 'Petrarch. I have indeed a great quantity of books. Critic. That gives me an excellent instance.
The Norman family of Bigot rivalled the race of De Mesmes in their ardour for book-collecting. Jean Bigot in 1649 had a magnificent library of 6000 volumes, partly inherited from his ancestors, and partly collected out of the monastic libraries at Fécamp and Mont St. Michel and other places in that neighbourhood.
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