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Updated: June 17, 2025
We have still to notice one or two of Grolier's contemporaries, who may be classed as great book-collectors of an old-fashioned type. But their function was not so much to collect books as rare and curious objects as to undertake the duty of saving the records of past history from destruction.
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.
A book from Grolier's library, the "Toison d'Or," 1563, brought £405, or over $2,000, and a Heptameron, which had belonged to Louis XIV, in beautiful brown morocco, with crown, fleur-de-lys, a stag, a cock, and stars, as ornaments, all exquisitely worked in gold, lined with vellum, was sold for £400.
Some of their favourite volumes have been preserved; the young King's books bear the dolphin or the arms of France; the Queen bound everything in black morocco emblasoned with the lion of Scotland. Charles IX. had a turn for literature, as beseemed the pupil of Bishop Amyot; he studied archæology in some detail, and purchased Grolier's cabinet of coins.
As patron of all the arts the treasurer became the friend of Francino Gafori, the leader of the new school of music that was flourishing at Milan. Gafori seems to have been often in Grolier's company. He dedicated to the treasurer his work on the harmony of musical instruments, as well as the Apologia in which he afterwards convicted the Bologna school of its errors.
One of his books belonged to the late Baron Jérôme Pichon, the head of the French Société des Bibliophiles, and it is admitted that nothing even in Grolier's library could excel it in delicacy of execution. His son, Claude Gouffier, created Duc de Rouannais, was a collector of an essentially modern type.
They were both fond of books, and took great care of Grolier's three thousand exquisite volumes, of which they were successively the owners. They lived in a large house in the Rue St. Martin, which had been built by Budæus, and here the books were kept until the great dispersion in the year 1676.
The splendid Aldines, on vellum, fell into the hands of an ignorant notary with a new room to furnish: and he thought fit to strip off all the bindings, that had been a marvel of Italian art, and to replace them with the gaudy coverings that were more suited to his bourgeois desires. M. de Lincy remarks that Grolier's books were strangely neglected through a great part of the eighteenth century.
The most valuable portion of Grolier's library was bought by his friend Henri de Mesmes. This included the long series of presentation copies, printed on vellum, and magnificently bound. De Mesmes was a collector with a love of curiosities of all kinds.
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