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'His residence in Pimlico, where he died, was filled, like Magliabecchi's at Florence, with books from the top to the bottom; every chair, every table, every passage containing piles of erudition. He had a house in York Street which was crowded with books. He had a library in Oxford, one at Paris, one at Antwerp, one at Brussels, and one at Ghent.
He was believed, moreover, to know the habitat of all the rare books in the world; and according to the well-known anecdote he replied to the Grand Duke, who asked for a particular volume: 'The only copy of this work is at Constantinople, in the Sultan's library, the seventh volume in the second book-case, on the right as you go in. He has been despised as 'a man who lived on titles and indexes, and whose very pillow was a folio. Dibdin declared that Magliabecchi's existence was confined to 'the parade and pacing of a library'; but, as a matter of fact, the old bibliomaniac lived in a kind of cave made of piles and masses of books, with hardly any room for his cooking or for the wooden cradle lined with pamphlets which he slung between his shelves for a bed.
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