The Eternal Collection

The Geneva version of the English Bible, published by Christopher Barker in 1576, is now in the Library of the University of Chicago. The First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, 1623, is in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Every important home in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had large libraries and first editions that have been lost or forgotten down the centuries are still being found on their shelves. At Longleat, the lovely house of the Marquis of Bath, I was recently shown two ships’ logs written by Sir Francis Drake. Many libraries were, of course, sold and those dispersed by the Harleian Collection and that of Sir Hans Sloane became part of the newly founded British Museum in 1750. In the late eighteenth century for the first time a group of dedicated wealthy Englishmen began systematically to collect early printed books. These splendid pioneers included the first and second Earls of Oxford, the third Earl of Sutherland, the first Duke of Roxburgh, the eighth Earl of Pembroke and the second Duke of Devonshire. The greatest collector of the generation was the third Earl of Spencer, whose books were headed by fifty-six Caxtons and first editions of the Greek and Latin classics (my daughter is now married to the eighth Earl) but, although there are also some lovely and valuable books at Althorp in Northamptonshire, the second Earl’s collection became, in 1892, the nucleus of the John Rylands Library in Manchester.