Book-collecting fraternities are far from uncommon, but none of them is the equal of their British progenitor, the Roxburghe Club, either in age or exclusivity. This June the members celebrated its bicentenary, apparently in due style. At the inaugural dinner in 1812, 18 book-collectors, chaired by the Lord Spencer of the day, gathered to celebrate the sale at auction of the 3rd Duke of Roxburghe’s copy of a 1471 edition of Boccaccio, for which Lord Blandford had just paid £2,260, then a record price for a printed book. It was exceeded only in 1884, and meanwhile the antiquarian book market went through periods of despondency. The Roxburghe’s members — soon to number the still current limit of 40 — agreed to meet annually, and to present to each of their brethren a strictly limited printing of some text of their own choice.
The organiser of the bibliophilic club was Lord Spencer’s library cataloguer, a London clergyman, a lightweight but undoubted enthusiast for books, and author some years earlier of The Bibliomania …containing some account of the history, symptoms and cures of this fatal disease. This was the Revd Thomas Frognall Dibdin, who managed to get things started fairly well.
One of the prospective members he hoped for was Sir Walter Scott, whose substantial library survives at Abbotsford, in the Scottish borders. Scott attended only one Roxburghe dinner, where he found the grandees deaf and boring, though ‘there were many little chirruping men who might have talked but went into committee’. Scott was happier with his own society, the Bannatyne Club, which then produced larger volumes of historical value.
It took the Roxburghers a while longer to realise that more substantial volumes were expected of them.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in