Never by the Yard

In 1802, the French librarian Étienne Gabriel Peignot described the contemporary phenomenon of bibliomania ('la bibliomanie'): a 'compulsion to own books, not so much to inform oneself as to possess them and feast one's eyes on them'. This craze gripped private book collectors in the first two decades of the nineteenth century; the price of antiquarian books soared as wealthy aristocrats such as the second Earl Spencer (owner of the magnificent library at Althorp, one of the finest private collections in Europe), the marquess of Blandford, and the young sixth duke of Devonshire competed with one another to fill their shelves with treasures. In 1809 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, author of the Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics (1802) and Spencer's librarian at Althorp, published a 'bibliographical romance', entitled Bibliomania. This book, writes Mark Purcell in his new volume, The Country House Library, was ostensibly a 'light-hearted skit' on the book-collecting bubble of Dibdin's day, but it also served as an 'incitement' and a 'manual of instruction' to eager collectors and readers in the early nineteenth century.

This remarkable period of book-collecting is one of the many engrossing stories told in Purcell's handsome, compendious book – a bibliophilic book, for sure, if not a bibliomaniac one (not, at least, in the way that Peignot means). The Country House Library is extraordinarily detailed, copiously and beautifully illustrated, and makes a cogent plea to scholars and historians to rethink country house libraries (not to mention the houses themselves) through the books that they contained. It insists upon the central importance of these private libraries to the material history of books and of reading in the British Isles, and fights against a series of misconceptions: 'that libraries have always been the province of institutions rather than individuals, that cultural patronage has always fundamentally been the preserve of states or organisations, rather than individuals, and that it is normal for books to be available to everyone, as a matter of right, rather than being concentrated in the hands of a minority'. Purcell argues that these private book collections, some of them still surviving and others long dispersed, have been widely neglected or ignored, and he calls for the books within them to be read in the context of the material and social circumstances of the libraries that contained them.

What underpins this call is the remarkable project undertaken in the last decade by the National Trust, for whom Purcell was, until recently, the Libraries Curator – a public catalogue of the books held in its historical properties (300,000 or so volumes in more than 160 houses). Purcell concludes his final chapter by noting that the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the history of reading and of material texts makes it imperative that scholars and readers be able to study books in the context of their historical collections: the challenge is 'not just to preserve [the libraries'] collections and ensure that they are sufficiently well documented to make research possible, but to make fragile historic libraries which were intended for the few visible, accessible and meaningful for the many'. The Country House Library offers some sense of the thrill of accessing these under-explored collections and the remarkable books within them. But it is also, in its way, a book about the history, and the contemporary politics, of access and accessibility. It begins by noting that, even though most of the books owned by the National Trust are now catalogued on Copac and are almost always accessible by appointment, the contents of other private collections can be much more difficult to consult, their owners less sympathetic to enquiries. And if Purcell writes with palpable sadness about the dispersal of great book collections, he notes that surviving libraries are often off-limits to the public and scholarly readers; the destruction of private collections (such as the Harley manuscripts, now in the British Library, and the many books sold...