English Book Collectors

English Book Collectors by William Younger Fletcher has a preface saying its principal object is to bring together in a compact and convenient form the information respecting the collectors scattered in the works of many writers, both old and new. The preface adds that the writer also endeavoured to show what manner of men the owners of these collections were.

The text quotes a letter from George IV to Lord Liverpool, dated January 15th, 1823, resolving to present a library of about 120,000 volumes to the British Nation. The text says the Duke of Sussex alone appears to have inherited his father's love of collecting books and formed a magnificent library in his apartments at Kensington Palace, a collection of more than fifty thousand volumes, twelve thousand of which were theological. The text describes a man who, from near his residence, Kelmscott House, on the Upper Mall, Hammersmith, issued a series of beautiful and sumptuous reprints, principally of old books, of which that of Chaucer's Poems is considered the finest.