38 - Rare-book libraries and the growth of humanities scholarship

Summary

The idea of rarity

What makes a book ‘rare’ has been a subject of discussion since the eighteenth century when systematic enquiry into the question began, when naturally the discussion was conducted in the universal language of scholarship – Latin, which was also the language of rare books. But vernacular works also became sought-after and rare, and William Oldys’s The British Librarian (1738) was the first systematic published guide to rare books in English, followed by James Savage's periodical The librarian, being an account of scarce, valuable and useful English books, manuscripts, libraries, public records, etc., 3 vols. (1808–9). By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was becoming clearer that the market value of books deemed rare had become a significant factor in this judgment. The concept of rarity necessarily implies more than one copy of a printed book, and is associated not only with book collecting, dealt with in more detail elsewhere, but also with the commercial trade in books. The defining event for Britain was the founding of the aristocratic Roxburghe Club (1812) which inspired book collectors throughout the country to collect, catalogue and display their rare books, and naturally to emphasise the rarity of books in the vernacular, as opposed to those in the previously universal scholarly language. The work of Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847), Earl Spencer's librarian, provided theoretical and practical guidance for the book collectors of his day. Book collecting inevitably carried over to the public libraries established later in the century, whose collections began to emulate those of distinguished private collectors.