A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Later that year, Kraus issued Bibliotheca Phillippica, a handsome catalogue of treasures he had culled from the residue. “I am sitting, figuratively, on a huge heap of manuscripts and printed books which arrived in hundreds of cartons,” he wrote in the foreword. “It is still like Christmas, and scarcely a week passes without the discovery of something important.” The 106 items he selected for sale in the catalogue embraced nine hundred years, from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries. Many of them were decorated with gorgeous illuminations. After Kraus died in 1988 at the age of eighty-one, his daughter, Mary Ann Folter, and her mother, Hanni Kraus, assumed control of the company and continued to sell Phillipps material well into the 1990s. “We’ve placed manuscripts in collections all over the world,” Mary Ann Folter said in October 1994. “But all the yummy stuff is pretty much gone.”

  On a broader scale, the migration of these materials to the United States continued a pattern that began in earnest during Sir Thomas’s lifetime and became more apparent in the years afterward. Alarms were raised by concerned British curators and scholars, but serious money was being tendered by well-heeled Americans, and the sales went on. In one dramatic instance, however, the private collection considered the most spectacular of them all—the forty thousand–volume Althorp Library assembled by Dibdin’s patron, the second earl of Spencer—was saved from the “disaster of dispersion” by a widow’s wish to honor her beloved husband.

  Enriqueta Augustina Tennant Rylands’s commitment to place a magnificent library in the industrial city of Manchester surprised the people who had known her husband, a textile manufacturer and benefactor of many charities who left an estate of close to £3 million at his death in 1888. John Rylands (1801–1888) was remembered as a pleasant man who enjoyed giving books to poor preachers, but he was not an ardent bibliophile by any means, and he left no specific instructions for the bequest that ultimately would bear his name.

  But in 1890, Mrs. Rylands set about erecting an ornate gothic structure in the Deansgate section of the city, though she had only a vague idea of what specific treasures should go inside. Indeed, while the building was rising from the ground, “few people were aware that a great library was in process of formation,” according to Henry Guppy, the institution’s first director. But two years after construction began, Mrs. Rylands learned that “the most famous of all private collections” was about to be sold by Sotheby’s on behalf of Lord Spencer’s financially strapped heirs. Recognizing instantly that this collection would be “the crowning glory of her design,” she wasted little time. Her bid of £210,000 beat by a matter of minutes an offer of £300,000 that would have sent the collection to the New York Public Library.

  When the announcement was made, “a great sigh of relief went up” throughout England, Guppy wrote. “The nation was relieved to know that so many of its priceless literary treasures were to be secured for all time against the risk of transportation, and the public spirit which Mrs. Rylands had manifested, was greeted with a chorus of grateful approbation.” On October 6, 1899, the twenty-fourth anniversary of her wedding day, Mrs. Rylands formally gave the building and its contents to the nation. In his dedication address, the Reverend Dr. Fairbairn, principal of Mansfield College, Oxford University, allowed as how Basil Champneys, the architect, had “proved himself a genius” with the design. And while the building alone would have been contribution enough, he made clear that it is books that make a library, not vaulted stone ceilings, leaded glass windows, gunmetal railings, or polished oak floors.

  “The library will be entitled to take its place among the deathless creations of love,” Dr. Fairbairn declared.

  To multitudes it will be simply the John Rylands Library, built by the munificence of his widow. But to the few, and those the few who know, it will forever remain the most marvelous thing in history, as the tribute of a wife’s admiration of her husband, and her devotion to his memory. All citizens who desire to see England illumined, reasonable, right, will rejoice that there came into the heart of one who inherited the wealth of this great Manchester merchant, the desire to create for him so seemly a monument as this. It stands here fitly in a city where wealth is made, to help to promote the culture, to enlarge the liberty, to confirm the faith, to illumine the way of its citizens, small and great.

  Two years later, Mrs. Rylands pledged another £155,000 for an exceptional collection of manuscripts assembled by the earl of Crawford. At her death in 1908, she had augmented the holdings to 200,000 printed books and 7,000 manuscripts. In 1972, administration of the Rylands Library was turned over to Manchester University, and the Rylands and university collections were merged. People who visit the elegant repository continue to be moved by the building’s majestic beauty, but the one image that lingers is of two marble statues that face each other at either end of the Grand Hall. John and Enriqueta Rylands preside over a gift that kept the nation’s finest private library inside the United Kingdom.

  4

  America, Americans,Americana

  As he lay dying with consumption in 1638, a thirty-one-year-old Puritan clergyman directed that half his estate and all of his books, four hundred volumes comprising 329 titles, be given to a college then being built on a one-acre cow yard in Newtowne, across the Charles River from Boston. Whatever good works the Reverend John Harvard performed during his brief ministry to the New World were not recorded for posterity, but this thoughtful gift, made on his deathbed, endowed the first library to be formed in British North America. In tribute, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered that the college take the minister’s name, and honored the city of Cambridge, England, where Harvard had been educated, by declaring that Newtowne thenceforth be known as Cambridge.

  In similar fashion, the establishment in 1701 of the Collegiate School of the Colony of Connecticut was formalized by the gift of “forty volumes in folio” by ten Congregational ministers gathered in the home of Samuel Russell. Several years later, the institution was named for Governor Elihu Yale, whose copy of Speculum humanae salvationis (pseudo-Bonaventura, Meditations de passione Christi, England, early fifteenth century) in 1714 is believed to be the first illuminated manuscript given to an American academic library. Nineteen years after that, Bishop George Berkeley gave the school 880 volumes he had brought over from England, “the finest Collection of Books that ever came together at one Time into America,” according to Yale’s second president, Thomas Clap.

  “Books were scarce in the New England colonies,” Marjorie G. Wynne, a retired Yale librarian, emphasized in a lecture at Columbia University, yet they were “essential equipment” nonetheless. Just how dearly the colonists treasured their books was made clear in 1779, when British troops raided the Connecticut coast and advanced toward New Haven. As word of looting spread, Yale’s three thousand volumes were distributed among several nearby villages for safekeeping and remained hidden until hostilities were concluded in 1782. Of course, one reason books were especially precious then is that they were so difficult to acquire. There was not even a press operating in the British colonies until 1639, when the locksmith Stephen Daye set up a shop in Cambridge and began work on The Whole Booke of Psalmes, a psalter commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book and prized today as the oldest surviving object printed in what is now the United States.

  As other printing shops opened, the primary order of business was job work for local governments, not the production of literature. As long as European sources provided ample reading material, there was no need for duplication in America. “It was inevitable that in a new land, faced with the immediate necessity of building a state and drawing a living from farm, forest, and sea, of adapting old traditions and theories to fresh conditions, the thinking of these people should have been at first utilitarian in character, and that in consequence their writing and publishing should have been of the same nature,” the historian Lawrence C. Wroth has written.

  The first “great” book printed in the colonies—and the first American bo
ok immediately recognized as “collectible” in Europe—appeared in 1661 under the title Wusku Wuttestamentum nul-lordumun Jesus Christ Nuppoquohwussuaeneumun. Obviously, this version of the New Testament could not be prepared in England; it had to be done “in the field,” as it were. Cotton Mather could barely restrain his enthusiasm for the Reverend John Eliot and the “Indian Bible” he had prepared in the Algonquin language. “Behold, ye Americans, the greatest honor that ever you were partakers of,” he declared. “The Bible was printed here at our Cambridge, and is the only Bible that ever was printed in all America, from the very foundation of the world.” In Europe, Eliot became known as “the Augustine of New England” and “the Apostle of the Indians” for his achievement. The first “Eliot Indian Bible” off Stephen Green’s press was sent to England and presented to the dedicatee, King Charles II. Others were given to the lord high chancellor and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A copy at Brown University contains the annotations of Roger Williams. Another at Yale bears the signature of John Winthrop. None of these people could read this book, but they valued it as an important artifact nonetheless.

  The copy now at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a subscription library founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and his friends, on the other hand, first belonged to a British subject who dealt with Indians regularly and even entertained them in his home. In a bicentennial history of the Library Company of Philadelphia, Austin K. Gray told how a European scholar was discovered one day “slapping and pinching himself” among some old mathematical and astronomical books gathered two centuries earlier by a man named James Logan. “Some of these books are unprocurable today,” the visitor marveled. “I have hunted for them in vain in many libraries in Europe. And here they are altogether in America, and here they have been apparently for over two hundred years. Who was this man Logan and how did he know where to look?”

  James Logan (1674–1751), it turns out, spent a good deal of his life looking for books, and he found them under the most daunting conditions. Esteemed by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic for his keen mind, Logan was a resourceful man who excelled as a scholar, scientist, entrepreneur, and public figure. Though not the first American collector of consequence—that distinction probably belongs to William Byrd II (1674–1744) of Westover, Virginia—he is certainly the most interesting, and his library has survived largely intact to this day.

  Born to Scottish Quaker parents in 1674, Logan pursued several opportunities in business and teaching before accepting an attractive offer to serve as confidential agent for William Penn, the prudent Quaker who founded a settlement in America’s Delaware Valley that continues to bear his family name. “Books are my disease,” Logan wrote many years later, and that lifelong affliction must have caused unbearable agony when he left England a month shy of his twenty-fifth birthday for a frontier on the outskirts of civilization. Shortly before setting sail on the Canterbury in 1699, Logan sold a library that he ruefully estimated years later contained up to eight hundred volumes.

  In time, Logan achieved stature and fortune as a cloth merchant, land speculator, fur trader, and shipper; along the way, he served as mayor of Philadelphia, chief justice of the supreme court of Pennsylvania, lieutenant govenor, and, for two years, acting governor of the province. “In many ways, James Logan was the most important and most influential public figure in the proprietary province of Pennsylvania during the first half of the eighteenth century,” Edwin Wolf 2nd wrote in his definitive catalogue of this remarkable man’s collection.

  “I confess a Book has from my Infancy been my Diversion and serves me agreeably to spend my vacant hours,” Logan wrote in 1726 to an Amsterdam merchant. In fact, he spent those “vacant hours” absorbed in self-instruction, teaching himself subjects as diverse as advanced mathematics, botany, astronomy, and linguistics, languages as challenging as Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic. His alert mind required constant stimulation, and when circumstance brought him to America, the only way to satisfy his curiosity was to arrange for a steady flow of books.

  Over the next fifty years Logan conducted an active correspondence with friends, family, and associates in Europe, and most of what he wrote was copied and filed in letter-books now owned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, an archive that offers insight into just how his library was assembled. Once settled in America, Logan’s immediate responsibility was to administer Penn’s varied interests, and by all accounts he served Penn (one of five proprietors of the province) admirably. By 1708 he had begun an active exchange with the leading booksellers of Europe, ordering title after title on a variety of formidable subjects. In 1709, he sent for what is believed to be the first copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica to enter America; using it, he mastered the newly postulated principles of calculus.

  In 1710 pressing provincial business required a voyage to England, allowing Logan to immerse himself for a few brief months in London’s rich cultural life. He attended lectures, observed scientific demonstrations, watched Isaac Newton perform an experiment, toyed with a microscope, made a social call on the mathematician Charles Hayes, and searched the stores and stalls of the capital for challenging things to read. When he returned to Pennsylvania, he left a “Great Chest of Books” to be sent on after him (which took three years to arrive). Once back in Philadelphia, Logan took a wife, started a family, and embarked on a frenetic decade of more acquisitions.

  Any bibliophile who examines Logan’s long, discursive, and often crusty letters will recognize the odd rituals of a kindred spirit. He sends out want lists. He cultivates sources. He saves catalogues. He haggles over prices. He insists on good condition. He complains when his exacting standards are not met. He preens over his triumphs. He insults his inferiors. And always, when he authorizes a purchase, he waits anxiously for the treasures to make what seems an interminable crossing over three thousand miles of open ocean.

  “I observe thy method of rating a Book is exceedingly different from mine,” he wrote Thomas Osborne II, “for I value a book for what I can most easily learn by it, thou on ye other hand for its antiquity, its being bound in Morocco black or red and the quantity of lent Gold that’s spent on it which none but ye weak can value.” To Josiah Martin, for twenty-five years Logan’s principal contact for books in England, Logan confided:

  I am under this great Disadvantage in this Country that I can but rarely meet with an uncommon Book without purchasing it from England and as my reading is chiefly for my own Amusement and entirely out of ye way of my business, I care not to lay out all the Money that ye Books I desire to look into would cost me, because it would rise to a Considerable sum and they would afterwards be of very little use to my family here.

  Near the end of his life, Logan filed a complaint with the bookseller John Whiston in London: “Thou may therefore well excuse me for finding fault with thee as I do when thy prices are unreasonable, who have been a buyer of Books above these 50 years and am not to be put off as a common American, as thou has divers times served me, for I know a book well.”

  In 1723, about the same time a sixteen-year-old printer’s apprentice named Benjamin Franklin was leaving Boston for Philadelphia, Logan was making a final call on England. Once again he combined business with recreation, and again he was refreshed by contact with the leading thinkers of the day. By 1728 he was building Stenton, a country mansion north of Philadelphia, where he settled two years later and where his dedication to learning took on a new intensity. His heavily annotated books, many with the signature “J. Logan” inscribed boldly in the upper-right-hand corner of the title page, reveal a vigorous intellect. Inside Andrea Argoli’s Ephemerides, for example, he has written his own tables for latitude in Pennsylvania, along with a note about the 1639 conjunction of Venus and the sun. In John Flamsteed’s celestial atlas Logan drew a number of stars he determined had been omitted by the author. He appended missing words to Arabic and Italian dictionaries. In a set of proof sheets titled
Tabulae Astronomicae, he rebutted several theses put forward by Sir Edmund Halley regarding the motions of comets and the satellites of Saturn. On almost every page of his Greek edition of Aeschylus he wrote alternative readings, explanations, and Latin equivalents of the text.

  During this time Logan also began to submit essays to learned societies in Europe. Experimenta et Meletemata de Plantarum Generatione, a report detailing his experiments in the cultivation of maize, was issued in Leiden in 1739; impressed, Carolus Linnaeus named the plant Logania in his honor. The London journal Philosophical Transactions, published by the Royal Society, printed two of his papers, “The Crooked and Angular Appearance of Lightning,” and “The Sun and the Moon, when nearing the Horizon, appearing larger.” But it was a correspondence with Johann Albrecht Fabricius, a professor in Hamburg who was an astronomer, physician, respected classicist, and author of a fourteen-volume history of Greek literature, that led to one of Logan’s most satisfying achievements.

  While reading the professor’s notes on early astronomy, Logan had come across an assertion that the first printed version of the second century astronomer Ptolemy’s Almagest was issued in 1538, and in Greek. He was certain the work had appeared earlier in a Latin version—such a text was among the books he had left behind in Dublin—and he raised the question in a respectful letter to the famous scholar, written entirely in Latin; translated, it begins: