id not immediately appear. There is a natural
temptation to imagine that the early book-owners, whose libraries have
enriched modern collectors with some of their best-known treasures, must
necessarily have been collectors themselves. This is far from being the
case. Hardly a book of all that Jean Grolier (1479-1565) caused to be
bound so tastefully for himself and his friends reveals any antiquarian
instincts in its liberal owner, who bought partly to encourage the best
printers of his day, partly to provide his friends with the most recent
fruits of Renaissance scholarship. In England Archbishop Cranmer, Lords
Arundel and Lumley, and Henry, prince of Wales (1594-1612), in France
the famous historian Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617), brought
together the best books of their day in all departments of learned
literature, put them into handsome leather jackets, and enriched them
with their coats of arms, heraldic badges or other marks of possession.
But they brought their books together for use and study, to be read by
themselves and by the scholars who frequented their houses, and no
evidence has been produced that they appreciated what a collector might
now call the points of a book other than its fine condition and literary
or informational merits. Again, not a few other more or less famous men
have been dubbed collectors on the score of a scanty shelf-full of
volumes known to have been stamped with their arms. Collecting, as
distinct both from the formation of working libraries and from casual
ownership of this latter kind, may perhaps be said to have begun in
England at the time of the antiquarian reaction produced by the
book-massacres when the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII., and
the university and college libraries and the parish service books were
plundered and stript by the commissioners of Edward VI. To rescue good
books from perishing is one of the main objects of book-collecting, and
when Archbishop Parker and Sir Robert Cotton set to work to gather what
they could of the scattered records of English statecraft and
literature, and of the decorative art bestowed so lavishly on the books
of public and private devotion, they were book-collectors in a sense and
on a scale to which few of their modern imitators can pretend. Men of
more slender purses, and armed with none of Archbishop Parker's special
powers, worked according to their ability on similar lines. Humphrey
Dyson, an Elizabethan notary, who