Introduction
ON APRIL 27, 1995, a truckload of 48 neatly packed boxes
of books, manuscripts, drawings and ephemera relating to the
life and work of Sir Thomas Phillipps was delivered to the
front door of the Clubhouse and enthusiastically received by
the staff. This delivery constituted the largest and most
important addition to the Club's library in its history, the
gift of Jean Mermin Horblit in honor of her husband,
Harrison Horblit, who assembled this monumental collection
between the late 1940s and his death in 1988.
This gift to the Grolier Club was the culmination of
discussions between Harrison Horblit and several of his
fellow members, former president G. Thomas Tanselle, Robert
Nikirk, and Jonathan Hill. All three were frequent visitors
to the Horblits' home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and on
these and other occasions they discussed the disposition of
the Phillipps collection. Horblit was always aware of the
research value of the collection, and after his death his
widow, Jean Horblit, continued discussions with his Grolier
friends. After Mr. Nikirk's death in 1990 the new librarian,
Martin Antonetti, and Mr. Tanselle made several trips to
Ridgefield to discuss the timing of the gift with Mrs.
Horblit. G. Thomas Tanselle had written in a letter to Mrs.
Horblit (5 May 1989) that he thought the Grolier Club was
the most appropriate place to house her husband's collection
for several reasons: "1) the Club is the most important and
best known independent library specializing in the history
of books and bibliophily, and the central role that
Phillipps occupies in that history means that people will
think of the Club as the natural repository of this archive;
2) some of the areas in which the Club's holdings are
unrivalled (such as booksellers' and auction catalogues) are
particularly relevant to the Phillipps archive, and
therefore his archive and the present institutional
collections would support and reinforce each other more
satisfyingly at the Grolier than could be the case
elsewhere; 3) the central location of the Club in a city
that is central to the book world means that its collections
are readily accessible to interested researchers; 4) the
Club library and staff, being devoted to a single specialty,
can offer users of the the Phillipps archive more efficient
access to related materials and to accumulated knowledge in
the field than is likely to be the case in a library of
broader scope." Mrs. Horblit was of the same mind, and after
a period of five years in which the collection was
inventoried and appraised, the gift was formalized.
At about the same time as the Horblit collection was
being delivered to the Club, the House Committee had
undertaken to renovate a space in the Clubhouse to contain
and display it. The committee chose a room on the Club's
fifth floor next to the Dutch kitchen. The space had
originally been the office the Club's Librarian; more
recently it had come to be known as the Print Room, since
the Club's graphic arts collection, including the Iconophile
archive, was stored there. In 1994 the graphic arts
collection and the Iconophile archive had been moved to a
more secure space in the basement vault, leaving this sunny
room overlooking 60th Street free for renovation. To the
House Committee the location at the heart of the Clubhouse
seemed particularly appropriate for the Horblit gift, as
reflecting the collection's importance. A separate room
would, it was thought, also serve to keep the Horblit
Phillipps Collection distinct, and provide a focus for
particular scholarly use. Indeed, it is the only one of our
special collections that is housed in a space specially
dedicated to it.
First, the redwood floors were sanded, restained, and
varnished. Minor damage to the plaster walls and ceiling was
repaired. The House Committee then designed and supervised
the construction of the chest-high walnut cabinets with
bronze wire-mesh fronts which run along three walls. An
ornamental cornice was built around the upper corners of the
walls to hide air conditioning ductwork. Finally, the room
was furnished with a library table and chairs and hung with
framed documents, drawings and photographs from the
collection, creating a space suitable not only for private
study but also for small meetings or gatherings in the
evening. The collection has now been moved from its
temporary storage place in the basement vault to the
Phillipps Room and is available for consultation.
What follows is a description of the collection by
category:
Middle Hill Press Books and Related
Material
The Horblit collection of Middle Hill Press publications
at the Grolier Club is unmatched elsewhere in the United
States, and worthy of note even in comparison with the great
English archives of such material. Consisting of more than
557 separate titles and several thousand corrected proofs
and proof sheets, as well as a great many supporting
manuscripts, letters, and other documents, the collection is
the core and foundation of Horblit's magnificent gift. The
archive was amassed over a period of thirty years and in a
number of separate purchases, two of which, as they concern
Middle Hill Press material specifically, deserve particular
notice here. The first of these was made in 1958 from the
firm of William H. Robinson, Ltd., London. Surviving in the
collection is the typewritten Robinson hand-list of this
purchase, headed Catalogue of the Most Complete
Collection Extant of the Books, Tracts, Leaflets and
Broadsides Printed in Very Limited Issues by Sir Thomas
Phillipps at His Private Press at Middle Hill or Privately
Printed Elsewhere to His Order. Comprising Some 460
Separate Items. From Sir Thomas Phillipps' Own
Collection. It is a title calculated to seduce -- what
Phillipps enthusiast could possibly resist such a
description? -- but it is also a quite accurate assessment
of the material, as we shall see.
The Robinson set of Middle Hill Press publications is
described in 460 numbered typescript entries on 30 foolscap
leaves. Horblit kept this numerical scheme in organizing the
material on his shelves, and continued to add numbers in
sequence as he bought other Middle Hill Press publications,
the whole eventually totalling 510 items. The Grolier Club
(as much from necessity as sentiment) in its turn has
retained this numerical arrangement, and by the admixture of
some Middle Hill Press items from elsewhere in the Horblit
gift and from its own collection has brought the total to
557 distinct titles. No count has yet been made of the
supplementary proofs and proof sheets accompanying almost
every piece, but they certainly number in the thousands.
The more substantial works are generally stitched into
the drab terra-cotta colored boards so favored by Sir Thomas
that they have become known as "Middle Hill boards," but
some are bound in a pleasant full russia -- the majority of
these bearing the label of George Bretherton, Sir Thomas's
printer and binder from 1848 to 1851 -- and the remainder
survive in various other inexpensive nineteenth-century
coverings. A few pieces have been bound in modern full or
half calf, and a few are in unsewn loose sheets. Of the
single-sheet, smaller-scale, or less important 'fugitive'
pieces, the majority have been sewn into later stiff paper
wrappers (probably dating from the Robinson era), and a few
are unbound or disbound.
The significance of this set, aside from its value as a
nearly complete archive of the Middle Hill Press, lies in
the fact that many of the individual pieces are indeed, as
the Robinson hand-list states, "From Sir Thomas Phillipps'
Own Collection," and bear his annotations and corrections.
The true Phillippophile will not think much of this claim,
for he knows that Sir Thomas Phillipps was a compulsive
annotater of his own works, and that it is not at all
uncommon to find multiple copies of the same work bearing
the baronet's notes, corrigenda, and random doodles. The
particular value of the Robinson set, however, lies in the
fact that many of the items are actually Sir Thomas's
personal file copies, the copies he kept close at hand so
that he could continue, even after publication, to correct,
annotate, and generally perfect his handiwork, in
anticipation perhaps of later revisions or second editions,
which in most cases never came to pass.
The Robinson copy of Parochial Collections for the
County of Oxford provides an excellent illustration,
both of Phillipps's disinclination to complete his printing
projects, and of his grandiose plans for some of them. As
issued (if Phillipps's haphazard distribution system can be
so described) in 1825, the Parochial Collections is a
fragment, consisting of 1) an incomplete series of
Oxfordshire pedigrees on two leaves, followed by 2) 98 pages
describing inscriptions and other antiquities in Oxfordshire
parishes, intended to run from A to Z, but as issued
extending only through the letter E. It is generally found
without the title-page, and the title under which it is
commonly cited, Parochial Collections for the County of
Oxford, is in reality the drop- or caption-title. Even
in truncated form it is not entirely without interest and
value, but it still falls far short of the full-dress
history of Oxfordshire described by Phillipps in his 1819
prospectus. Phillipps's own copy in the Horblit collection,
however, hints at larger things. This copy not only has the
scarce title-page -- Oxfordshire Monumental Inscriptions,
From the MSS. of Antony à Wood, Dr. Hutton, and Mr.
Hinton) -- but it is also interleaved, and the leaves
are extensively annotated with additional pedigrees and
parish names. It is also clear from this copy that Phillipps
eventually intended the Parochial Collections to be
issued with illustrations; dozens of models for these
illustrations are present in the form of engravings and
sketches of churches, monuments, and brasses (some of them
obviously torn or cut out of other histories) inserted at
intervals throughout the volume. Some of these illustrations
were actually prepared and printed in quantity, although
apparently never issued; there exists elsewhere in the
collection an otherwise rather mysterious suite of ten
lithograph plates of Oxfordshire antiquities, each of which
can be matched to an exact counterpart drawing or engraving
in this copy.
The second major group of Middle Hill Press publications
purchased by Horblit is significant in its own right, and
not just because of its distinguished provenance. One of the
largest collections of Middle Hill Press publications in
private hands during the nineteenth century was that
belonging to the fabled Bibliotheca Lindesiana. The entries
under "Phillipps" in the massive folio catalogue of that
collection run for twenty columns and cover nearly four
hundred items. The separate pieces were apparently bound
together in volumes, and are described as such in an
appendix at the end of volume IV of the catalogue:
"Phillipps, (Sir T.) Bart. Publications, inquisitions
post-mortems, etc. 13 vols. 1818, etc. fol., 4o., 8o." Four
of these thirteen volumes were sold at Sotheby's on 7 May
1947, and found their way soon thereafter into the
collection of Major J. R. Abbey, and later into Horblit's
hands at a sale of Abbey's books at Sotheby's on 15 November
1966. Horblit at some later time bought seven additional
bound volumes, and the final two volumes were acquired from
Mr. Roland Folter in late 1997. The full set of thirteen
volumes is now housed in the Grolier Club Library
The volumes are bound uniformly, in nineteenth-century
half morocco over marbled boards by the Fazakerly firm of
binders, Liverpool, and all bear the armorial bookplate of
the Bibliotheca Lindesiana on the front pastedown. On each
spine is stamped the general title, Sir T. Phillipps'
Privately Printed Works; in addition, each volume has a
separate descriptive title: 1) Catalogues of MSS.; 2)
Wales, Ireland, Miscellaneous; 3) Inquisitiones
Post Mortem, etc.; 4) Heralds' Visitations; 5)
Salop, Warwick, Wilts; 6) Berks to Oxford; 7)
Worcester, Yorks; 8) Heralds' Visitations: Wilts,
1623; 9) Institutiones Wiltoniae, 1297-1810; 10)
& 11) Pedigrees I[-II]; 12) 4o
Series; and 13) 8o Series. The set contains
approximately 320 titles, most of which are duplicated in
the comprehensive group of Middle Hill Press file copies
which Horblit had already purchased from the Robinsons.
A number of the individual pieces in this set are
annotated by or inscribed to Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of
Manuscripts at the British Museum, a longtime friend of Sir
Thomas Phillipps. It was Horblit's opinion that the items in
this second group originally belonged to Madden himself, and
the Sotheby sale catalogue of Madden's library (7 August
1873) seems to support this hypothesis.
Whether or not it was owned by Madden, much of the real
significance of this set lies in the fact that, in contrast
to the more-or-less doctored copies in the Robinson set, the
Bibliotheca Lindesiana archive appears to present the
publications of the Middle Hill Press in something
approximating the state in which they were originally
issued: loose sheets, often lacking any title-page, or with
title-page (as in this set) acquired at a later date and
bound or laid in.
In combining these two complementary archives Harrison
Horblit achieved a collection of exceptional richness and
depth. Through the generosity of Mrs. Harrison Horblit the
Grolier Club has issued a complete
checklist of the Horblit gift, but some indication of
the physical and textual scope of this material is
appropriate here.
Phillipps's overriding passion -
the collecting of books and manuscripts - is displayed in
the forty three catalogues he printed to document his own
extraordinary Bibliotheca Phillippica and the libraries of
other collectors and institutions. The immensely interesting
and important catalogue of his own manuscripts, the
Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum is perhaps the best
known of these. Sir Thomas was an obsessive maker and
printer of lists, and one might also include under
"catalogues" the twenty inventories he produced describing
his furniture, maps, photographs, paintings, and plate; he
even saw fit to print a list of specimens kept on hand for
the microscope at Middle Hill.
Phillipps's antiquarian tastes account for the largest
category of works in the collection. His very first work to
see print was a two-volume series of transcriptions of
Wiltshire parochial registers (Collections for Wiltshire.
1818[-1819], by Tho. Phillipps, Esq. Junior)
which appeared in 1818 or 1819, and the last was a
continuation of Ralph Bigland's Historical, Monumental
and Genealogical Collections, Relative to the County of
Gloucestershire which was begun in 1871. In the course
of the intervening half-century he edited and printed more
than three hundred titles on local history, genealogy, and
folklore, virtually all of which are represented in the
Horblit archive. An equally passionate (if less edifying)
fixation on the Roman Catholic church accounts for the
presence of over fifty virulently anti-Catholic tracts and
leaflets. The convenient catch-all category of
"miscellaneous" encompasses a hundred or so pieces relating
to Phillipps's estate and his private finances, including
rental agreements, lists of tenants and advertisements of
timber sales; more of these extremely ephemeral "fugitive
pieces" undoubtedly remain to be discovered, but the number
preserved in the Horblit collection must represent a
substantial fraction of the whole. The baronet's disastrous
forays into local politics are also included under this
heading, in the form of ten campaign broadsides and
pamphlets documenting his activities in the elections of
1826, 1832, and 1861. Not least interesting in this final
category are a number of small-scale literary works - poems,
acrostics, ghost stories, etc. - printed by Sir Thomas for
distribution to his friends and family. Sir Thomas's poetry,
by the way, if not as outstandingly awful as that of the
celebrated William McGonagall, is quite bad enough.
There is a great deal to learn about Phillipps and the
workings of the Middle Hill Press from the physical objects
themselves. For instance, most of the individual
single-sheet and pamphlet-size works in the Robinson archive
show signs of having been disbound from some larger volume,
and there is evidence elsewhere in the collection to suggest
that binding small-scale works in this way may have been how
Sir Thomas kept his multiple file copies of such items in
order. Most of these are now either loose or have been
stitched into modern wrappers, but there still exists intact
in the collection a set of seventeen copies of a
single-sheet anti-Catholic political tract, a Political
Catechism for England and Ireland, which remains bound in
Middle Hill boards.
Sir Thomas's notorious stinginess in all matters not
directly related to book-buying is obliquely illustrated by
the many examples of anastatic printing in the collection.
Anastatic printing was a form of transfer lithography
developed in the 1840s as a cheap means of reproducing
manuscripts and drawings in facsimile, and Sir Thomas used
it extensively for transcripts of parish registers and other
documents, as well as for illustrations in some of his
works. Geoffrey Wakeman's article on Sir Thomas's pioneering
use of this process describes what anastatic printing was,
when it was used for Middle Hill Press publications, and by
whom, but, curiously enough, declines to speculate about why
Sir Thomas should seek for alternatives to traditional
letterpress printing. Money (lack thereof, habitual
penny-pinching attitudes towards) must surely have been a
factor, but to what extent is still unclear. However, any
investigation into the matter might profitably include an
examination of the sixty-odd examples of lithography and
anastatic printing in the Horblit Phillipps collection.
But the primary scholarly value of this archive surely
lies in the corrected and annotated proof sheets which
accompany almost every one of the 557 Middle Hill Press
titles in the collection. For instance, the often stormy
relations between Phillipps and a series of unhappy resident
printers are revealed in bitter comments inscribed on many
of these sheets, and we can deduce from this ad-hoc
correspondence (as did Munby, who worked from the same
material) that Phillipps paid his printers grudgingly, when
he paid them at all, and also that he was a terrible editor
- although that much is painfully obvious from the corrected
sheets alone. We might clear up a good many bibliographic
mysteries surrounding the Middle Hill Press by careful
examination of these annotated proof sheets. For instance,
Sir Thomas was famously reluctant to provide frills such as
title-pages for his publications, and even where he did so,
was prone to express dates of publication in some such
unhelpful form as "ca. 1840" or "183.. or 184..", or even ".
. . 1850, annisque variis prioribus". Many of these undated
or misleadingly dated publications can be assigned a correct
(or at least probable) chronological place based on
information from accompanying dated proofs. As a bonus, the
sheets often bear additional notes identifying the author or
printer of the work, or specifying the number of copies to
be printed off. The published checklist takes into account
evidence provided by some of these proofs in establishing
dates and attributions, but to date it has not been possible
to properly examine even a small fraction of the several
thousand annotated sheets in the Horblit collection (over
800 such sheets accompany the Catalogus Librorum
Manuscriptorum alone), and much information about Sir
Thomas and his press no doubt lies hidden there.
Pictorial Material
The Horblit Phillipps Collection also contains a large
number of prints, drawings, and photographs relating to Sir
Thomas and his family. There are several photographs of
Phillipps himself. The earliest is a remarkable (and
apparently unrecorded) daguerrotype dating from the 1840s,
showing the collector in dapper middle age. The collection
also includes three versions of the famous 1860 photograph
of Phillipps (seated, and surrounded by recently-acquired
manuscript treasures) which is reproduced by Munby as the
frontispiece to vol. IV of his Phillipps Studies.
Other family portraits include ambrotypes, stereoscopic
prints, and silhouettes of Phillipps' daughters Kate and
Mary, Kate's husband, the Rev. John Fenwick, their son (and
Phillipps's executor) Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick, and various
other members of the Fenwick clan. Among these is a touching
group portrait in ambrotype of Phillipps and the Fenwicks,
reproduced as plate VI in Munby's Phillipps Studies
II.
Sir Thomas's estate of Middle Hill is the subject of
another major category of pictorial material. This modest
late 18th-century house situated near Broadway, Worcester,
was Phillipps's home from early childhood until 1863, when
an escalating feud with his son-in-law James Orchard
Halliwell-Phillipps (on whom the estate was entailed)
precipitated Sir Thomas's removal to Thirlestaine House,
Cheltenham. Nearly twenty photographs, pencil sketches and
watercolors of Middle Hill are preserved in the collection.
Several sketches show planned additions to the house which
were intended to accommodate Sir Thomas's ever-growing
library, but were never carried out. The photographic views
of Middle Hill, like many of the other photographs in the
collection, are the work of one Charles Phillipps - no
relation to Sir Thomas, but an example of the baronet's
curious attraction to people bearing his own last name. The
various sketches and watercolors are mostly unsigned, but
are probably the work of Phillipps family members. One
sketch at least, which survives in the collection as an
anastatic print, can be attributed to Lady Elizabeth
Steele-Graves, a longtime Phillipps family friend. The
signature of J. P. Neale appears on another sketch of Middle
Hill, the original of an engraved illustration which
appeared in Neale's Views of the Seats of Noblemen and
Gentlemen in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland (1826);
the Horblit collection also includes Phillipps's copy of
that work, with Neale's inscription.
Phillipps's printing activities and antiquarian interests
account for the last category of views. A great many
pictures of churches, monuments and old houses exist in the
Horblit collection. There are a number of drawings and
sketches (generally unsigned), but the majority are engraved
illustrations removed from various other published
histories. Some of these loose plates are laid between Sir
Thomas's distinctive "Middle Hill boards", some are in
folders, and some (as has been described in detail elsewhere
in this article) have been tipped into copies of Sir
Thomas's own antiquarian works, where they were apparently
intended as models for future illustrations.
Almanacs and Diaries
Phillipps kept a more or less faithful and steady record
of his activities by jotting daily notes in a series of
annual almanacs, one for every year from 1814 through 1866
(plus one for a youthful 1803 but minus one for 1865). These
leatherbound almanacs, usually Peacock's Polite
Repository or the Pocket Companion for any given
year, were compendia of useful information, such as a list
of the bankers in London, mail coach schedules, holidays
kept at public offices, etc., with blank ruled pages for
diaristic notation. Phillipps, like many of his
contemporaries, was accustomed to note all sorts of things
-- accounts of travel, illnesses, visits to neighbors, bills
come due, the weather -- very briefly, on a daily basis.
Predictably, most of the entries in Phillipps's diaries
refer to his principal passion, book acquisition. Indeed,
even the very first almanac in the collection, the one for
1803, when Phillipps was only 11 years old, contains a list
of 134 books (inter alia Tales of the Fairies,
Cavern of Horrors, but also The Vicar of
Wakefield and Bruce's Poems), some with prices,
presumably his first catalogue. This is an astonishing
document that shows his obsession fully formed at an early
age. The later almanacs contain much valuable information
about the logistics involved with assembling so mammoth a
collection, for example, "Sent 3 Boxes marked No 1 from the
Hague. . . 8 from Darmstadt. . . No 9 Schoiffers
[sic] Bible 1476 on Vellum. . ." (8 April 1825).
Entries like this are, of course, very useful in tracking
his various shipments of books across the continent and
document the rapidity with which the Bibliotheca Phillippica
grew.
The almanacs also afford precious glimpses of the man's
human side, such as it was, something he took great pains to
keep from almost all of his acquaintances. Phillipps was
known to his contemporaries as a contentious and difficult
person, seemingly always at war with his creditors as well
as with his fellow antiquaries. However, certain passages in
the diaries show that, at least in certain periods, he
harbored what might be understood as genuine affection
towards members of his immediate family, as in the entry for
15 February 1819 about Harriet, his future wife: "Walked
with my dearest love through the fields, where we had
strayed in former times." Mostly, though, he reveals himself
as a dispassionate and unemotional observer. He writes on 9
August 1842, rather simply and bloodlessly, that "My
Dau[ghter] Henrietta ran away to be married to James
Halliwell" about an event that was to have enormous
consequences on his domestic life.
In addition to Phillipps's own almanacs, there are 14
others from the period 1821 through 1844 that belonged
variously to his wife, Harriet, and his daughters, Henrietta
and Kate (and perhaps Mary). As would be expected, the
women's diaries for the most part record domestic events in
the Phillipps household. The exceptions are those of
daughter Henrietta from the late 1830s and early 1840s, a
time during which she worked very closely with her father on
his genealogical and antiquarian projects. In these she
gives not only a supplementary view of Phillipps's
activities but also documents her own role in what had
clearly become a cottage industry: "Writing [i.e.
transcribing manuscripts] in the morning. Papa busy with
his Heber manuscripts in the Dining Room" (16 May 1839).
Works By and About James Orchard
Halliwell-Phillipps
J.O. Halliwell, the Shakespearean scholar, editor, and
biographer, first came to Phillipps's attention in 1841 when
he dedicated his Reliquae Antiquae (1841), the first
volume in a series entitled Scraps from Ancient MSS,
to the great collector. Halliwell was only 21 years old at
the time, but he had already published nearly 25 works on
various literary and antiquarian subjects, and had, in
addition, built an impressive library of his own which
included 130 manuscripts, chiefly on mathematics and
astrology. Shortly after the publication of the
Reliquae Phillipps invited Halliwell to visit him at
Middle Hill, and the young scholar soon became a frequent
guest there, eventually, perhaps inevitably, falling in love
with Henrietta, Phillipps's eldest daughter. Phillipps
steadfastly refused to give his consent to the proposed
marriage, a stance that precipitated an unexpected result:
in August of 1842 Henrietta and Halliwell eloped and were
married against his wishes. The enraged Phillipps never
forgave the pair and declined to have any communication with
them for the rest of his life. Ironically, though, upon the
death of Phillipps in 1872 Henrietta came into possession of
Middle Hill and the Broadway estates under the terms of her
grandfather's will, which had granted Phillipps only a
life-interest in the property. Soon after, by royal letters
patent, Halliwell assumed the surname Phillipps, thereby
becoming master of the estate, a truly Shandean
[Shandy-an?] turn.
The Horblit Phillipps collection contains a small group
of about 20 books and pamphlets either by or about
Halliwell-Phillipps. Most of these are the author's own
copies of works from his important corpus of Shakespearean
studies, in which he presents in facsimile early documentary
evidence related to Shakespeare's life and work. They are
privately printed in very limited editions, usually 10-20
copies each. There are also several pamphlets, also
privately printed, documenting various personal and
professional controversies that he was involved in,
including the Statement in Answer to Reports Which Have
Been Spread Abroad Against Mr. James Orchard Halliwell
(1845), about Halliwell's role in the theft of manuscripts
from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Many of the
items in this group of books and pamphlets were formerly in
the possession of A.N.L. Munby and contain his
annotations.
Auction and Bookseller
Catalogues
The Horblit Phillipps collection is rich in contemporary
auction and bookseller catalogues which were either owned by
Phillipps himself or in some way document the acquisition
and dispersal of his collection. There is also an
interesting cache of related manuscript material in the form
of correspondence and memoranda from booksellers, mostly
concerning his purchases and the nonpayment thereof.
Phillipps was of course engaged in every significant sale of
books in England, and to a lesser degree on the continent,
from the late 1810s until his death. In catalogues of the
major auction sales, especially those from which he made
purchases, Phillipps customarily, and very carefully, made
notations of the buyers and prices realized. At the very
least he indicated which items in a sale were acquired by
him. The presence of a large group of these catalogues in
the Horblit Phillipps collection is particularly exciting
because some of the most important auctions of books ever
held occured during Phillipps's lifetime. Taken together,
his personal annotated copies of these catalogues form an
eyewitness account, so to speak, of the "bibliomania" which
characterised the age. Thus we find marked copies of the
sale catalogues of the libraries of the Duke of Roxburghe
(1812), the Earl of Guilford (1830), Heber (1834-1836),
Horace Walpole (1842), and of the Stowe collection of
manuscripts (1849), among many others. A number of these are
deluxe copies on large paper inscribed to Phillipps. There
are also auction catalogues for many of the smaller sales
which, nonetheless, contained material that interested
Phillipps: Hanrott (1833), Van Sypesteyn (1825), Donnadieu
(1851), etc. The collection also includes Phillipps's own
run of the catalogues from the auction house of Puttick and
Simpson, a firm with whom he did a very significant amount
of business, during the period 1846 to 1872, over 1200
catalogues in all, many of which contain manuscript notes or
markings in his own hand. Phillipps was always 'on account'
with every bookseller he ever traded with, and the firm of
Puttick and Simpson was no exception. There are in the
collection several memoranda booklets from the 1860s that
the firm sent to Phillipps to remind him of the state of his
debt. Interestingly, at the end of the memorandum for the 13
January 1868 sale there is an extra charge for "5 Cases
& man 3 days packing same 1/15/-" which gives an idea of
the scale of his buying at the time.
Likewise, Phillipps patronized many English booksellers,
and collected and marked their catalogues just as
assiduously. Among others, we find representative catalogues
from the firms of Cochran, Cole, Engle, Payne and Foss, and
Strong. There is also a complete run of his copies of the
catalogues of Thomas Thorpe, the bookseller who was
Phillipps's largest supplier of manuscripts in the 1830s but
with whom he had a "chequered" relationship, as A.N.L. Munby
tactfully put it. In fact, by demanding almost unlimited
credit from poor Thorpe and by contriving exceedingly
complex plans for deferring payment, Phillipps can be said
to have caused the unfortunate firm's bankruptcy in 1837.
Additionally, since Phillipps was also well known on the
continent, there are some choice catalogues from German and
French dealers, most noteworthy Leander van Ess's extremely
rare Handschriftlicher Bücher (1823) and De Bure's
catalogue of the MacCarthy Reagh collection (1815).
Thus, the building of the great Bibliotheca Phillippica
is documented by the Horblit Phillipps collection - but so
is its dispersal. Upon Phillipps's death in 1872 the library
and Thirlestaine House (Phillipps's second residence) passed
to his youngest daughter Kate and her husband John Fenwick,
and then later to Phillipps's grandson Thomas FitzRoy
Fenwick. The fate of the library from that point is a very
complicated story, one which is covered in great detail in
volume V of Munby's Phillipps Studies. But it can also be
read in the bound set of Sotheby & Co. auction
catalogues, once owned by the Fenwick family, which records
the sales of the Bibliotheca Phillippica from 1886 to 1950
and also in Horblit's own series of the second round of
Sotheby Co. sales which began in 1965. Also present is run
of catalogues from the London firm of William H. Robinson
Ltd., which acquired the "residue" of the Phillipps
collection in 1946 and handled further disbursments until
1956.
Manuscripts Associated with the
Bibliotheca Phillippica
Among the manuscript material in the Horblit gift are
some of central importance to the study of the Bibliotheca
Phillippica. The earliest of these is the little catalogue
of printed books (already described under Almanacs and
Diaries) written out on fourteen pages of Le Souvenir or
Pocket Remembrancer for the year 1803, which presumably
represents the library of eleven-year-old Master Thomas
Phillipps. This manuscript was apparently unknown to Munby,
as was another in the collection, a duodecimo pamphlet
titled E Libris T.P. which contains notes on about
three hundred and seventy books. This list is datable from
internal evidence to ca. 1811, but the date 1808 also
appears prominently on the inner rear wrapper, making this
document quite possibly the one described (erroneously, as
it turns out) by Munby as the "first catalogue of books at
Middle Hill." This very interesting sequence continues with
two notebooks in quarto dated respectively 1816 and 1827 and
ends with a large collection of leaves and notes loosely
stitched or laid into Middle Hill boards, and dating from
ca. 1842-1853. These last three catalogues are all also
apparently undocumented in Munby's Phillipps
Studies.
Another modest quarto notebook houses what may be the
most significant item in the entire Horblit collection. The
first six pages of this rather shabby roan-backed volume
(Phillipps MSS no. 24742) contain the original manuscript of
the "Preface to My Catalogue of MSS," Sir Thomas Phillipps's
famous confessio bibliomaniae. The preface was never
printed during Sir Thomas's lifetime, but Munby transcribes
it as Appendix A (pp. 18-20) of his Phillipps Studies
I, and also includes a facsimile of the first leaf as
the frontispiece of that volume. As part of his labors on
the massive Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum, Sir
Thomas created a series of printed folio "form books"
setting out Phillipps Manuscript numbers in series for
purposes of indexing and inventory. The collection contains
three of these, in various stages of completion. Another
similar form book in the Horblit collection has printed
leaves headed "No.," "Subject," "Vols.," "Author or
Collector," and so on, which apparently represents a scheme
by Phillipps (ca. 1840) to initiate a much expanded version
of his catalogue of the Phillipps Manuscripts. Accompanying
it are two corrected proofs of the new arrangement, but it
was apparently never carried any further. Sir Thomas's move
in 1863 from Middle Hill to his new residence at
Thirlestaine House near Cheltenham produced numerous
manuscript inventories and checklists of the library, one of
which, in three large quarto volumes, survives in the
Horblit Phillipps collection. The death of the great
collector in 1872 precipitated another flurry of handwritten
inventories, this time for purposes of probate. Phillipps
scholars will be interested to know that the Horblit
collection houses two versions of the supplementary list of
the Phillipps manuscripts prepared in 1872 by Edward A.
Bond, Madden's successor as Keeper of Manuscripts at the
British Museum. The first version (which is that described
by Munby ) carries the inventory of Phillipps Manuscripts
from no. 23838 to no. 26179; but the second version appears
to be more extensive, ending at no. 26365.
Personalia
As a major figure in the antiquarian and bibliophilic
circles of mid-19th-century England, Phillipps naturally
acquired a good many copies of works written by his
colleagues in those fields, and by scholars who had made use
of the Bibliotheca Phillippica. Traveller, explorer and
bibliophile Robert Curzon was one of the few friends Sir
Thomas never managed to alienate, and there is a copy in the
Horblit collection of Curzon's Visits to Monasteries in
the Levant (London : J. Murray, 1849). It is accompanied
by a very interesting little autograph manuscript (Phillipps
MSS no. 22133) by Curzon, bound in Middle Hill boards, and
entitled Notes of some of the original libraries in the
Levant where manuscripts still exist, which have been mostly
written there, & are not generally known. This is
the manuscript described by Munby on p. 124 of his Phillipps
Studies III, and transcribed as Appendix B of that volume.
Munby has also documented the warm friendship between Sir
Thomas and American historian Jared Sparks, attested to in
the Horblit collection by a copy of Sparks's Life of
George Washington (Boston: F. Andrews, 1839), inscribed
at some length to Sir Thomas. There are numerous other such
association copies of this type in the collection, as well
as a several contemporary accounts and descriptions of the
Bibliotheca Phillippica.
The objects collected by Horblit for their personal
association with Sir Thomas Phillipps are fascinating, and
make a particularly fine show in their new home. Among the
first things a visitor to the Club will notice on entering
the Horblit Phillipps Room are three large framed vellum
documents, complete with seals, which decorate the walls.
These are 1) the "letters patent" creating Thomas Phillipps
a baronet, dated 1 September 1821, 2) the "grant of arms" to
the baronet of 1 August 1821, and 3) a "grant of altered
arms" dated 29 August 1857. As the illegitimate son of a
wealthy tradesman and a barmaid, Phillipps took more than a
passing pleasure in these marks of social importance, and
this is reflected in the many images incorporating
Phillipps's arms in the Horblit collection. He commissioned
numerous designs for an armorial bookplate, and the
collection contains several of these, as well as the
original engraved copper printing plate for one version that
was carried a little further than most. None, apparently,
was ever used. This small assemblage of Phillippsiana
includes notebooks and texts from Sir Thomas's schooldays at
Rugby (one notebook contains several poems by young
Phillipps), as well as his ivory-handled seal, his imposing
walnut-framed magnifying glass -- and, of course, a lock of
his hair.
|
