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Selling the Family Silver – sale of the Macclesfield Library

Patrica Fara and Roger Gaskell, 'Selling the Family Silver: country house libraries and the history of science'  Endeavour, 29 ( 2005), pp. 14–19. 

This article, written with Patricia Fara, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and author of Newton, the Making of Genius (Macmillan, 2002), discusses the dispersal of the Macclesfield Library removed from Shirburn Castle. The scientific books mostly come from the library of William Jones (1675–1749), who in his turn had acquired the library and papers of John Collins (1625–1683). At the time of his death, Jones' library was regarded as the finest scientific library in England. Over 3000 early scientific books are being sold by Sothebys' in London in  one of the most, if not the most significant dispersal of a private scientific library in Britain in the last 50 years. Yet despite the public outcry over the wretched Keele affair, this massive blow to the history of science in Britain is passing almost un-noticed by the history of science community and the public.

We have shown how important this library is as an archive of unique documents – books with specific bibliographical features, provenances and notes as well as whole manuscript treatises – and argue that it should have been kept together. The total sales price will not be so very great compared with other things with less historical context or dubious national importance for which public (that is lottery) money has been found. We ask why there has been no public debate about the loss of this extraordinary library. 

The full article can be viewed here: pdf of article >

Erratum: in the caption to figure 6 in the article I stated that Foster's Miscellanies (1659) was edited by John Collins: it was not, it was edited by John Twysden.

Dibner lecture

From collector to reader: Bern Dibner and history of science collections

In this lecture, delivered at the Smithsonian Institution on the 25 anniversary of the gift of the Dibner Library, I outlined Dibner's career as a collector and then discussed the collecting of science books from the renaissance to the present. Text of lecture.

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Winship lecture

The bibliography of engravings in books

The Winship Lecture for 2000 in which I examined an area of bibliography which has so far been almost entirely neglected. I describe the techniques of printing engravings within the text and on inserted plates, and the implications for descriptive and analytical bibliography. Text of lecture.

NB this text is now superseded by ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop, a mysterious collaboration’ by Roger Gaskell, The Book Collector, Summer 2004, 213–251). I will mount the full text and illustrations on the website soon.