Portrait of an Obsession
The Life of Sir Thomas Phillipps, the world’s greatest book collector, adapted by Nicolas Barker from the five volumes of Phillipps studies. London, Constable. 1967.. © Sheila Munby, and reproduced with her kind permission.

The urge to collect things resolutely defies easy explanation or definition. A chair is a thing to sit on. Why, when you can buy one for a few pounds, spend hundreds on one by Chippendale or Riesener, the more so as, when you have got it, you do not sit on it? Most collectors, confronted with 'common sense' of that order, react to it like a cold bath they try and get out of it. Argument is only possible when there is some common ground: if there is none, there is no point in arguing. The collecting of books is one of the earliest manifestations of the urge: for this reason, it is harder than with most other forms of collecting to distinguish between the useful and the useless, between books collected for purely functional purposes and, say, illuminated medieval manuscripts whose texts even a literate collector may be wholly unable to read.

To begin with, it is only fairly recently five hundred years ago that a book began to be considered purely as a functional tool. Since classical times, at any rate, to be able to read was to possess a semimagical power. Thus, even the humblest reading matter required some element, most obviously that of decoration, to distinguish it for the illiterate. It was only with the invention of the printing press, a process into which decoration was not easily introduced, that this element disappeared. The growth of literacy with the decrease in cost of books accelerated this tendency, but it is worth remembering that interest in books for reasons other than as tools for reading never died. Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when, it is fashionable to say, books were collected for what was in them, not because they were first editions, even then, the great collectors, Golbert, Lord Sunderland, Harley, preferred their books in fine bindings or on large paper, and were not above paying prices out of proportion to a book's interest because it was rare. Aesthetic pleasure in the appearance, or pleasure derived from the chase, have always coexisted with the pleasure derived from the reading of books.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that a large amount of the apparatus of book-collecting, especially those parts which offend the advocates of pure common sense, are barely a hundred and fifty years old. What it was that changed the course of interest in books about the end of the eighteenth century is hard to define. In general terms, it is part of the extension of antiquarian interest from the realm of scholarship only into the province of taste. More immediately to the purpose, it is to be remarked that the lifetime of Sir Thomas Phillipps exactly spans the critical period in this change. When he was born, the collecting of books and manuscripts was the occupation of the dilettanti. The prices they paid were never such as to make much impact on a reasonable fortune. When they came to consider the ultimate destination of their libraries they tended to consider where the books would do most good, not how much they could be turned to their own profit.

When Phillipps died, eighty years later, book-collecting had become a professional business. The criteria which dictate the price of one book in relation to another had been, broadly speaking, laid down, and if tastes have changed a little and new criteria have grown up, the essential principles have altered very little. It would be unwise to ascribe so large a change to one man alone, and it could be argued that if Phillipps had any influence, taste was the last aspect of bibliophily in which it might have been expressed. So all-absorbing was his passion for collecting that he had little time for any of the ordinary human relations which would have been necessary for any direct influence to have been transmitted to others. Further, he lacked, and boasted that he lacked, any principle of selection on which taste must depend. 'I am buying Printed Books', he wrote at the very end of his life, 'because I wish to have one copy of every Book in the World.'
But in fact it was this omnivorous appetite which may be claimed as a very effective cause of the change of taste. Before 1800 there were no very established rules about the value of books. It would be hardly unfair to say that the opposition against which a book-collector made his purchases was the waste-paper merchant. Sometimes he would be bidding against fellow collectors, but more often than not he would be paying to save something from destruction, and it was this factor which formed the climate of taste. Sir Thomas Phillipps changed all that. For over fifty years he collected every scrap of written or printed matter he could lay hands on. He never threw away a piece of paper. Every note, every rejected draft of a letter on no matter how trifling a subject, every newspaper he read, he preserved. Whenever anything written or printed could be bought, he would try to buy it all. No library, private or even institutional, was immune from his solicitations. No bookseller could suppress a feeling of expectation half fear, half hope that he might one day get an offer for his entire stock. Even the waste-paper merchants themselves learnt to regard him as a profitable source of custom. This was no ordinary 'urge to collect': he had a mania, quite unrestrained by the limit of his resources (large though they were), for preservation. He collected manuscripts rather than books, not because he liked them more, in any ordinary sense, but because there was only one of them, and if it were lost, it was lost for ever.

The effect of his presence, rather than the waste-paper merchants, as the opposition to two generations of book-collectors, can be well imagined. Every one, whether his interest was Erse or Amharic, Greek or gothic, poetry or public accounts, was forced to think how much an object was worth to him, because he knew that if Sir Thomas Phillipps wanted it, no ordinary consideration of price would get in his way. Thus he amassed the largest collection of its kind ever put together by a private individual; its size alone, as well as the way it was collected, defy any reasonable explanation. His influence is still felt in the world of books, and few who have any urge to collect, whether a long-forgotten boyhood passion for stamps or a scholarly anthropological interest in Ibo masks, will be able to repress the feeling 'There, but for . . .' as they contemplate his life. It makes a very moral story. Phillipps had many good sides to him: his passion for the proper preservation of archives, far ahead of his times, is a case in point. But if tragedy is founded in the unnatural growth of some normal human characteristic, this is indeed the collector's tragedy.