POEMS From SIR KENELM DIGBY'S PAPERS.

Item Details

London, Nichols and Sons, 25, Parliament Street, 1877

1st Edition, a paper copy. [6], vi, [2], 51, [1] pp. T.p printed in red & black. Laid in at front a printed slip, "Eighty copies on paper. / Two copies on vellum." Illustrated with portrait of Digby, from an Engraving by R. Van de Voerst after A. Van Dyck. Facsimile leaf of Digby's handwriting inserted prior to p. 7. Portrait of Venetia, Lady Digby, inserted prior to p. 21. Tailpieces throughout. Printer's device to last page. Royal 8vo. 10-3/4" x 8". Original brown quarter leather binding over red paste-paper boards. Gilt stamped title lettering to spine. General binding wear, primarily to extremities & some rubs to spine leather. Usual age-toning to paper. A VG copy. 

The Roxburghe Club was founded in 1812 and is the oldest society of bibliophiles in the world. Its membership is limited to 40, chosen from among those with distinguished libraries or collections, or with a scholarly interest in books. It has also been distinguished, among the many publishing societies that have done so much in this country for history, letters, antiquity and other branches of literature and art, for the quality of its publications.The spur to the Club's foundation was the sale of the enormous library of the Duke of Roxburghe (who had died in 1804), which took place over 46 days in May-July 1812. The auction was eagerly followed by bibliophiles, the high point being the sale on 17 June 1812 of a first edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Christophorus Valdarfer of Venice in 1471, and sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at that time. (The Marquis already possessed a copy, but one that lacked 5 leaves.) That evening, a group of eighteen collectors met at the St Albans Tavern, St Albans Street (later renamed Waterloo Place) for a dinner presided over by the 2nd Earl Spencer, and this is regarded as the origin of the Roxburghe Club.

A toast drunk on that occasion has been repeated at every annual anniversary dinner since to the "immortal memory of John Duke of Roxburghe, of Christopher Valdarfer, printer of the Boccaccio of 1471, of Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, the inventors of the art of printing, of William Caxton, Father of the British press [and others; and] the prosperity of the Roxburghe Club and the Cause of Bibliomania all over the world".

It was decided to make the dinner an annual event: further members were admitted the following year. The club was formed by Thomas Frognall Dibdin, author of the book Bibliomania; or Book-Madness (1809), who served as its first secretary; and the club was formalised under Earl Spencer's presidency.

The Club rapidly became more than a mere social institution. Each member was (and remains) expected to sponsor the publication of a rare or curious volume. Other volumes are published by the Club collectively. Initially the volumes were editions of early blackletter printed texts (the first, in 1814, was the Earl of Surrey's translation of parts of Virgil's Aeneid, originally printed in 1557); but from as early as 1819 they began to include texts taken from manuscript originals. The standards of scholarship are high, and the quality of printing, facsimile reproduction, and binding is lavish. Copies of each volume (in a fine binding) are presented to all members, and a limited number of extra copies (generally in a less lavish binding) may be made available for sale to non-members. From 1839, the total number of copies for each publication, including members' copies, was limited to 100. Recently, the limit was raised to 342 copies: 42 for the club, 300 for the public. The Roxburghe Club is generally recognised as the first "book club" (that is, text publication society), and was a model for many book societies that appeared later in Britain and Europe.

Digby "was an English courtier and diplomat. He was also a highly reputed natural philosopher, astrologer and known as a leading Roman Catholic intellectual and Blackloist. For his versatility, he is described in John Pointer's Oxoniensis Academia (1749) as the 'Magazine of all Arts and Sciences, or (as one stiles him) the Ornament of this Nation'". [Wiki]

Scarce Roxburghe publication, at the time of cataloguing, RBH shows the last copy to market was almost 60 years ago, in 1966, and we see no other copies on offer.

Order on TavBooks.com site: <https://www.tavbooks.com/pages/books/51722>