The great thing about collecting books is that they were produced as multiples giving lots of collectors a chance to own a copy. To distinguish between copies the most desirable factors are condition and provenance and for me the greatest is provenance.

This is where book collecting collides with emotion – who can resist the allure of a book from the library of a great collector or from a distinguished country house? To hold a book once carefully chosen and shelved amongst other treasures from a previous age.

Probably the greatest book collector of the mid-twentieth century was Major J.R. ‘Jack’ Abbey. A member of the ‘beerage’ he had the means to pursue his obsession. Despite suffering from extreme dyslexia, he collected on a vast scale including private press, fine bindings, illuminated manuscripts, and, above all, colour plate books. His collection of these now form the core of the Yale Center for British Art. One that got away is Asiatic Costumes by Robert Smith. This 1828 publication featuring 44 hand-coloured plates depicting Indian life is not in Abbey’s catalogue of travel books but bears his Reynold Stone designed bookplate, his acquisition number and date at the end, and his binder’s stamp.
In addition, this copy was subsequently in the collection of Norman Bobins. Mr. Bobins put together probably the greatest collection of colour plate books of our time although with different parameters to Major Abbey.

Captain Robert SMITH (illustrator). Asiatic costumes. London, 1828.

In the nineteenth century one of the most renowned book collections was that formed by aesthete and connoisseur William Beckford. Beckford is now considered a very controversial figure, his fortune having come from plantations in Jamaica, with some 3000 enslaved people, and due to his very dissolute private life. He did, however, possess remarkable taste in books and formed a huge library in which travel books, generally in the finest possible condition, featured large. An Historical Account of British Trade over the Caspian Sea, 1753 by Janas Hanway, is one of the earliest European works on the area and was for a long time the definitive work on the subject. Published in four quarto volumes it is a very imposing work in any case. The Beckford copy is distinguished by his two different crests, a heron’s head gorging on a fish, and an oak springing from a ducal coronet to the spines, as well as his distinctive tooling to the corners of the covers of a cinquefoil and a cross flory.

Jonas HANWAY. An historical account of the British trade over the Caspian Sea. London, 1753.

If you are going to have a book from a chateau, what could be better than a book from the Château de Ferrières, the grand residence of James de Rothschild, one of the most illustrious members of one of the most illustrious of all families? When discussing his plans for Ferrières, Rothschild, who had been very impressed by his cousin Meyer’s residence at Mentmore, is reputed to have told his architect ‘build me a Mentmore only bigger’. Narrative of a journey to the Interior of China, 1819, is just such a book. Important in its own right as a product of the Amherst Mission to China, this account by the chief medical officer is adorned with colour plates.

Clarke ABEL. Narrative of a journey in the interior of China. London, 1819.

 

 

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