the book collector
1821: 10 I expected to have cleared 2000 guineas by my Tour, which would have placed a large number of bills in your desk. By a strange fatality, and by a result, in which ingratitude & persecution have not been wanting, I shall be £ 80 minus – when all the outgoings are settled. Nevertheless, Dibdin paid Lewis £ 50 initially and, in early August 1821, arranged to pay the remainder in a series of bills at four, five, six, nine, and twelve months: December 1821 ( £ 50), January ( £ 50), February ( £ 50), May ( £ 150), and August 1822 ( £ 80). 11 Dibdin o V ered the drawings back to Lewis, to sell speculatively, but was turned down. After several attempts to raise funds by disposing of the drawings privately, Dibdin consigned them to Robert Evans, who added them to the end of the sale of the library of George Isted, 11–14 February 1822 12 . Many of Dibdin’s friends attended the sale and several bought heavily to support him. Some, no doubt, had plans to include the drawings as extra-illustrations in their copies of the Tour . George Lewis was present, carefully annotating his copy of the o V print with prices and buyers (it survives in a private col- lection). 13 Comments may have been made before, during, or after the sale and, according to Lewis, these reports wrongly accused him of overcharging Dibdin. Within a month of the sale, the artist had written several letters to Dibdin on this subject, at the same time stating his intention to publish an account of their arrangements with the final part of his Groups . 10 . Transcribed and reproduced in facsimile, along with Nicol’s reply, by Henry Watson Kent, ‘Another Day: a retrospective note on Thomas Frognall Dibdin and the printers of the Shakespeare Press’ in The Colophon Part Two (1930). Kent read ‘my Tour’ as ‘any hour’ and Aedes as Odes . He took the printing bill discussed in the letters as referring to the Typographical Antiquities , one dating from 1819. Although Dibdin did mention a large debt he had been carrying for several years (some of it resulting from family expenses), it seems to me that the letters relate to the work just completed, the Tour . Regarding Dibdin’s financial matters, see Renato Rabaiotti’s introduction in Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Horae Bibliographicae Cantabrigienses (New Castle, 1989). 11 . Lewis, ‘The following observations’, [1822], p. 5; ‘Advertisement’, [1822/3], p. 5. 12 . There are two issues of this catalogue: one with both the Isted lots and the Lewis drawings and an o V print containing only the Lewis drawings (Windle & Pippin A43). 13 . The gross sale proceeds were about £ 568 (figures vary slightly), although Lewis gives £ 440 as the ‘sum-total’ for the sale in both versions of his statement, p. 4.
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