the book collector
on a single book to large-scale trompe-l’œil, encompassing whole rooms. The reasons behind such deceptions are as varied as the methods employed, but invariably the library shelves were utilised to demonstrate wealth, erudition or status. From the outset, the skills of the bookbinder were a useful tool in so doing. The earliest examples of bibliopegic sleight-of-hand were driven primarily by economics and a desire for uniformity, but they also represented a response, witting or unwitting, to a series of contem- porary developments and trends, tastes and fashions in book collect- ing, library use, and library design. Fundamentally, this period saw a vast increase in printed output - there were simply a great many more books to be accommodated. With a few notable exceptions, 3 most early seventeenth private libraries were ‘closet’ libraries, small collections of practical books kept in a locked chest or in a closet o V a bedchamber, and as such wholly private spaces for study, devo- tion and contemplation. With the increase in printed output in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, books became more a V ordable and more widely accessible. Libraries began to outgrow the closet. By the time our anonymous collectors had saved a few pence by tarting-up the spines of their bindings, the private library was mor- phing into something altogether more ambitious and serving a very di V erent function. The early years of the eighteenth century saw dramatic changes in the content, use and architecture of the private library. New tastes in book collecting saw the emphasis shift from content to materiality. For the first time a book’s age and antiquity, its rarity, status or place within a ‘canon of collectible books’ 4 added value. Simultaneously ‘several members of the British nobility became … seized by a violent desire to collect incunabula … the first great 3 . There was a library room created at St. James’s Palace in 1609–10 to accommo- date Lord Lumley’s books, whilst at Hatfield House a ‘boke chamber’ was created in the ground-floor apartment of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, in 1607–11. See J. Newman, ‘Library Buildings and Fittings’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Volume II 1640–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp.207–08. 4 . A. Hunt, ‘Private Libraries in the Age of Bibliomania’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 439.
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