the book collector
seventeenth-century house and the wings added in the mid-eigh- teenth century with a load-bearing arch across the main axis of the room, and has been carefully designed and decorated to create a trompe-l’œil e V ect, suggesting the room is significantly larger than its relatively meagre forty feet. This wider deception is enhanced by Wright’s fine jib door, decorated with false spines. 12 The use of false books in English libraries has a long precedent. The earliest example yet found appears in the famous satirical de- scription of ‘Leonora’s Library’ from The Spectator. 13 In 1711 Mr. Spectator writes of his visit to the ‘Lady’s Library’ of Leonora, ‘formerly a celebrated beauty … a widow for two or three years’ who subsequently has ‘turned all the passions of her sex, into a love of books’. There he found ‘several … counterfeit books upon the upper shelves, which were carved in wood, and served only to fill up the number, like faggots in the muster of a regiment.’ For this practice to be satirized, it seems likely to have been well established by 1711. Although the activities of later architects often eliminated evidence, jib doors and false spines were probably part of the first generation of architectural libraries. Recently unearthed evidence concerning the Long Library designed by William Kent in c.1735 at Holkham Hall, perhaps the greatest Anglo-Palladian house, suggests that a jib door was part of the initial conception. In Kent’s original drawing for the east wall of the Long Library the press next to the fireplace where the jib door was constructed is annotated, requesting ‘A halfe door to be contriv’d here’, with a superscript mark possibly suggesting ‘herein’. 14 Whether this door was dis- Robinson, Shugborough (London: National Trust, 1996), p. 33. 12 . I am grateful to Jane Gallagher for confirming that the jib door is likely to be part of Wright’s original design. 13 . The Spectator No. 37. Thursday, April 12, 1711 (London: S. Buckley and A. Baldwin, 1711) pp. 203–08. This famous listing of a ‘lady’s library’ has been much discussed; see, for example: R. M. Wiles, Serial Publication in England Before 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 12, R. Tierney-Hynes, Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 32–5;K. Lubey, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain 1660–1760 (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2012), p. 94. 14 . Holkham Archive: P/M5, ‘A sketch for Ld Lovell’s library at Holkham, W. K. 1737’. The drawing is illustrated in D. P. Mortlock, Holkham Library: A History and
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