the book collector
with the publication of H. Bardon’s La Littérature Latine Inconnue. 31 Earlier authors were certainly interested in the topic, 32 and Bruce’s papers suggest that he drew some of the names from his list from Thomas Blackwell’s 1735 Enquiry into the life and writings of Homer , 33 but the majority of his information was sourced directly from obscure references within extant works. Despite this herculean e V ort, within a generation his work was forgotten; knowledge of the in-joke died with Robert Stewart, only to be rediscovered 200 years later. The identity of the craftsman responsible for the Mount Stewart shutters remains frustratingly elusive, but he was almost certainly a Dublin bookbinder who bound both books for the family as well as executed the false spines. Evidence from elsewhere suggests that this aspect of interior design was usually outsourced to a professional binder. A patchy account survives of the ordering of the jib door at Nostell Priory, supplied by Thomas Chippendale in 1767. 34 Chippendale’s bill for the door is dated 30 June 1767, and a series of other documents chart its creation and installation. 35 An undated list, probably a schedule of work delivered or completed, includes reference to ‘157 Sham Books for the upper part of the library Door, Gilt & Letterd’, then later ‘81 Sham books for the door of the library’. More detail emerges from the accounts for 1767: 36 31 . H. Bardon, La Littérature Latine Inconnue (Paris: Klincksieck, 1952–56). An earlier attempt was made by A. F. West, ‘The Lost Parts of Latin literature’, in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association , 33 (1902), xxi-xxvi. West cites no earlier listing. 32 . Thomas Browne’s Mus æum Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita listed ‘some remark- able books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living’. (See G. Keynes, ed., T. Browne, The Works of Sir Thomas Browne , (London: Faber and Faber,1946), vol. 3, pp. 109–19). Voltaire wrote an epitaph on the poets cited by Ovid, but subsequently lost; see T. Besterman, ed., Voltaire, Voltaire’s Notebooks (Geneva, Oxford [printed]: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1952), vol. II, p. 384. 33 . National Library of Ireland, MS 20, 887, p. 12: Bruce read Blackwell’s Homer in 1804, the year before the shutters were commissioned. Blackwell’s book contained a lengthy list of the poets who preceded Homer. 34 . See Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam , p. 200 and p. 354, note 20. 35 . See Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, vol. 1, pp. 181–85. 36 . Gilbert, Life and Work , vol. 1, p. 181–82.
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