Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Century

The social categorization of the book collectors in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain informs the relationship between bibliomania and the private library. Much bibliomania was middle-class, with much emula-tion of celebrated aristocratic collectors and collections. Privacy, however, remained an important concern. Collectors often shared their books with others, but their passion was regarded as an individual one, with private space associated with the collecting habit. Paralleling the commercial restructuring of bookselling was a boom in the fashioning and equipping of domestic libraries, and by 1800 the middle classes were building more libraries than ever before, often to enhance their social prestige. The essay also interrogates the ambiguity of connoisseurship, which sometimes involved destruction as well as conservation. What needs further investiga-tion is the motivation of library owners, as evidenced by correspondence and the prefaces to library catalogues.