The British Museum Library contains a valuable collection of early sale catalogues, and one of the volumes, containing the first eleven sales from Seaman to Bysshe, is of considerable interest from having the following note in Richard Heber’s handwriting—
“This volume, which formerly belonged to Narcissus Luttrell, and since to Mr. Gough, is remarkable for containing the eleven first Catalogues of Books ever sold by auction in England. What renders it still more curious, is that the prices of nearly all the articles are added in MS. When it came into my possession it had suffered so much from damp, and the leaves were so tender and rotten, that every time the volume was opened, it was liable to injury. This has been remedied by giving the whole a strong coat of size. At Willett’s sale, Booth, the bookseller of Duke Street, Portland Place, bought a volume of old catalogues for £2, 3s. (see Merly Catalogue, 531), and charged the same in his own shop catalogue for 1815, £21 (6823). It contained merely the eight which stand first in the present collection, of which Greenhill’s and Godolphin’s were not priced at all; and Voet’s and Sangar’s only partially. However, it enabled me to fill up a few omissions in the prices of my copy of Sangar’s.—N.B. The prices of Willett’s and the present copy did not always tally exactly.”
Heber paid six shillings for this volume at Gough’s sale in 1810, and Charles Lewis’s labours in sizing and binding in 1824 cost £2, 15s. At Heber’s sale the volume sold for £3.
In April 1680 was sold “the Library of the Right Hon. George, late Earl of Bristol, a great part of which were the curiosities collected by the learned Sir Kenelm Digby, together with the Library of another Learned person.” It is impossible from the catalogue to tell which lots belonged to Sir Kenelm; and there seems to be little doubt that few of the books