The Williamscote Library at Penn State:
An 18th-Century Survival
Charles W. Mann, Jr.
East-Central American Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies
October 1994
The Pennsylvania State University Libraries received in July 1968, through the good offices of Blackwell's a relatively intact 18th-century library, numbering nearly 2,500 bound volumes, an additional five or six hundred pamphlets, and about thirty manuscript volumes. The library is mentioned in Nichols's Literary Anecdotes and in the DNB. It was principally assembled by John Loveday (1711-1789), philologist and antiquary, who lived at Caversham in Oxfordshire. John Loveday the second (1742-1809), Doctor of Laws, removed the library in 1799 to Williamscote House near Banbury, and continued to add to it.
The elder Loveday's career had been beautifully chronicled by his descendant Sarah Markham in her book John Loveday of Caversham, 1711-1789, The Life and Tours of an 18th-Century Onlooker, published by Michael Russell in 1984. Loveday began collecting as a student at Brasenose College and never stopped thereafter. When Loveday was only seventeen, Thomas Hearne, Bodley's librarian and distinguished antiquarian, was already sending presentation copies of his books around to the young man's rooms. John Loveday the elder annotated his books frequently, and so did his son, in remarkably clear and similar handwriting. JLI generally noted the price of the book and the cost of the binding but did not inscribe his name. JIL's inscriptions can be evocative: "priced 2 shillings, May 19, 1750. Bought at a sale of T. Osborne's in the catalog of which it was said to be, with Mss. Notes by Mr. Bacon, viz Montague Bacon Esqu. Viz Hughes letters ii.7 note." He indexed and annotated his books throughout his life, so each copy frequently had a little history of its own, which must be puzzled out. Hearne was to memoralize the young man in a Latin phrase, "optimae spei juvenis literarum et literatorulm amantissimus." John Loveday returned the compliment when after Hearne's death he saw to it that Hearne's tomb was properly looked after, and it should be noted that the last letter that Hearne wrote was to John Loveday.
The Loveday family's wealth derived from investments in the Turkish trade, and these two gentlemen lived the lives of privileged antiquaries. I queried Sarah Markham one day as to what John Loveday did besides collect and annotate his books, and with a look of surprise she said, "He didn't do anything else." The library contained upwards of six or seven thousand volumes; probably much of it survives but in different places. The library came our way through the wonderful grant-in-aid program, inadvertently instigated by the British government, called "death duties." The pressure on the law of entailment began to show itself first in 1952 when the then Thomas Loveday, who owned a Caxton, put up at sale on 8 June 1953 approximately 350 books and manuscripts from the library, in 100 and 216 lots. He seems to have chosen for that sale STC books, travel accounts, and a Thomas Otway manuscripts--presumably big-ticket items in a low-cost era. The sale realized 5,244 pounds, roughly $26,000 in American currency at the time, and a respectable price. Other books found their way into the public hands, particularly through the bookseller James Stevens-Cox, who moved from Dorchester to Guernsey in 1970. Stevens-Cox issued a catalog of Williamscote books, from which we made some purchases.
However, the saga of Penn State begins in mid-1968, when we began dealing with the firm of Blackwell's to purchase the library. Arrangements went quite smoothly, and sometime in the fall of 1968 Blackwell's, for whatever benighted reason, presumably because of the newly instigated container-shipping program, shipped the books, wrapped a huge, specially constructed 7,800-pound crate, to America. It was a year of a two-month dock strike. The books stayed in England for another two months before arriving somewhere in the vicinity of Camden, New Jersey. I say "somewhere" because the container disappeared altogether. It was ultimately found aboard a freight car and sent to Lewistown, Pennsylvania. It arrived there only to find that there was no equipment strong enough to get it off the train. It went on to Pittsburgh, and was eventually returned to Philadelphia, and we should note at this time that the crate, tall as a man and wide as a small trailer, was addressed to the Pennsylvania State University, Philadelphia, PA, which possibly caused some of our problems. The crate was brought to the Penn State motor pool, broken up, and was found to contain seventy-nine quite large metal boxes. These specially purchased boxes contained approximately 2,400 volumes, including many volumes of bound pamphlets. What is pleasing to relate is that the books taken from the cartons, while not quite Tut's treasures, seemed to match them in fine condition. Some years later, Fritz Liebert of Yale mentioned to me that he had purchased a Williamscote book and had been astonished by this quality condition. The Williamscote books are neatly bound without tooling, with characteristic gold labeling on the spine, and free from flourish. But they can be spotted quite readily in any collection of books.
In working with the collection, we began to discover a fair number of really decent books, things that we weren't quite expecting, such as John Smith's History of Virginia (London, 1624) with the 1630 continuation bound in. Other books included works by Raleigh, Jacques Callot (his larger series on the horrors of war), and happily for us, what appeared to be a nearly complete set of the edited works of Thomas Hearne. We had paid approximately $30,000 for this library in 1968, which seemed like a fair price, and we began to wonder just what had happened and why we were so fortunate. Some years later Sarah Markham told me that Blackwell's was to return much of the library and had inadvertently sold us the good books along with the ordinary ones! Blackwell's had to pay the family approximately $30,000 (or pounds?) to make up the difference, so they presumably lost money on all aspects of the transaction.
The two Lovedays were inveterate catalogers, as well as annotators, and no fewer than two catalogs for the library exist. These are worth special mention for the clarity of the writing and especially for the excellence of the cross-references. They are still of use to us in identifying problem titles. And it is always pleasant to find a cryptic note with a little "v" telling us where to find something after two centuries. The latest entry in what appears to be the fullest catalog is 1787. JLI was to die in 1789. The younger lived until 1809.
Supplementing the main catalog was an invaluable tool, the pamphlet catalog, which in our pre-computer days guided us to the seemingly endless numbers of randomly bound pamphlets. Those of you who are familiar with disbound works of the 17th and 18th centuries are perhaps unaware of the problems these pamphlets offer in cataloging and retrieval. For any number of years we would wince whenever the little expression "bound with" appeared on a finding guide. If you have lost the initial reference, you may spend hours looking for the item. The Loveday catalog can still be turned to as an index to these pamphlets.
Less useful but still evocative is the shelf list. Williamscote books can frequently be identified by a shelf mark-for example D.1-23, indicating that a book would be found in book press 1, first shelf, 23rd volume. With the shelf list it is possible to reconstruct in one's mind the library as it was originally shelved and to see where the books fell in order to be more useful. It's also an indication of just how an 18th-century mind viewed classification.
The library for its time is characteristically rich in theology, which, in addition to runs of sermons, does include early editions in Latin and Greek of church fathers, commentaries on the bible, and all of the appurtenances of what was a very religious age. The character of the library was strengthened in classics through the inheritance of the library of James Merrick, an editor and poet who died prematurely, leaving his manuscript and book collections to John Loveday in 1769. Other materials that strengthened the collection came from the library of John Ward, the historian of Gresham College, whose library had been sold in 1759. Loveday curiously became all the more famous for owning John Ward's books and materials than he was for building his own library. Eventually he gave much of the manuscript material to the British Library. But some significant Ward items and some significant Merricks, for that matter, remain with the material at Penn State, including the manuscript catalog of Ward's library.
After theology, classics (particularly Greek editions and to a lesser extent Latin editions), history and philosophy make up the strengths in the collection. A rather fine Johnson collection was dispersed at the 1952 auction, but interesting literary works remain. One would like to have a dozen titles by John Ray, listed in the catalog, but only one remains in the collection. Also missing are all but one of the twelve titles listed for Robert Boyle. Science generally sells reasonably well, so we must gather that these were picked out long ago. Fortunately, Penn State has been actively buying 18th-century books for approximately thirty-five years, so many important books no longer found in the Williamscote Library are on the shelves in the Rare Books Room. High spots do remain in the library, including such standards as Hollinshead's Chronicles of 1577 and '87, Milton's Paradise Lost with an 8th title page, Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663-64), Raleigh's Historie of the World (1628), and so on. It's also a library made up of the books of friends, so there are good runs of not completely forgotten antiquaries like Benjamin Kennicott and Richard Ducarel and Richard Chandler, the compiler of Marmora Oxoniensis, a volume that JLII helped to prepare.
In recent years I have been trying to find out where Williamscote books may be located. I have found a number in the collections of the University of Illinois. Many yet remain with the family, others are at Harvard, and many probably rest unnoticed in library collections around the country. Back in 1970, I actually found a two-volume set in the library on our own open shelves.
The family collection of papers remains extraordinarily intact in England in the care of Sarah Markham, who has produced two books over the past twenty years, based on her family's history. She herself is not in her middle eighties and presides over family letters from Alexander Pope, Thomas Hearne, Horace Walpole, and--very strikingly--a letter to a relative of hers, one Thomas Bagshaw, asking Bagshaw to place a stone on the grave of Johnson's wife. Only yesterday another family member placed for sale at Sotheby's some books from the library. We hope as we can find funds, and as chance and fate play our way, to continue to add books to this collection, but I am pleased to say that since 1968 it has provided Penn State a strong foundation for 18th-century studies. We have much enjoyed sharing information about the collection with libraries and scholars. We hope to continue to do so. Although the library is not fully cataloged, it is available by author, title, and keyword search. Sarah Markham, introduced to the world of word processors, is now looking forward to e-mail. She has been the most indefatigable and delightful of correspondents, who with vigor and impatience responds to queries and questions. A long correspondence with her constitutes one more supplement to our most prized 18th-century collection, the Williamscote Library.
