Born in Calcutta in 1776 and orphaned on a voyage to England, Thomas Frognall Dibdin came into the care of his wider family. His first tutor, John Man, lived in a divey part of Reading called Hosier’s Lane. In Man’s private bookroom, young Tom caught ‘the electric spark of bibliomania’. Man purchased books ‘by the sack-full’. When he brought them home he tumbled them out on the floor; his pupil, standing by, pulled from the pile illustrated editions of Horace, Ovid, Aesop and other authors who piqued his boyish interest.
At the age of twelve, Dibdin moved to Stockwell, where he learned French and drawing, and acquired, without paying for it, his first book: an odd volume of Shakespeare, containing Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. As a recently printed volume in a broken set, the book had no commercial value. But Dibdin was excited ‘almost to delirium’ by the find, and decided to try his hand at drama. Shunning spy-high, soldiers, scrumping and other ‘ordinary games of youth’, he rose early to pursue ‘drawing and dramatic composition; and, ere my fourteenth year, was the author of three exceedingly bloody tragedies’. This mania, though, was cured by a ‘simple but severe incident’:
I had brought these plays (of which I now recollect only the names of two—viz. Jasmin and The Distressed Brothers) home to my aunt, Mrs William Compton; a lively and sensible woman, and much disposed to humour my vagaries in many ways. I begged she would read them, and challenged her approbation. She did read them, or as much as she liked of them; but studiously pronounced no opinion. One evening, on retiring to rest, and receiving the bedchamber candlestick from the servant, I found a piece of paper at the bottom of the candle, to keep it steady in the stick, upon which my hand-writing was but too visible. I stopped—and read ‘Act III, scene V’, and found it to be a fragment of my beloved Jasmin! Retracing my steps with a precipitancy which may well be conceived, I enquired of the servant ‘where she had got this?’ ‘Sir,’ said she, ‘my mistress gave it me as WASTE PAPER TO LIGHT THE FIRE.’
Bookstalls and bookshops held irresistible charms. One of Dibdin’s first purchases, and a milestone in his nascent bookmanship, came from the window of Mr Collins’ shop in Walbrook: Theobald’s edition of Shakespeare’s Works, along with three other books. ‘I disdained to let the shopman carry them home for me, but took them triumphantly under my arm’.
At Oxford, Dibdin founded a literary debating club called The Lunatics. A mysterious incident with a girl led to a hasty marriage and an even hastier exit from the university. He left without taking his degree, but set up anyway as a practitioner of the law. This he practised, without success, before taking Holy Orders and devoting his life to the church, and to literature.
The Bishop of Winchester appointed him a deacon; three months later, after a three-minute exam, he became a priest. Dibdin’s ecclesiastical duties made only small demands on his time and ardour, leaving plenty of room for his true calling, books. He found himself enraptured by their contents, but also, perhaps even more so, by their outward properties: their bindings, formats, illustrations, typography, title pages. In 1802 Dibdin published his first bibliographical work, An Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics. Several of the classics were source texts for Shakespeare’s plays. The slight volume sold rapidly and gave Dibdin what little encouragement he needed to become the biggest bibliomaniac in history.
In 1809 Dibdin published Bibliomania or Book-Madness. Dedicated to the great collector Richard Heber, the book helped fuel a fashionable hunger for rare and precious volumes. A second edition, much revised and expanded, followed two years later. In Shakespeare and His Times (1817), Nathan Drake called Dibdin’s book ‘the most fascinating which has ever been written on Bibliography…It is composed in the highest tone of enthusiasm for the art, and its dialogue and descriptions are given with a mellowness, a warmth and a raciness, which absolutely fix and enchant the reader’. Netting its author two hundred pounds, the second Bibliomania emboldened Dibdin to attempt a much more significant enterprise: a deluxe, career-defining, seven-volume catalogue of the remarkable Renaissance library of Dibdin’s new friend and patron, George John, Second Earl Spencer of Spencer House, St James’s Place and Althorp in Northamptonshire.
In the opinion of their author, these and subsequent works ‘set wealthy and well educated men a-stirring to collect materials, which, but for such occasional excitement, might, in the end, moulder in oblivion’. In a forty-year literary career, Dibdin applied and popularised terms and a perspective that booklovers now take for granted. According to this perspective, first editions (‘editiones princepes’) are best and rarity is a virtue. Vellum beats morocco, which in turn beats ordinary calf. (The critic and poet Leigh Hunt described Dibdin ‘leaping up to kiss and embrace every enticing edition in vellum and every sweetly toned, mellow-toned, yellow morocco binding’.) Copies printed with wide margins (‘large paper copies’) are to be preferred. Fatter margins are more amenable, more luxurious; some bibliophile editions have margins so generous that only ‘a rivulet of text trickles down the middle of the page’. Adhering to the fashions Dibdin helped create, prospectuses and colophons announced breathlessly that ‘only a hundred copies’, or, better still, ‘only fifty copies’ had been taken off the press. Special copies (‘specials’) were another dimension of the vogue; the most desirable of these were printed on coloured or otherwise exotic paper: ‘yellow paper, blue paper, writing paper, on papier de Hollande, de Chine, or d’Inde’.
Worshipping primacy of publication was something new. In the seventeenth century, collectors replaced old editions with new ones, and regarded this as an improvement. On 6 November 1683, Sir William Boothby wrote to the bookseller Michael Johnson: ‘I have sent you my old Josephus, and desire you to send me one of the last and best edition.’ He wrote similarly about Livy’s Theatrum Historicum, John Cowell’s The Interpreter (1607) and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). The Bodleian library had a copy of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays—until the library disposed of it when the 1663 ‘enhanced’ third edition became available.
In the production of his editions, Dibdin collaborated with William Bulmer, the finest English printer of the era, and Charles Lewis, London’s foremost bookbinder. Lewis was so successful that he earned opprobrium for dressing above his tradesman station by ‘wearing tassels to his half boots’. When Dibdin produced an enlarged edition of Joseph Ames and William Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities (1810–19) the subscribers included all the leading bookmen of the day—Richard Heber, Francis Douce, Edmond Malone, Earl Spencer, Mark Masterman-Sykes—as well as King George III. The orphan from Calcutta had come a long way.
According to the bookman Colin Franklin, ‘books are tedious things—unless you own them’. Becoming the owner of an especially rare and desirable book can have a magical effect. The most famous example of a life transformed by a single book purchase is the tale of John Ker, Third Duke of Roxburghe.
Under George III, Ker had shouldered weighty responsibilities: Lord of the Bedchamber, Knight of the Thistle, Groom of the Stole and Knight of the Garter. In Italy on the Grand Tour he came across a 1471 Christopher Valdarfer edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Shakespeare used the Decameron as the principal source for All’s Well that Ends Well. The Valdarfer edition, the first known printing, was so rare that many authorities denied it could be found at all. Ker bought it for a hundred guineas. Back in London it was celebrated as a magnificent prize, and Ker was a changed man. He had caught the most virulent strain of the bibliomania virus.
Like Earl Spencer, Ker became one of the few noblemen of the time who preferred books over bloodstock and gambling. For the next four decades, he hunted rare volumes, and especially the rarest editions of Shakespeare’s works, or books relating to Shakespeare, or to his sources or his peers. Ker acquired all four seventeenth-century folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays. He also bought a large number of Shakespeare quartos, and much else besides. If Shakespeare ever owned a quantity of books, the chances are that some of them made it into Ker’s collection.
The Roxburghe Library became the greatest of the age, and exemplified the mounting interest in Shakespeare and his world. According to the Pall Mall bookseller Robert Harding Evans, Ker ‘idolized the talents of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and collected everything that could illustrate their works’. (Members of one branch of Shakespearean heresy claim that Francis Bacon wrote not only the works of Shakespeare but Don Quixote as well, of which Cervantes’ version is a Spanish translation.) At its core, the library was a Shakespeare library, and the most illustrious book sale ever held was a Shakespeare library sale. After Ker’s death, Evans sold the Roxburghe Library at auction. George Nicol prepared the catalogue and William Bulmer printed it. The 1812 sale became a defining moment in Shakespeare bibliography and indeed bibliography of every kind. Ten thousand items were dispersed, in sessions that extended over forty-six days. Napoleon Bonaparte was rumoured to have bid through a go-between while at the same time invading Russia. The auction raised £23,341 for Ker’s estate—an enormous sum in 1812.
Three bibliophiles in particular—the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer and his cousin the Marquess of Blandford—drove the Roxburghe Sale prices into the stratosphere. Ker’s fifteen Caxtons (volumes printed by England’s first printer) brought record prices: the Duke of Devonshire paid £1060 for the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (1464). Before the Roxburghe Sale, no one had ever paid more than a thousand pounds for a book.
George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford and later the Fifth Duke of Marlborough, was a notorious spendthrift. He splurged so much on books and manuscripts that he would soon be bankrupt. The Roxburghe Sale, though, coincided with the high point of his resources and his acquisitiveness. He bought the Valdarfer Decameron for £2260, a record price for a single book, and one that stood for many decades afterwards. When the crunch came for the Marquess, creditors seized his estates and sold his books. He was reduced to renting out Blenheim Palace’s fishing and hunting grounds at an hourly rate.
At the Roxburghe Sale, Earl Spencer had bid against the Marquess and helped run up the Decameron to the record value; Dibdin likened the contest to a mediaeval joust. At the distressed sale of the Marquess’s library, the fight became a fizzle: Earl Spencer bought the Decameron for £918 15s, less than half the bubbly Roxburghe price. Many other titles also failed to realise their Roxburghe price for many years after the sale. John Morgan Rice, for example, bought a rare volume at the sale, Richard Edwards’ The Paradyse of Daintie Devises (1580), for fifty-five pounds and thirteen shillings. The very same copy was sold, at the dispersal of Rice’s library in 1834, for twelve pounds.
On the day the Decameron was sold, Dibdin dined with jubilant bibliophiles at St Alban’s Tavern. There and then, the diners resolved to found a club that would become the world’s most prestigious and exclusive book fraternity. Earl Spencer was the inaugural president, Dibdin vice-president. The members adopted rules that would preserve the club’s exclusivity: one black ball would be enough to disqualify a candidate from membership. Despite these efforts, the Roxburghe Club’s members were soon ridiculed by publications such as the Museum and the Edinburgh Literary Courant as being ‘very considerable’ in wealth but ‘so-so’ in intellect.
Undeterred, the Roxburghers established a schedule of regular meetings to drink, gourmandise and talk about books. They began publishing Members’ Books for presentation to each other; the books sought to revive the rarest sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pamphlets and other small works.
In preparing his Member Book, Earl Spencer had many sources to choose from. His library at Althorp, Northamptonshire, contained tens of thousands of volumes; some estimates put the number above a hundred thousand. The library occupied five large rooms. The height of bookish discernment, it was rich in desirable books, many of them handsomely bound in leather featuring Spencer’s coat of arms. The library was off limits to most visitors, but Spencer gave Dibdin free access to what was probably the best private library in the western world.
In Shakespeare’s day, drama was regarded as low literature, far inferior to poetry. Indeed, drama rated so poorly that many library cataloguers did not even bother to identify individual plays. Sir Edward Dering assembled a substantial library that included over 225 plays, but he seldom recorded their titles, listing them instead merely as gatherings of ‘playbooks’. Author Robert Burton did the same. He bequeathed his substantial library, which included many plays as well as poetry and novels, to two Oxford institutions: the Bodleian and Christ Church. (Burton’s copies of Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are still in the Bodleian.) Burton’s play quartos were the first to be admitted into the Bodleian Library. The ‘founder’ of the library (actually the reviver), Sir Thomas Bodley, famously disliked the idea of including plays in the library. He made his views very clear:
I can see no good reason to alter my opinion, for excluding suche bookes, as almanackes, plaies, and an infinit number, that are daily printed, of very un-worthy matters…Happely some plaies may be worthy the keeping : But hardly one in fortie. For it is not alike in Englishe plaies, and others of other nations : because they are most esteemed, for learning the languages and many of them compiled, by men of great fame, for wisedom and Learning : which is seldom or never scene among us. Were it so againe, that some litle profit might be reaped (which God knowes is very litle) out of some of our play-bookes, the benefit thereof will nothing neere countervaile, the harme that the Scandal will bring unto the Librarie, when it shall be given out, that we stuff it full of baggage bookes…This is my opinion…and the more I thinke upon it, the more it doth distast me, that suche kinde of bookes, should be vouchsafed a rowme, in so noble a Librarie.
Like Bodley, many scholars and readers ranked the best English publications well below the best classical and Continental works. Dibdin would later strive to elevate the status of drama and English books, but his Spencer catalogue reflected the old prejudices. He placed Shakespeare’s works well down, as ‘miscellaneous English books’; after ‘Miscellaneous Latin books’; after editions of Ariosto; and after more than a hundred pages of Greek and Latin classics and editions of the Bible.
In the catalogue of his library, Earl Spencer wished to show off more than just his books. Dibdin’s Bibliotheca Spencereana is notorious in book-collecting circles for its ‘posh totty’: racy engraved portraits of the handsomest Spencer women. The Duchess of Portsmouth, Lady Denham and Mrs Middleton, appearing in the roles of Juliet, Ophelia and Desdemona. Breasty etchings, though, are not the only highlight of Spencer’s library. He also had a First Folio Shakespeare.
Published in 1623, Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies contained thirty-six plays, eighteen of them appearing in print for the first time. Dibdin regarded the book as a prize, though far from the apex of Spencer’s collection; the Aldines and Ariostos were more alluring. Nor was the Spencer copy of Shakespeare’s works in perfect condition. But Dibdin’s 1822 catalogue entry ignored the flaws, gushing instead about the book’s completeness and the Henry Walther binding, which Dibdin called Walther’s chef d’œuvre.
Shakespeare’s Works. 1623. Folio
First folio edition. The knowing need not be informed of the price and importance of this impression: yet a tougher question is rarely agitated among bibliographers than ‘as to what constitutes a fine and genuine copy of it?’ After having seen the copy lately obtained by Mr Grenville, and that, yet more recently, by Mr James Boswell, and carefully examined the present—I am abundantly convinced that this is, after all, but a disagreeable book—as to typographical execution. Every leaf of the present copy was carefully examined by the late George Steevens, for his Lordship…The leaves are, throughout, exceedingly clean…The binding of this copy, by Walther, is worthy of its intrinsic worth. It is in blue morocco, lined on the sides in the Grolier style, and the back is thickly studded with gold in the manner of Roger Payne.
Only two years later, in The Library-Companion (1824), Dibdin painted a rather different picture of the ‘exceedingly clean’ leaves.
The verses opposite are genuine, but inlaid, and there are many tender leaves throughout. There are also, in the centre of some of the pages, a few greasy-looking spots, which might have originally received the ‘flakes of pie-crust’ in the servant’s hall.
Spencer and Dibdin put the greatest store in pristine copies. It seems unbelievable to modern booklovers, but Spencer often had his books washed, to remove antique soiling and inscriptions. (How many Shakespearean inscriptions did he wash away?) He also routinely sent his acquisitions to be rebound in gold-tooled goatskin. This had a similar effect of obliterating information left by former owners.
The ‘flakes of pie-crust’ quotation in the Spencer catalogue is from George Steevens’ The Plays of William Shakespeare (1803). The former owner of the Spencer First Folio, Steevens was one of the leading eighteenth-century Shakespeare editors. Having seen many folios suffer with the passing of time, Steevens laid claim to ‘the merit of being the first commentator on Shakespeare who strove, with becoming seriousness, to account for the frequent stains that disgrace the earliest folio edition of his plays, which is now become the most expensive single book in our language’.
Though Shakespeare was not, like Fox the Martyrologist, deposited in churches, to be thumbed by the congregation, he generally took post on our hall tables; and that a multitude of his pages have ‘their effect of gravy,’ may be imputed to the various eatables set out every morning on the same boards. It would seem that most of his readers were so chary of their time, that (like Pistol, who gnaws his leek and swears all the while) they fed and studied at the same instant. I have repeatedly met with thin flakes of pie-crust between the leaves of our author. These unctuous fragments, remaining long in close confinement, communicated their grease to several pages deep on each side of them. It is easy enough to conceive how such accidents might happen…still it is no small elogium on Shakespeare, that his claims were more forcible than those of hunger.
Throughout his adult life, Steevens made a daily round of London’s bookshops. At his home on Hampstead Heath he assembled an excellent Elizabethan library that included many quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Steevens studied Shakespeare’s sources and undertook other Shakespearean research. In 1766 he reprinted twenty of the quartos. Impressed, Samuel Johnson encouraged him to prepare a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The resulting ten-volume Works of Shakespeare with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators appeared in 1773.
A decade and a half later, Steevens had become an incorrigible eccentric, irascibly engaged in pointless battles on all fronts. Anonymously he promoted Boswell’s claims as Johnson’s biographer, mainly to annoy Sir John Hawkins, the official candidate. He perpetrated public hoaxes, such as a spurious account of the fictitious ‘Java upas tree’; and the tombstone of the mediaeval king ‘Hardyknute’, supposedly excavated in Kennington but actually engraved with Steevens’ own Anglo-Saxon-style composition, on a chimney slab. Steevens published, in the Theatrical Review, a fake Shakespearean letter. Purportedly written in 1600 by George Peele to Christopher Marlowe, it concerned Shakespeare’s annoyance at being accused of stealing Edward Alleyn’s words to compose the speech in Hamlet on ‘excellencie of acting’. As his madness coalesced, Steevens denounced Shakespeare’s poems and was accused of pilfering and forging documents. In the latter years of his life, Steevens was more than a little crazy.
This was the same George Steevens who learned, in the 1780s, that Edmond Malone was working on a definitive edition of Shakespeare’s writings (the edition appeared in 1790). Gripped by the kind of competitive jealousy normally seen only in ice-skating, Steevens issued, in 1793, fifteen volumes that he hoped would be received as a virtuoso edition of Shakespeare’s works—a display of his wide knowledge of Elizabethan literature; confirmation of his editorial mastery; and a demonstration of his superiority over Malone. Steevens was a dogged researcher and competent editor. His unhinged eccentricity, though, made him unreliable. One of his quirks was to pepper footnotes with obscene and spurious interpretations, then foist them on enemies. History remembers Malone’s as the better edition.
Today, the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays is the world’s most famous book of literature. It is universally referred to as the ‘First Folio’, but things were not always so. If a time-traveller met Shakespeare on his deathbed and referred to the ‘First Folio’, the Bard would be baffled. When the book eventually appeared, Shakespeare had been dead for seven years. He had no direct involvement in its production and was probably not even involved in conceiving the idea of a collected edition of his plays. If the same time-traveller went to 1623 and met an early purchaser of Shakespeare’s works, and again mentioned the ‘First Folio’, she would receive the same look of bafflement. That term does not appear in the book at all. The great Shakespeare editors of the eighteenth century, such as Johnson, Malone and Steevens, were the first to use the term, but they used it not as we do today (not, that is, as a proper noun) but as a neutral, factual description, distinguishing the 1623 folio from the other three that followed it in the seventeenth century. Dibdin’s Spencer catalogue is a turning point, after which the term ‘First Folio’ starts to be used in the sense we use it today—as a sexy label bursting with bibliographical glamour.
Though both Dibdin and Steevens emphasised the book’s price, copies were changing hands at modest values in comparison to the Roxburghe First Folio price, and very much below the benchmark set by Ker’s Decameron, which sold for more than twenty times the price of his First Folio.
In a footnote to the First Folio entry, Dibdin expressed his sadness at the passing, in the weeks in which he was finalising Aedes Althorpianæ, of James Boswell the younger. Only six months before, Boswell had finished editing Malone’s twenty-one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works. (Like a force of nature, the length of Shakespeare editions—and the number of volumes—increased steadily from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth.) According to Dibdin, Boswell had paid £120 for John Philip Kemble’s copy of the First Folio—an inferior copy partially made up of leaves from later editions.
In keeping with the attitudes set in the seventeenth century, Spencer’s Shakespeare quartos were unworthy of individual descriptions in Bibliotheca Spencereana; they were catalogued as an undifferentiated group.
Despite the low ranking of the First Folio in Spencer’s catalogue, and despite Dibdin’s description of its typography as ‘disagreeable’, he would help make it the most collectable book of all time. In furtherance of that cause, he conducted in 1824 a census of First Folio owners. The census, focusing on the London area, would be the first of many. Over the years, the censuses would grow in scope and cachet. The world’s wealthiest men and women would compete to be included among the list of First Folio owners. (The latest census runs to 960 somewhat inaccurate pages.)
At the peak of his career, Dibdin was the most famous and influential bibliophile of his day. He taught a generation of bookmen what to appreciate and how to appreciate it. The latter years of his life, though, were unhappy. Dibdin’s expertise as a bibliographer did not match his enthusiasm. Many of Spencer’s books were written in languages and printed in characters that Dibdin could not read. He catalogued them anyway; errors were inevitable and plentiful.
Dibdin was forever proposing new books, but he managed money and work poorly. Many proposed projects failed to launch. Padded with rambling anecdotes, in-jokes, cringeworthy obsequiousness and over-long footnotes (taking up successive pages, even earning their own extensive infra-footnotes) his ebullient books fell out of fashion. Henry Crabb Robinson sketched a portrait in 1826. Dibdin was a ‘vain man’, ‘very pleasant’, ‘exceedingly gay’, and ‘too boyish in his laughter (especially for a Doctor of Divinity)’. Worst of all, he was a ‘Jerry Diddler’ who ‘published very costly books by subscription and borrowed everywhere’.
Critics tore apart Dibdin’s The Library-Companion variously for its sloppy inclusions and incompetent exclusions. He searched libraries throughout the British Isles and on the Continent, leaving a trail of errors. A book of a bibliographical tour of Scotland and northern England fell flat. In the same way that farmer Williams had had fun with the Irelands, a Scotsman tricked Dibdin into thinking the ‘Codex Club’ was a Roxburghe-style Scottish bibliophile society. A critic by the name of Turnbull found so many errors in the Northern Tour that he invited people to whip Dibdin’s bottom.
An apparently random episode of arsenic poisoning brought Dibdin close to death. His daughter complained of the burden of caring simultaneously for her father and her mother.
I assure you it is only with the utmost difficulties I can go on. The Chemist and our medical man must be paid to say nothing of washing and wine which are indispensable with the nature of his complaint. I should almost feel happy when it pleases the Almighty to remove him out of his trials and difficulties.
The Roxburghe Club refused to ease her burden or to support her or her mother after Dibdin’s death. One Roxburgher—Earl Spencer—had insured the bibliographer’s life for a thousand pounds, but does not seem to have paid any of the proceeds to Dibdin’s widow.
Shakespeare may have owned many books. He may even have commissioned armorial bindings, but he could never have been a full-blown, Dibdin-esque bibliophile. Shakespeare could not have cared less about whether his books were first printings or not. The very concept of a bibliophile was defined almost two centuries after his death. Veneration of primacy, the cult of scarcity, making love to vellum bindings; much that entertains collectors and bibliographers today would have mystified Shakespeare. By the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, firstness would be, for the field of book collecting, both a pillar and a drug. Dibdin was ‘patient zero’ for several book pathologies, including ‘point mania’—searching for and arguing about small and usually spurious indicators of primacy of issue—and the twentieth-century rage for ‘modern firsts’.
Like Pope and Theobald and Steevens, Dibdin was an unreliable scholar. Like Wilmot and Rowe and the Irelands, he was an unreliable searcher. He did, however, make interesting discoveries. Bibliotheca Spencereana includes an exceptionally rare copy of Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets (only thirteen copies are known today). The Spencer copy was inscribed with ‘Commendations to my very kind Ffriend 23: M’. Why 23? Who was M? Was he or she the author or the subject of the inscription? Dibdin’s Spencer catalogue is also useful as a record of Shakespearean sources. It notes, for example, pre-Shakespeare editions of Romeo and Juliet.
Bibliotheca Spencereana should also be remembered as the place where the First Folio received its modern title. But the man who christened the First Folio was not the man to find Shakespeare or his library. It is not difficult to catalogue his faults. Dibdin was starstruck by England’s aristocrats, intoxicated by the rarefied air of their libraries. Frivolous, giddy, inconsistent, he was too much of an enthusiast, too taken by surfaces, too much the Jerry Diddler. Dibdin represents another wrong turn in the search for Shakespeare and his library. It is not quite a tragedy that history remembers him as the ‘world’s worst bibliographer’.
Looked at in those terms, the fact that Dibdin found nothing is neither a surprise nor a disappointment. He might have missed something. During his lifetime, other searchers would take a closer look.