THOMAS WILLIAM EDWARD PHILLIPPS didn’t want much.
All he wanted was a copy of every single book that had ever been published in the history of the world.
Back in 18th-century England, when the number of books published each year was only a tiny fraction of what gets published today, this idea might not have sounded quite as crazy as it sounds nowadays—but it was close!
Thomas Phillipps was able to start his obsession early because his father was a rich aristocrat who could afford to give his son a big allowance. By 1798, when he was only six years old, Thomas already owned 110 books. That was about 109 more than any of his friends. Most people in those days didn’t own any books at all—just a Bible.
By 1811, when he was a student of geography at Oxford University, his library already numbered in the thousands. “You know the extent of your money, and it will be in vain to write to me for more,” his father replied when Phillipps wrote home asking for money to buy more books. He pointed out that the year had barely started and Thomas had already spent his entire annual allowance. Why did he need so many books?
Good question.
It might have made more sense if Phillipps had been so fascinated by geography that he was buying hundreds of geography books. But he wasn’t. He really didn’t care that much about geography. Geography was just an excuse to go to university, which was in London, which was a city full of bookstores, which were places where you could buy hundreds and hundreds of additional—books!!
The fact of the matter was that Thomas Phillipps didn’t even care what the books he bought were about.
He was just crazy about books—period. He loved the look of them. He loved the feel of them. He loved their smell, their covers, their papers, their typefaces, their bindings, inks, illustrations, spines, colors, designs. He loved the way books looked on bookshelves—hundreds and hundreds of them, all neatly lined up, floor to ceiling, beautifully printed, bursting with fascinating information.
It was an expensive obsession, even for an aristocrat. Books in the 18th century cost a lot of money because producing a book back then took a huge amount of work. Every page of every book had to be handprinted, and every book handbound. There were no mass-production printing machines in those days. Even an ordinary book cost an equivalent of about $200 today.
By the time Phillipps finished his university education (taking twice as long as everybody else), he was spending about 1,000 pounds per year of his father’s money on books—and his father was getting tired of it.
But in 1818, Phillipps’s father died, and as the only son, Thomas inherited the family’s Middle Hill Estate. This was a huge place, including not only their 21-room mansion but also half a dozen farms covering almost 320 hectares (800 acres). It was mostly the rent from those farms that had been paying the Phillipps’s bills. The estate was worth a fortune, but not (as it turned out) to Thomas. After many arguments about Thomas’s spending habits, his father had stipulated in his will that his son could only have the rental money from the farms—he couldn’t sell the estate itself. Mind you, even the rent money added up to a tidy fortune—almost 7,000 pounds per year. Thomas immediately spent the entire amount on books.
It was about then that he met Henrietta Molyneux, the pretty, outspoken daughter of an Irish major-general. She was his first non-book interest in many years.
Thomas and Henrietta were married in 1819, and for the next two years, during which Henrietta gave birth to two daughters, Phillipps found family life so entertaining and distracting that he only bought about half his usual number of books.
Henrietta approved. She encouraged Thomas to broaden his interests. A hobby was a worthy thing, but when it got out of hand, it could become a problem. They agreed they would take a holiday in Europe for a couple of years and focus on their marriage instead of books.
It was a big mistake.
The 1820s turned out to be the perfect time to buy books in Europe. During the Napoleonic Wars, which had just ended, a great many European libraries had been looted and damaged, and their books were now being sold off. Suddenly, books were plentiful—and cheap. They weren’t just being sold singly, or by the bundle, or by the box. They were being sold by the crateful, the wagonful, and the roomful! Phillipps felt like a kid in a candy store.
When Thomas and Henrietta returned to England two years later they brought back a third daughter, a marriage that was in shambles, a staggering debt load, and 56 massive crates full of books.
Phillipps told his friends his holiday had been a great success.
His father-in-law, who’d been looking after Middle Hill for them during their holiday, called on Thomas to have a heart-to-heart talk. Thomas’s estate earned a fortune, he pointed out, yet Middle Hill was going to ruin, Thomas appeared to owe money to every bookseller in England, and some of his servants hadn’t received a farthing in two years!
Thomas shrugged. He pointed out that his father’s will had put Middle Hill into a trust. If he could sell the estate he’d be able to pay his debts.
“Your father obviously knew you well,” Mr. Molyneux said grimly. “If you could sell Middle Hill, you would simply buy books with the proceeds and send your family to the poorhouse!”
Which was true.
By now Middle Hill was so full of books that 16 of its 21 rooms were being used only for book storage. Even the girls’ bedrooms were so full that there was barely room for their beds. The master bedroom contained so many books that Henrietta had to get up on her bed to get dressed. The hallways and vestibules had floor-to-ceiling stacks of books packed so close together that people had to walk sideways down the halls to get through.
Even more bizarre, the place was beginning to look alarmingly like a funeral home. Afraid of fire, Phillipps didn’t store his books on bookshelves like most people. Instead, he’d gotten a coffin-maker to adapt his cheapest coffin so that its side wall opened downward on hinges. Phillipps stored most of his books in such coffins now—hundreds of coffins stacked one on top of the other in rows. That way they could quickly be hauled out of the house in an emergency.
Visitors to Middle Hill reported other odd features, like the pieces of firewood scattered all over the floors. Phillipps had discovered that Middle Hill was infested with beetles—the kind that liked to eat wood, and if wood wasn’t available—books! So he scattered his firewood logs all over the house and checked them regularly. Whenever he saw telltale piles of sawdust beside any log, he knew that a beetle had taken the bait. That log went into the fireplace at the next opportunity.
Every serious book collector needs to keep records of what he owns, and because Phillipps was too cheap to hire cataloging clerks, everyone in the house had to pitch in. One of the first things Phillipps’s three daughters learned as soon as they were old enough to start home-schooling was how to read book titles and catalog them. That’s how they spent most of each school day, instead of learning math or geography or chemistry.
So did their governess, their tutor, and even their mother!
By 1830 Phillipps owed money to so many people that most local merchants refused to do business with him anymore. He spent hours every day dodging bailiffs, tax collectors, bank investigators, and even the police. Every few months the pressure became so bad that he had to escape to London, so his estate manager could say in all truthfulness that he hadn’t seen him and didn’t know where he could be found. But every time he came back, he brought back more cratefuls of books.
By this time Phillipps had perfected a number of scams to help him purchase books he couldn’t pay for. They weren’t very sophisticated, but they worked amazingly well.
1) He borrowed money from everybody and anybody—then used method #2.
2) He ignored all bills until the vendors sued, then fought the suits in court. It was surprising how often he won, or at least was able to reduce the bill.
3) He bought on long-term credit—buy now, pay later—then used method #2.
4) He bought “on approval,” then “forgot” to return the merchandise, sometimes for years. If the vendor finally sued, he used method #2.
5) He offered suspicious booksellers higher than usual prices to convince them to sell—then used method #2.
6) He ordered books from foreign booksellers who were unaware of his payment record—then used method #2.
7) He bought up the entire stock of bankrupt booksellers at distress prices—often booksellers who’d gone bankrupt because of Phillipps’s refusal to pay! Then he used method #2.
In short, when it came to acquiring books, Thomas Phillipps was a heartless scam artist. He knowingly and continually bought far more books than he could possibly pay for, not caring whose life he destroyed and whose business he ruined.
In fact, the only reason merchants still sold Phillipps anything at all was because they knew he earned 7,000 pounds of estate rent each year. They reasoned that even if he spent more than that, this amount at least would be paid down annually on his debts—and who knew? They might be one of the lucky ones to be paid!
Phillipps was quite happy to use such desperation to keep his scams going year after year.
As Phillipps’s obsession grew worse, so did his behavior. He became crankier and more ruthless. He even cheated a printer he’d hired to print his catalogs. When the man complained that the barn he was working in was a ruin, and his machinery and papers were being destroyed by rain, Phillipps told him to count his blessings that he had a job at all.
“Employment without payment is no blessing,” the printer replied.
Phillipps didn’t treat his own family much better. Henrietta tried everything she could think of to patch up their marriage. She begged Thomas to write her a letter once in a while when he was in London. Even a short note would do. Something to let her know what he was doing, how he had spent his day.
Phillipps replied impatiently that there was nothing whatsoever to tell. He got up in the morning, spent the day buying books, then went to bed. That was all the news there was.
Henrietta felt increasingly abandoned and began to feel depressed. In the fall of 1831 her bouts of depression became worse. She began to take opium, a common anti-depressant of the time. Phillipps didn’t even notice.
She died alone in February of the following year, while Phillipps was in London. She had sent a message to his lodging house to tell him she was very sick, but he’d ignored it. Even after he received the message of her death, he didn’t come home for another four days.
Phillipps wasted no time in searching for a new wife—preferably a very rich one so he could pay off his debts and buy more books.
“I’m for sale for 50,000 pounds,” he wrote to a friend. “Do you know of any lady with that amount of income?”
His friend didn’t, so Phillipps got to work. Over the next few months he wrote to the parents of 17 rich heiresses. “I’ve been given to understand that your daughter will inherit a substantial estate. I am writing to ask if this is true, and what the value of the estate will be. If the amount is large enough, I intend to ask for her hand in marriage.”
His letters were so frankly business-like and unsentimental that one father angrily accused him of acting like a cattle dealer!
Another friend put it a little more diplomatically. “My dear Thomas,” he cautioned. “Women are not books.”
Phillipps was rejected by all 17 families.
The only people Phillipps seemed genuinely to like were scholars. With scholars he was helpful, considerate, even generous. As his library grew, more and more scholars asked permission to come to Middle Hill to use it. They were always welcomed—both by Phillipps and by his daughters. It was the girls’ only chance to enjoy some company, as their father didn’t approve of girls going to parties or dances.
Phillipps probably didn’t want his daughters to go to parties because he was afraid they would meet young men and get married. They were far more valuable to him as free labor. By 1841, all three were working for him full-time as librarians in his enormous library.
But on February 22, 1842, Middle Hill received a visitor whose effect on the entire Phillipps family over the next 30 years would be profound.
His name was James Orchard Halliwell, and he was a Shakespeare scholar. He was as obsessive about books and documents dealing with Shakespeare as Phillipps was about books in general.
Halliwell’s eyes nearly popped out when he saw Phillipps’s many rare and valuable Shakespeare documents. The two men got along very well because Phillipps liked anybody who liked books that much.
But then Halliwell became almost as fascinated with Phillipps’s eldest daughter Henrietta as he was with Phillipps’s books. Phillipps became suspicious, and then alarmed. He began making anxious inquiries about Halliwell’s background.
At first he was told that Halliwell was a brilliant young scholar whose impulsive purchases of Shakespeare documents had sometimes gotten him into financial trouble. (Phillipps had no trouble understanding that.) But Halliwell didn’t have a rich family to bail him out, so he had turned a number of friends into enemies by failing to repay loans. (Still no reason for Phillipps to become alarmed.) Then Phillipps made a discovery that genuinely horrified him. Several years earlier, James Halliwell had been caught by the British Museum stealing rare and precious manuscripts, which he had tried to sell to pay off his debts.
He was a book thief!
Phillipps immediately banned Halliwell from Middle Hill. But it was already too late. Henrietta had fallen in love with her admirer. And when the two eloped six months later, Phillipps discovered that a rare edition of Hamlet was missing from his Shakespeare collection.
Phillipps was talking with his lawyer about the possibility of having Halliwell arrested for book theft when his lawyer alerted him to a much bigger problem: that since Halliwell had married Phillipps’s eldest daughter, he would eventually inherit Middle Hill. Even worse, if something wasn’t done to protect Phillipps’s library, Halliwell would inherit that too—which had no doubt been a part of the young man’s plans all along.
“There is nothing you can do about Middle Hill,” the lawyer explained quickly, when he saw the shock on Phillipps’s face. “It must be passed on to your eldest child, like it or not. But your book collection is another matter. You can give that to anyone you please. Just make certain that your will includes explicit instructions to keep Halliwell away from it.”
“You can rely on that,” Phillipps scowled. “I’ll make very certain of that. But let’s return to Middle Hill. I understand that I can’t dispose of it, or deed it to someone else—it must be passed on to Henrietta. But does it matter what condition it’s in when she receives it?”
His lawyer looked puzzled. “Its condition? No, I don’t believe the will says anything about its condition. Why? What do you have in mind?”
Phillipps laughed, but there was no humor in his voice. “You’ll see,” he said grimly. “Just give me a little time and you’ll see.”
Around the time of his daughter’s elopement, the 50-year-old Phillipps had married again. Her name was Elizabeth Mansel, she was 27 years old, and she wasn’t rich—her father was a church minister. But she was astonishingly patient, and a good thing too. More boxes and crates of books arrived every day, and Mary and Katharine, the two daughters still living at home, did their best to update the records.
Thomas Phillipps’s debts increased, and the living space for Middle Hill’s residents shrank more and more. Then, not long after their wedding, Phillipps began to follow through on the threat he’d made in his lawyer’s office.
The first sign of what Phillipps had in mind was the arrival of a small army of timber cutters. They began to cut down the dozens of majestic oaks and elms and ash trees lining the long, beautiful drive through the Middle Hill estate to the mansion’s front door.
Then they began to chop down the forest around the mansion itself.
Horrified, James Halliwell appealed to the Courts for a restraining order. There had to be some way to stop this reckless destruction of his future inheritance! The judge saw his point, but said his hands were tied. The will that protected the ownership of Middle Hill didn’t say anything about its condition.
There was nothing Halliwell could do but watch in despair as Phillipps systematically destroyed the Middle Hill estate.
“He’s cut down every tree and ornamental bush,” Halliwell reported to Henrietta, who refused to watch the carnage. “He’s ripped up the gardens and destroyed the ponds. He’s even let in cattle to ruin the lawns and trample the nurseries and the flowerbeds!”
And that was only the beginning of what Phillipps intended. With the money he received for the Middle Hill timber, Phillipps eventually bought himself a mansion more than twice the size. It was called Thirlestaine House, and was located near Cheltenham, about a day’s journey north. And on April 27, 1863, Phillipps called in the movers.
Moving the family’s possessions to Thirlestaine House took only three days, using a single cart, one horse, and one driver.
Moving Phillipps’s library took a fleet of more than 100 wagons, 230 cart horses, and 175 men an astounding eight months, working dawn till dusk, six days a week! The wagons were often so overloaded that many of them suffered broken wheels and axles, which remained scattered along that stretch of road for years afterwards. Even after eight months the drivers had only transferred about three-quarters of Phillipps’s library, but they rebelled and stopped work when Phillipps once again became hopelessly behind in his payments.
Thirlestaine House was so huge and its corridors so long that Phillipps actually rode a horse through them to get from one wing to the other while his books were being brought in. Its kitchen was almost a city block away from its dining room—by the time the food arrived for dinner, it was always cold. Elizabeth hated the house from the start.
But it was a great place to store books—hundreds of thousands of books. By now Phillipps had become so insane for them that when a bookseller sent him a catalog, he often just ordered everything it listed. If he entered a bookshop, he often bought its entire contents. If at all possible, he preferred buying entire libraries, complete auction book lots, and whole warehouses full of books.
He even took to buying wagonloads of wastepaper on its way to the dump—just in case they contained valuable documents, manuscripts, or books.
When his entire library had finally been transferred to Thirlestaine House three years later, Thomas Phillipps turned his attention back to his further plans for Middle Hill.
If James Halliwell thought he had seen the end of its destruction, he was in for an ugly surprise.
Phillipps now proceeded to strip the house of every nut and bolt and fitting that could be removed. He tore off the gutters and smashed down the chimneys. He removed every cabinet, door, and window casing. He allowed vagrants to move in, and vandals to smash whatever he hadn’t removed.
Middle Hill was reduced to a complete ruin.
After decades of tyranny, Phillipps’s remaining daughters quickly found themselves husbands and fled. At this point even the ever patient Elizabeth found life with Thomas Phillipps too much to handle. “Books, books, books!” she cried. “Your books are going to be the ruination of you, Thomas Phillipps!” Not long afterwards she had a mental breakdown and was sent off to live in a cheap boardinghouse in southern England.
Phillipps mailed her a little money now and then, but never enough to pay her rent. When her family wrote him to protest the way he was treating their daughter, Phillipps replied: “Well, why don’t you take care of her? You have some money—I don’t. All I have is debts.”
During the last four years of his life, Thomas Phillipps turned into a total hermit. Most of his servants left him, and he stopped receiving visitors. He hardly seemed to eat or sleep anymore. He just roamed around his house day and night, unwrapping, shelving, and cataloging more books. If a servant found him asleep, it was usually in the middle of the floor or at some table, surrounded by great piles of books.
Thomas Phillipps died on February 6, 1872—several days after falling from a ladder he’d been using to reach some books stored high up near the library ceiling.
In his will, he left his spectacular collection—by now the largest privately held library in the world—to Thomas Fitzroy Fenwick, the baby son of his youngest daughter Katharine, in the desperate hope that the boy would grow up to love books as much as his grandfather. In the meantime, he specified that the book thief James Halliwell, inheritor of Middle Hill, was never to be allowed into Thirlestaine House, and certainly nowhere near Phillipps’s treasured books.
To his wife Elizabeth, as “a token of his affection,” he left the miserable sum of 100 pounds.
Whether or not Thomas Phillipps’s final hope—that his grandson would love books as much as he had—came true depends on your definition of the word “love.”
According to some people, Thomas Fitzroy Fenwick turned out to be even worse than his Uncle James Halliwell, the book thief. While his grandfather Phillipps had spent his entire life collecting books, Thomas Fenwick spent his entire life selling the books his grandfather had collected.
But he didn’t just dump them. He didn’t just take the money and run. No, he spent his entire life patiently evaluating and documenting his grandfather’s books, while carrying on the world’s longest, slowest, and most carefully conducted library book sale ever.
It made him and his family very wealthy, but it also meant that none of the wealth was wasted. Thomas Fenwick “harvested” his inherited book collection so carefully that when he died and the library passed into the hands of his eldest son, only a small fraction of it had actually been sold.
This process has now gone on for over 130 years, and continues to the present day. Although the library has since passed out of the hands of Phillipps’s descendants, its sale has gone on in the same careful way. Known as the Bibliotheca Phillippica, its books continue to be listed for sale on the Internet and in antiquarian auctions all over the world.
And if the current owners maintain this same wise and patient approach, the proceeds from Bibliotheca Phillippica may very well enable many more generations of book lovers to benefit from the manic obsession of the world’s most ruthless and devious book collector.