Special Collections
Book of the Month, October 2009
The Bibliomania, or, Book-Madness
Thomas Frognall Dibdin
London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1809
[S] 010 [Dibdin]
The Bibliomania is perhaps the best-known of the 46 works by the bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), whose other works include Typographical Antiquities (1810; based on the work of Joseph Ames and William Herbert), the four-volume catalogue Bibliotheca Spenceriana (1814-15), The Bibliographical Decameron (1817), A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1821) and the autobiographical Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836).
This first edition of the Bibliomania is only 92 pages long, including the preliminaries, index and an unnumbered page of advertisements. Written in less than a month, it marks, according to Dibdin’s 1965 bibliographer William A. Jackson, ‘the first full flowering of Dibdin’s love affair with books’. The book is divided into three parts. Part One is a brief history of bibliomania, noting eminent collectors from Richard De Bury, a tutor of Edward III, to John Ratcliffe (1707–1776). Part Two covers symptoms of bibliomania, seen as a passion for large paper, uncut, illustrated, unique or vellum copies or for first, variant (called by Dibdin ‘true’) or black letter editions. The third part deals with the cure of bibliomania, by such methods as reprinting scarce and valuable works and encouraging the study of bibliography.
The text popularised the word ‘bibliomania’ and promoted book collecting among the aristocracy. It was to be expanded in the second edition, of 1811, to 782 pages plus preliminaries, Dibdin recounting in the preface to the 1811 volume his resolve to gratify a ‘book-auction-loving bibliomanic’ who exclaimed about the 1809 book that ‘the book would do, but that there was not gall enough in it’. Dibdin himself noted that the second edition was ‘so much altered and enlarged, as to assume the character of a new work’. The two editions were reprinted together in 1842, 1876 and 1903. A reprint of the first edition alone was privately reprinted for the Club of Odd Sticks in 1864.
This copy is bound with the second edition. It is from the library of the London Institution in Finsbury Circus, much of the valuable stock of which came to Senate House after the London Institution closed in 1910.
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