It was Dibdin who gave us the word bibliomania, and so it is fitting to build this collection around him. His Bibliomania, here reprinted from a revised edition, is an affectionate personal history of book-collecting through the ages. Bibliographical descriptions are complemented and expanded in The Library Companion, a book full of detail designed to bring out the book-collector in every educated person. Merryweather, Burton, Elton, Fletcher and Hazlitt relate their own and other collectors' passions through the ages, both in Britain and abroad. Together they form an extraordinary biographical dictionary of pioneers in the accumulation of culture and learning. Without these book-collectors' devotion of time, money, knowledge and taste, and the subsequent wholesale bequest or sale of their collections, public libraries as we know them would be greatly impoverished.
--Informative accounts of British bibliophiles
--Valuable biographical and bibliographical documentation on the British book trade
--Informative accounts of British bibliophiles
--Valuable biographical and bibliographical documentation on the British book trade
