In 1790, the London bookseller Thomas Payne sold a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the earliest printed book, to George John, 2nd Earl Spencer. He charged him £370 – an enormous sum at the time, roughly equivalent to £878,000 today – as part of a package deal which included two other early theological works. As part of the deal, Payne had the old book rebound in sumptuous midnight blue goatskin. In the process, signs of earlier provenance (ownership annotations, stamps or other marks which might have revealed the Bible’s history) were carefully removed.
Nearly 230 years later, multispectral imaging (a process which captures multiple images across different wavelengths, including ultraviolet and infrared) has allowed historians to recover those lost inscriptions. My research has revealed that the Bible had belonged to the Augustinian friars of Colmar in northeastern France – a community whose library was being dismantled during the French revolution.
This discovery forms part of the research for my new book, Portrait of an Obsession: How England’s Greatest Private Library was Built from the Ruins of Europe’s Monasteries. It offers a window onto how Britain’s wealthiest collectors acquired rare books as Europe’s monasteries were being dissolved, looted and destroyed. Priceless intellectual heritage was erased almost overnight.
The year before Payne sold the Bible, the revolutionary government in France had decreed that all ecclesiastical property belonged to the nation. As part of this sea change in property ownership, monastic houses like the convent in Colmar were visited by revolutionary officials, inventoried, the friars forcibly evicted and their goods (including their books) transferred to the state.
Colmar’s property, notably its library of 1,900 volumes, was inventoried on May 11 1790 and the convent was finally closed in June 1791.
This means that Payne, or one of his agents, probably acquired the Bible from the Augustinian friars when they were already under the threat of dissolution from the state. They would have been desperate for any way to survive in the hostile new climate. We do not know what he paid them if this was the case, but we can guess that it would have been substantially less than what he charged Earl Spencer.
This was only one instance of a phenomenon which occurred across Europe in the years between 1789 and 1815. The Napoleonic wars saw monastic houses despoiled and closed, their inhabitants evicted and their contents pilfered. Sometimes as the result of government decrees, sometimes as the casualties of war. This catastrophic moment spelled pure profit for people with the ambition and the contacts to benefit.
English booksellers and book collectors used agents on the ground in France, Germany and Italy to buy books from threatened libraries, coerce their owners into sale, or, if everything else failed, simply steal the desired items. They did so secure in the knowledge that the homes of these books would soon be broken up anyhow.
The moment popularised the term “bibliomania”, as some of the richest men and women in England competed against each other to pay eye-watering prices for Europe’s oldest and rarest books.
Earl Spencer, the purchaser of the Gutenberg Bible, was the greatest of these ultra-rich collectors. Beginning as a young man, at the outbreak of the French revolution, he spent the following 40 years assembling a library of over 20,000 volumes. This contained within it a never-to-be-equalled collection of incunabula (books printed before 1500), all in outstanding condition and many acquired by means at least as dubious as those described above.
Over the past few years I have carefully combed through his correspondence and accounts – both now in the British Library – and matched them up with his books, including the Gutenberg Bible, now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. In doing so, I uncovered a trail of books sold under duress, of librarians threatened, of desired items mysteriously disappearing, subsequently to arrive in Spencer’s collection. There can be no doubt about it – Spencer was profiting from the chaos on the continent and using the destruction of millennium-old institutions, the monasteries, to put books on his shelves.
Those books are now on the shelves of a public research library and the Rylands is not alone in holding the fruits of monastic appropriation and looting. Spencer’s methods were no different from many of his contemporaries and their books now form the foundation of the collections of many, if not most, research libraries across the Anglophone world. The wonderful collections of incunabula and other rare books in London, New York and California owe a huge and unacknowledged debt to the monasteries of Alsace, Swabia and Tuscany.
Where does this put us in an age which has increasingly concerned itself with questions of antiquities looting and the restitution or repatriation that might follow on from that? It is not an easy question to answer. But that many of these books were acquired in circumstances morally dubious at best, clearly illegal and unethical at worst, can no longer be ignored.
The institutions from which they were taken, by and large, no longer exist, but the damage done to the cultural heritage of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere remains. Whatever we decide and however we eventually reorient our relations to these volumes, it is time that scholars, librarians and curators acknowledged the historic injustices which led to the English-speaking world’s present-day ownership of some of the world’s rarest books.