Thomas Frognall Dibdin (whose own, much more famous and influential work on bibliomania appeared the same year as Ferriar's satirical poem--see yesterday's post) credited Ferriar with the first use of the term bibliomania in the sense of a specific medical malady (though the term was in more general use as early as 1739).
Dibdin, a British clergyman infamous for cataloging a famous library for which his language skills were insufficient (that of John Charles Spencer, the third Earl Spencer), reflected in his own Bibliomania the passion for collecting books and manuscripts that gripped many learned men (and it was almost entirely men) during the first decades of the 19th century:
Ina Ferris notes that bibliomania (during the period in question) was typically viewed as "a distortion of properly literary and readerly values, a perverse lust after physical properties," even as "the publicity surrounding it meant that the specialized idiom of book-collection [the language of bindings, paper, margins, tall copies, and so forth]" filtered out into the general populace.
Despite the numerous errors and rhetorical excess of his Bibliomania (as well as of virtually everything else he wrote), Dibdin was well within the mainstream of the audience for whom he was writing. As Deidre Lynch points out, bibliomania's symptoms were virtually identical in all of the numerous books and commentaries about "book disease" printed during the period:
1. a liking for large paper copies; 2. for illustrated copies; 3. for copies printed on vellum instead of paper; 4. a liking not just for first editions but also 5. for particular copies rendered not simply rare but unique by printers' errata. Such lists portray these collectors as downplaying meaning, and loving matter, in all its truculent particularity.
But many 19th century "bibliomaniacs," such as the great British critic and essayist William Hazlitt, believed such books to be not mere physical objects, but "links in the chain of our conscious being." For Hazlitt, as for many book collectors since, such books have the power to transport readers to "the place where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky:"
Such emotional connection to one's books was much less likely to occur with "ugly" tomes, which may account for why people like Dibdin spent enormous amounts of money on the best papers, the best bindings, the best engravers, the best printers, etc., for his numerous works, although this meant that virtually everything he published produced a net monetary loss.
As printing became less and less artisanal over the course of the 19th century, the affective losses occasioned by modern production processes would lead to another major wave of bibliomania (in the early 20th century), a topic to which we shall turn tomorrow....
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