chapter Introduction / ANNIKA BAUTZ -- part PART I Renaissance Collectors -- chapter 1 Building a Library Without Walls: The Early Years of the Bodleian Library / ROBYN ADAMS -- chapter 2 Universal Knowledge and Self-Fashioning: Cardinal Bernardino Spada’s Collection of Books / GIULIA MARTINA WESTON -- chapter 3 ‘A Paradise and Cabinet of Rarities’: Thomas Browne, His Library, and Communities of Collecting in Seventeenth-Century Norfolk / LUCY GWYNN -- chapter 4 Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn: A ‘Collecting Friendship’ as Told Through a Re-evaluation of Manuscript PL 2237 and Print Album PL 2062 in the Pepys Library, Magdalene College Cambridge / CATHERINE SUTHERLAND -- part PART II Gentlemen and Their Libraries From the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century -- chapter 5 ‘Ye Best Tast of Books and Learning of Any Other Country Gentn’: The Library of Thomas Mostyn of Gloddaith, c.1676–1692 / MARY CHADWICK -- chapter 6 Fashioning a Gentleman’s Library: Displaying the Cottonian Collection, 1791–1816 / SUSAN LEEDHAM -- chapter 7 “He Was Always Fond of Books”: John Couch Adams’s Genesis as an Academic Collector / SOPHIE DEFRANCE -- part PART III Beyond Mere Records of Collecting: On Book Catalogues -- chapter 8 From Francis Bacon’s Historia Literarum to Samuel Johnson’s Literary History: The Catalogus Bibliothecae Harleianae (1743–1745) / ALEX WRIGHT -- chapter 9 Booksellers’ Catalogues and Readership in the Luso-Brazilian World / Luso-Brazilian World LUCIANE SCARATO -- chapter 10 Reading in the Provinces: Plymouth Public Library’s Nineteenth-Century Catalogues / ANNIKA BAUTZ -- part PART IV Bibliomania -- chapter 11 Satire and the Bibliomania in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain / Britain SHAYNE HUSBANDS -- chapter 12 The ‘Fancy for Fine Printing’: Collecting Whittaker’s Golden Magna Carta / Golden Magna Carta JAMES GREGORY -- chapter 13 Blurred Lines in the History of Domestic Libraries in the Age of Dibdin’s Bibliomania / K. A. MANLEY.

This book presents the collectors’ roles as prominently as the collections of books and texts which they assembled. Contributors explore the activities and networks shaping a range of continental and transcontinental European public and private collections during the Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern eras. They study the impact of class, geographical location and specific cultural contexts on the gathering and use of printed and handwritten texts and other printed artefacts. The volume explores the social dimension of book collecting, and considers how practices of collecting developed during these periods of profound cultural, social and political change.