This book, devoted to the history of libraries, primarily assumes an implicit definition of a library as a collection of books held in some kind of communal ownership, with rights of access and resultant benefits for a group of people. This may be a relatively small and well-defined group, such as the members of a university, or a much wider one like the citizens of a municipality or even a whole nation. In seeking to chart how libraries and their contents have influenced and helped to shape our social history, we must remember that books have come to people not only via public collections but also through direct personal ownership, and that books are objects (unlike some other historical artefacts) which it has long been feasible to own in considerable numbers. Private libraries are an important part of our cultural and intellectual fabric, and they have also played a significant role in developing public collections.

The title of this chapter brings together two concepts – ‘private libraries’ and ‘collecting’ – which are commonly yoked together interchangeably but whose interrelationship should be examined more carefully at the outset. Collecting, in the widest sense, is a topic which can be studied from a psychological viewpoint as a commonly manifested aspect of human behaviour, and it has generated a considerable literature in its own right. Book collecting was memorably defined by A. W. Pollard as ‘the bringing together of books which in their contents, their form or the history of the individual copy possess some element of permanent interest, and either actually or prospectively are rare’.