The Roxburghe Club, a name well known to book collectors but often unfamiliar outside of their circles, was founded in 1812 and has enjoyed an unbroken record of private publishing to the present day. It was formed against the backdrop of bibliomania, that delirious period during which book prices soared beyond all expectations, creating a financial bubble that would eventually dissolve, taking with it more than one patrician fortune. Antiquarians, a group who were already often ridiculed for their perverse taste in old and forgotten works of literature, now suddenly gained far more ostentatious and objectionable facets to their dusty character by a display of conspicuous wealth and social prominence that confused the comfortable stereotypes. The Roxburghe Club was founded by a group of wealthy bibliophiles, led by the flamboyant bibliophile and bibliographer, Thomas Frognall Dibdin (see Figure 0.1). Sharing as they did an interest in the earliest printed books, the group wished to distribute among themselves reproductions of rare volumes published at their own expense. The print runs were normally small, and the volumes were usually made available only to members and occasionally to close friends. The membership is still small, but today the club publishes volumes for its members with an additional limited number for sale to the public. The modern incarnation of the Roxburghe Club is that of a respected printing society publishing highly collectable modern editions and facsimiles of rare and important texts from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, with high standards of scholarly editing and luxurious presentation. Posterity has tended, however, to view the early years of the Roxburghe Club and its founder members in a distinctly dismissive manner, sometimes with ridicule, often with belligerence, but seldom with open- minded serious enquiry. If one wishes to examine the Roxburghe Club and its long and complex connection with, and contributions to, the world of literature and the histories of editing and literary studies in Britain, it appears to be necessary to look almost anywhere but in British literary history for answers.