As might be expected, such high- profile bibliophilic pursuits did not go unnoticed in the media of the day hungry for titbits of recyclable society gossip. Aristocratic activities represented a large percentage of the celebrity culture of the period, and unconventional, not to mention expensive, pastimes were certainly always going to be given plenty of column inches. In fact, bibliomania could be argued to have been, to some extent, a media construct. The high prices, obsessive collecting and identification (and often self- identification) of collectors as bibliomaniacs was defined, discussed and promoted by the newspapers, books and periodicals of the day, and the fiery debates that it aroused in the letters pages provided welcome fillips to sales figures. As so often when a previously private and solitary avocation gains sudden and visible popularity, it also becomes the cause of much public ridicule, criticism and hand- wringing. The Roxburghe Club, possibly as a result of its highly publicized aristocratic membership and a certain taste for self- promotion, provided a useful focus for this anxiety and opprobrium. There was no shortage of opinionated correspondents ready to blame bibliomania for every possible shortcoming in the contemporary literary (and in some cases moral) world.

In the satirical poem Bibliomania by John Ferriar, written in 1809 and dedicated to his friend the soon- to- be Roxburghe Club member Richard Heber, ‘bibliomania’ is delineated as the collecting or hoarding of books to a point where social relations or health are damaged – this obsessive- compulsive disorder gradually expanding in the public mind to include book collectors in general. Ferriar, a collector himself, was making a wry joke, a point often missed both then and now, perhaps in part because Ferriar's day job was that of a physician and pioneer researcher into psychiatric disorders.

Dibdin, while grasping the joke, readily acknowledged the dim view taken of bibliophiles, and their conflation with bibliomaniacs in the minds of the public, in his answering work, Bibliomania, which is part satire, part warning and part celebration of the obsessive collecting of books.