This quotation from Seymour de Ricci highlights the immense importance of the act of placing a book into a collection, that is, the degree of safety imparted by the ennoblement of a text through its proximity to other equally beautifully preserved volumes. This is a frank admission of the truth that, however much scholars might stress the intrinsic value of a text over the aesthetic value placed on it by many book collectors, everyone in the end loves a beautiful book in a handsome binding. Such a binding will ensure that a text might last long enough to be appreciated for its intrinsic value. On this level alone it can be said that the Roxburghe founding members provided a solid service to literature by preserving between them a vast quantity of early printed books and manuscripts within their personal collections as well as helping create the wider appetite for and awareness of such items. That would be faint praise if they are viewed as mere bibliomaniacs, collecting indiscriminately and on purely aesthetic grounds.

Much information is available about the collections owned by these men because most of them were catalogued, if not for their own use and the convenience of their friends, then certainly when they came to auction. A look at the books contained within these collections reveals that their owners were not only collecting books that fell within the usual collector's remit such as rarities, first editions, large paper copies and so on but also that most of these bibliophiles were also constructing libraries that reflected their personal intellectual interests and expertise. It is easy to be dazzled by the expensive rarities that appeared in every big collection of the day, but often the greater interest lies in these more personal collections that coexist alongside the more famous works. In this chapter I attempt to give an, unavoidably brief, outline of the books collected by the Roxburghe Club members during this period in order to illustrate how diverse and specialized these collections really were.