In the year that the Roxburghe Club was established, the first steam- driven printing press was receiving its initial trial for The Times and the true mass production of books was fast becoming a reality. During this period when many men of letters, including Isaac Disraeli, were voicing their concerns about the avalanche of books that was threatening to overwhelm the discerning reader, the Roxburghe Club were unconcernedly revelling in the printed word. While the Roxburghe members’ collections did, of course, contain many rare and beautiful manuscripts, some of which later became important Roxburghe editions, the main focus of collecting for most of the members were blackletter works, and, tellingly, the first items that they chose to reproduce were not manuscripts but reproductions of early printed volumes. Public opinion towards the collecting and study of black- letter items, as we have seen, was not overall a positive one, and a heated debate was carried on in magazines of the day, with the Roxburghe Club soon being seen as the epitome of this desire to ‘grub up all the trash’, as it was dismissively described by one detractor. James Beresford, in his satirical work Bibliosophia, wryly acknowledged the public view when he described the features of black- letter type as ‘the uncouthly angular configuration – the obsoletely stiff, grim and bloated appearance of its characters’, while asserting that it is exactly this lack of appeal to the general reader which recommends it to the collector.

There are a number of possible reasons for this cultural antipathy towards early texts, especially those reproduced in black- letter facsimile. One possibility is that, at a time when Catholic emancipation was a highly contentious subject, black- letter volumes could be seen as somehow too reminiscent of medieval Catholic hegemony. While anti- Catholic sentiment has been perceived in antiquarian culture, it was certainly not present in the activities of the early Roxburghe Club, who as a group worked to produce a number of reprints of books and manuscripts of Catholic origin, that is, pre- Reformation, including excerpts from Mystery cycles: the Chester Mysteries, edited and presented by James Markland, and Judicium, a Pageant, presented to the club by Peregrine Towneley.