The Roxburghe Club has enjoyed a rich, unbroken history spanning over two hundred years. This book has concentrated on the significance of just the first two decades of its existence and has hopefully established a clearer, more factual account of this period than has previously been available, one which provides a plausible counternarrative to that formerly available and underlines the need for a more complex view of the club demographic and motivation than has previously been acknowledged. It is apparent that in contrast to commonly held views the club membership, although mythologized as aristocratic, contained considerably more middle- class professionals and representatives of the gentry than nobles and that the members were not dilettante playboys but men of serious intent, committed to books, especially early printed texts. They were also politically active in their various spheres, and this was sometimes reflected in their choice of texts. Although, as might be expected, some were Tories, a surprisingly large percentage of the club were Whig, at least one was radical and most were unexpectedly sympathetic to political reform and Catholic emancipation, a position underlined by the club's willingness to reprint works of pre- Reformation Catholic provenance during a period when this could be considered provocative, and despite what has been seen as the wider anti- Catholic conservatism of antiquarianism at this time.

The club's genesis and the onset of its early members’ association together for the investigation and discussion of early printing and texts are two other topics where the powerful existing myth – that the club owes its existence to the chance occurrence of a contested rare volume raising an extravagant auction price followed by an absurdly gluttonous dinner – proves to be misleading, and not just for the lack of seriousness it conveys. The men who would become the Roxburghe Club were in most cases already well known to each other, and the formation of the club can be seen as the result of their literary interests and the pooling of their individual expertise rather than as the fortuitous and frivolous genesis.