CHAPTER I.
How Men have Formed Libraries.
As long as books have existed there have been book collectors. It is easy now to collect, for books of interest are to be found on all sides; but in old times this was not so, and we must therefore admire the more those men who formed their libraries under the greatest difficulties. In a book devoted to the formation of libraries it seems but fair to devote some space to doing honour to those who have formed libraries, and perhaps some practical lessons may be learned from a few historical facts.
Englishmen may well be proud of Richard Aungerville de Bury, a man occupying a busy and exalted station, who not only collected books with ardour united with judgment, but has left for the benefit of later ages a manual which specially endears his memory to all book lovers.
He collected books, and often took them in place of corn for tithes and dues, but he also produced books, for he kept copyists in his house. Many of these books were carefully preserved in his palace at Durham, but it is also pleasant to think of some of them being carefully preserved in the noble mansion belonging to his see which stood by the side of the Thames, and on the site of the present Adelphi.
Petrarch was a book-loving poet, and he is said to have met the book-loving ecclesiastic Richard de Bury at Rome. He gave his library to the Church of St. Mark at Venice in 1362; but the guardians allowed the books to decay, and few were rescued. Boccaccio bequeathed his library to the Augustinians at Florence, but one cannot imagine the books of the accomplished author of the Decameron as very well suited for the needs of a religious society, and it was probably weeded before Boccaccio's death. The remains of the library are still shown to visitors in the Laurentian Library, the famous building due to the genius of Michael Angelo.