Sir Thomas Phillipps Wanted Every Book in the World

Sir Thomas Phillipps was a nineteenth-century English baronet with a private income of about six thousand pounds a year and a collecting habit that cost him five thousand of it. His goal, which he stated plainly and without apparent embarrassment, was to own one copy of every book in the world.

He nearly managed it.

By the 1830s, manuscripts were arriving at his estate at Middle Hill at a rate of forty to fifty per week. He bought entire monastery libraries in Belgium. He outbid the Dutch government for a collection at The Hague. He would walk into a bookshop and purchase the complete stock. When catalogues arrived from dealers, he ordered every item.

Sixteen of his twenty rooms filled up. Then the hallways. His second wife complained she had been "booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other." He slept on a sofa because the bedroom was full of manuscripts. One imagines the conversation that preceded that arrangement was brief.

When he finally moved houses, it took 105 wagons to transport the collection, and even then he left rooms of books behind. He died in 1872 at the age of seventy-nine. The auction houses began selling off his collection in 1891, nineteen years later.

They finished in 2006. Some of the crates had never been opened.