[A clutch of late nineteenth-century printed ephemera concerning the Roxburghe Club]

[London]: [s.n.], [1864-95] 19 separate bifoliums, two single sheets (printed on both sides), and two quarto pamphlets (stitched, as issued). All evidently at one time folded, overall clean and crisp. Very occasional manuscript annotations to price lists. An archive of administrational ephemera, spanning the final decades of the nineteenth- century, relating to the Roxburghe Club; the world's oldest society of bibliophiles. The spur to the Club's foundation was the sale of the extensive library of John Ker, third Duke of Roxburghe (1720-1804), which took place over 46 days in 1812. The auction was eagerly followed by bibliophiles, the highlight being the sale of the first dated edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Christophorus Valdarfer at Venice in 1471, and sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at that time. That evening, a group of eighteen collectors met at the St Albans Tavern for a dinner presided over by the second Earl Spencer, the greatest collector of his age, and his panegyrist Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776- 1847). It was subsequently decided that the dinner become an annual event, thus the Club was formalised, with Spencer presiding and Dibdin serving as first secretary. The Roxburghe is generally recognised as the first text publication society. Each member was, and remains, expected to sponsor the publication of a rare and or curious volume. Initially the volumes were editions of early blackletter printed texts (the first, in 1814, was the Earl of Surrey's translation of parts of Virgil's Aeneid, originally printed in 1557); but from as early as 1819 they began to include texts taken from manuscript originals. Included here are two pamphlets; the first (dated May 17th 1895) a draft of proposed revisions to the Clubs rules, the second (undated, but presumably contemporary) presenting the amended regulations. The preponderance of the loose articles are devoted to announcements on the proceedings of the general and anniversary meetings of the society. Topics of discussion include, inter alia, endeavours to fill up vacancies, the treasurer reports on the state of the Clubs finances (the account balance varying wildly, though at its lowest still comfortably in the region of two hundred pounds), notification of imminent publications, and the election of new members. The majority conclude with a price list for books currently available through the society to 'members whose subscriptions are not in arrear'. Given that the society is composed of only forty members at any one time, the print runs of these announcements, as with all Roxburghe Club publications, would have been necessarily small; indeed, all are apparently institutionally unrepresented (except in the archives of the Club itself). .