Gone Missing

The library of Dr Daniel Williams (Presbyterian minister, 1643-1716) in London is selling its copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and to mark the occasion Peter Lindenbaum examines not only the Folio but the library (TLS June 2). The Folio is not the only (modest) surprise in this library, whose original collection included not only Williams’ books but those of fellow Presbyterian Dr William Bates (1625-99). The catalogue from 1727 lists 6700 or so items, including a sufficient number of works in French, Italian, and Spanish that Lindenbaum describes it as being more “a Renaissance humanist’s library” than a Puritan preacher’s. The heart of the collection is theological, including the papers of Richard Baxter, the original minutes of the Westminster Assembly, and other related items.

Not that all of this is readily accessible: “Successive changes in the cataloguing system have dispersed the volumes of the original collection throughout the Library. One has to match the contents of the original 1727 catalogue against the entries of the 1801 and later catalogues to determine whether the original copy is still there.” Because the library was until recently a lending library, a number of works have gone missing, including a 1680 volume containing Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, which “was evidently replaced by a first edition of 1671 sometime between 1727 and 1801, but the card catalogue tells us that the replacement has been missing since October 1886, and thus both are gone.”