117 Years in the Dismantling:<br>The End of Perhaps the Greatest Collection Ever
- by Michael Stillman
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“Three oblong wooden boxes each separated into two compartments…each crammed to overflowing with defective vellum fragments and pieces and scraps of documents, charters, writs, letters, indentures, proclamations, wills, summonses, final concords, estate rolls and very many other pieces, written in Latin and English in the widest possible range of English scripts, some royal, some decorated, some with seals, some (but probably not very many) medieval, probably most eighteenth-century, some printed on vellum, some wrappers, some in cardboard boxes, some loose in Middle Hill boards, some large, many small, all dusty and mostly unsorted.”
“These remarkable survivals perhaps provide a greater insight into the true nature of the Phillipps collection than any amount of description and cataloguing. These are the original Middle Hill boxes in which books and manuscripts were stored. Phillipps does not seem to have had the slightest interest in the appearance of his library, his main concern being a fear of fire (this was such that he made it a provision of his will that no hot air flues or gas pipes were ever to be used at Thirlestaine House). These coffin-like boxes were piled one on top of the other, so that in an emergency the books could be carried out in their shelves. Middle Hill is not a large house, and the books were spread all over it. The effect was described by E. Edwards in 1859, Memoirs of Libraries, II, pp.159-60, ‘Once seen it will never be forgotten. The most striking peculiarity of aspect lies in the long ranges of boxes, tier above tier, and of uniform size, each with its falling front, in which nearly all the books are lodged; not indeed for concealment, but by way of safeguard against that terrible foe of Libraries – fire’. The falling fronts of the boxes have now been removed but the marks of the hinges are still there.
“The boxes are at least as old as 1854, when Sir Frederic Madden described seeing ‘in every room piles of huge boxes up to the ceiling, containing the more valuable volumes’ (Munby, Phillipps Studies, IV, 1956, p.88). Madden’s journals record how the available living space for the family contracted as the collection expanded: by 1844 the dining room was packed and was only unlocked for use at meals, and by two years later it was no longer used at all. Even Sir Thomas’s bedroom was filled to the ceiling with large volumes, leaving only just enough space for a dressing table for his wife.
“In such circumstances, the chaotic arrangement of the books is scarcely surprising, all the more so as Phillipps refused to employ a librarian. He himself undertook the cataloguing and organisation, with the assistance of his three small daughters and various governesses. It was a common experience for visiting scholars to find that a manuscript they had come many miles to see could not be found.
“It took 160 men and 230 horses to transport the boxes to Thirlestaine House in 1863-64. They were still in use when the Robinson brothers saw the residue of the library in storage in 1945: ‘Here, stacked pile upon pile, rank upon rank, into the gloom, were the original box-shelves … Neither we, nor for that matter anyone else, really knew what were the contents of these coffin-shaped boxes’ (P. Robinson in The Book Collector, XXXV, 1986, p.436). As the collection was gradually unpacked, the boxes were discarded. These three remained as the last lot in the final sale of the Phillipps Collection in our Chancery Lane rooms in 1981, marking the end of a series of auctions which began in 1886 and lasted 95 years. They were bought by Alan Thomas, a great champion of Phillipps, and became a kind of Phillipps shrine behind guests seated in his dining room in Chelsea. They were lot 49 in the sale of his library, 21 and 22 June 1993, and passed into the Schøyen collection, the only modern private collection which can in any way rival Phillipps in terms of breadth of interest.”