16
Matthew’s library, given to York Minster in the 1630s, was of about
3,000
books, valued at £600 and considered then to be the largest private
library in England [25]. Probably Archbishop Harsnett’s in 1631 and Dr
John Knightbridge’s in 1677 were each of about 2,000 volumes [22 and
23].
The Norfolkian Library given to the Royal Society in 1678 was
again some 3,000 printed books [26] and that was the total aimed for and
achieved by Samuel Pepys [10(a)]. What stands in Dr Plume’s Library
amounts to at least 7,130
titles.
Perhaps there were about 7,400
titles
[27]
when they reached Maldon in 1705. Allowing for the number of titles in
these other collections being more than the number of volumes in which
they were bound, Dr Plume’s still far exceeds similar collections. It
would seem to have been exceptionally large, a princely gift, for its time.
Another difference is the unusually large number of foreign
publications. There are books fromalmost every town or city in northern
Europe that ever had a printing house in the 16th or 17th centuries and
some from Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe (see Figure 5). Many are of
course from the great centres of the publishing trade—Antwerp, Paris,
Lyons, Geneva, Leipzig, Cologne, Amsterdam—but also they have
come from Poland, Sweden, Denmark, from presses in Glasgow,
Aberdeen, Waterford. They include examples of the finest printing
techniques of the time, others are of the most ordinary shop-work and
there is at least one example [4.1 ] of the hurried printing done on a
fugitive press of an outlawed group. The books display the range of work
which the European press was capable of publishing by the early 17th
century in authorship, language and subject-matter, with Roman
Catholic, Orthodox and Calvinist authors as well as Anglicans and
Presbyterians, with texts in Hebrew, Persian, Syriac, Coptic and Greek as
well as Latin and English, with medieval chroniclers, Tartar astonomers,
Cardinals and Jesuits, Huguenots, a Portuguese bishop, a Bohemian
educationalist, a Quaker prisoner in the Tolbooth of Aberdeen, as well as
the expected host of English clergymen and lawyers.
The stock is so rich that some omissions are not easily noticed. In
general Dr Plume ignored the pamphlets of radical British sects of the
1640
s and 1650s. The atlases are not especially