19
J9
indication of the trend which a definitive count would show. The most
striking feature of the cumulative distribution is surely that 50% of Dr
Plume’s Library was in print before 1649; that is half the books had been
published before Thomas Plume became a B.A. It is unlikely that he had
much money to spend on books before about 1660 and was still finding
his way around the bookstalls until then but even if he had begun buying
extensively for himself whilst purchasing for Dr Hacket, the sheer size of
that part of his Library in print by 1650 is too great to encourage any idea
that they can have been a young man’s required reading or that more than
a few were necessary for his current needs.
Figure 6 also shows how
the
accession-rate
declined towards the end
of his life, so that he
appears to have bought
fewer books as his
income rose.
Or, he must have bought
more second-hand books
than new editions in the
last twenty years of his
life. New titles published
between 1675 and 1704
cannot have comprised
any more than 22%,
between one fifth and a
quarter, of this total stock. In fact they formed a smaller proportion,
because some of the accessions of 1675-1704 were reprints of works
originally published before 1660, some are first editions (of 1660-1704)
of works written before 1660.
Two simple conclusions to which this writer is drawn are, first, that Dr
Plume principally bought second- or third-hand books and, secondly, that
he deliberately sought the work of generations of scholars prior to his
own. The physical and financial limitations which he set on future
accessions, his requirement that the Librarian was to be “a Scholar that
knows books,” indicate his intention of creating before his death a
definitive reference library. One may suspect that far from being
145
r 1550
1 576 1000 1626 1850 1 675 1704
Figure 6. Cumulative totals, by date of
printing, of Dr Plume’s Library,
1487-1704.
The totals are expressed as a
percentage, where 100% is 7,131 titles.