Found piled in a bedroom bookcase on an appraisal visit to a suburban home: two 1625 George Chapman plays, quarto format, in immaculate condition and bound together by one of the world’s finest bookbinders, Riviere & Son. At the bottom of a dusty box in a country bookshop: a pre-revolutionary French royal binding, in wonderful condition and with spectacular provenance and rarity. In a secondhand store: Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s luxurious catalogue of Lord Spencer’s library at Althorp—the catalogue in which Dibdin glamourized the 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the “First Folio.”
