Bodleian – oh, the Bodleian, a national treasure in its own right: home of the largest collection of manuscripts in England (‘Cambridge has only got a hundred thousand titles,’ sniffed the clerk who admitted them, ‘and Edinburgh’s only got a paltry sixty-three’), whose collection only continued to expand under the proud leadership of the Reverend Doctor Bulkeley Bandinel, who had a book-buying budget of nearly £2,000 a year.
