Skip to main content
Grolier Club Exhibitions

Daniel’s Private Library

7.01a_1_cat39.jpg 7.01a_2_cat39.jpg 7.01b_3_cat41.jpg

Photo credit: Nicole Neenan

Leslie Chaundy (Firm). Being the Privately-Purchased Library of the Late Rev. C.H.O. Daniel, D.D., Provost of Worcester College, Oxford … Catalogues no. 39 & 41. Oxford: Leslie Chaundy, [1920].

Oxford bookseller Leslie Chaundy purchased Daniel’s large private library after his death and dispersed it through these two catalogues. Approximately 750 titles are listed all together, including 37 books from the Press itself. 

Daniel’s library was strong in examples of early printing, Aldines, and English Renaissance poetry, thus reflecting the antiquarian sensibility of his own publications. His collection of approximately 100 Aldines, many in contemporary bindings, was acquired en bloc by the University of Liverpool, where it still resides.

 

Purchased 2020

MS+Daniel+12.92+_0002.jpg

Photo courtesy of the Provost and Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford.

Worcester House, Oxford. Home of the Daniels until 1903. 

“His collection of books, his love and knowledge of them, both in their pure bookliness and in their contents, was a feature of life there [i.e. Worcester House] which could not be overlooked. If a congenial presence was divined, a tall slow-moving figure was sure to appear in one or the other of the drawing room doorways, a calf-bound volume under one arm, either an old favourite or a recent prize, to be exhibited and richly discussed.”

Margaret L. Woods, “Henry Daniel and His Home,” in Madan’s Memorial of C.H.O. Daniel (1921).