Title
Jeremy M. Norman Count Guglielmo Libri Collection.
Date
1823-2009
Description
There are few figures in book history as infamous as Count Guglielmo Libri (1803-1869). An erudite and accomplished Italian aristocrat, Libri was appointed in 1841 as Chief Inspector of French Libraries and began to leverage his unsupervised access to these collections to enrich his own personal library of rarities. By 1848 his mounting thefts could no longer be hidden and, warned that he was about to be arrested, Libri fled to London with 18 large trunks of books and manuscripts containing about 30,000 items. He was able to convince his English friends that his problems in France were political rather than criminal, and he retained the trust of many, even after being convicted in absentia in France in 1850. Several sales in the 1850s and 1860s reputedly netted him over a million francs.
Source
The Club’s extraordinarily rich collection of pamphlets, catalogues, and letters relating to “L’Affaire Libri” was acquired in 2016, the gift of Grolier member Jeremy Norman, in the wake of his exhibition of this material at the Club in 2013.