ABSTRACT
The first personal working library of any substance collected by an English lay scholar belonged to the statesman and martyr, Sir Thomas More. An inventory made at Losely House in 1556 by Sir William More reveals the progress of the manorial library. The walls of the library were hung with maps of England, Scotland and France, a perpetual almanack and a small picture. Chaucer gives us much more information about his library than Shakespeare does. The end of the formative period of the English domestic library, and the beginning of the new age, is marked by possibly the most famous of all our private libraries, and the only one that has survived to this day in its original state: the library of Samuel Pepys. The Pepys Library today rightly commands universal admiration, but it has had its detractors.
