ABSTRACT
By contrast with some of the meaner parish collections, dustier school libraries and basic commercial operations to which many readers were nevertheless very grateful to have access, the Bibliotheca Beauclerkiana, on Great Russell Street in London in the 1770s, was one of the real wonders of the age. For appreciating books as artefacts for collection and display, as the owner of the Bibliotheca Beauclerkiana certainly did, might well encourage a far more aggressive approach to purchasing than would typically be exhibited by a reader guided mainly or exclusively. Occasionally the reading interests of such people are given colour by the chance survival of documentary evidence, such as that which lists the books of Mary Cowgill, a Methodist woman in Ribblesdale in the North Riding of Yorkshire some time after 1800. Even where both the location and the circumstance were a little less picturesque, the context of the reading experience could greatly affect an individual’s perceptions of a book.
