Bibliographer, a nephew of Charles Dibdin, was born at Calcutta in 1776. Having lost both parents when hardly four years of age, he was brought up by a maternal uncle, studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, tried law, but took orders in 1804. Librarian to Lord Spencer, he proceeded D.D. in 1825; held the vicarage of Exning near Newmarket and the rectory of St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, London; and died 18th November 1847. Among his works were “Bibliomania” (1809); “The Bibliographical Decameron” (1817); “Bibliotheca Spenceriana” (1814–15); “Bibliographical Tour in France and Germany” (1821); “Reminiscences of a Literary Life” (1836); and “Bibliographical tour in the Northern Counties of England and Scotland” (1838).

Personal

  I knew him in his later years, and found him full of literary information, and as eager to communicate as I was to receive it. He was small in stature, with a countenance expressive of much firmness, and a profusion of gray hair.

  At the Roxburghe sale the edition of Boccaccio printed by Valdarfer sold for the enormous sum of 2,260l., and to commemorate this Dibdin proposed that several of the leading bibliophiles should dine together on the day. Eighteen met at the St. Alban’s Tavern, in St. Alban’s Street (now Waterloo Place), on 17 June 1812, with Lord Spencer as president, and Dibdin as vice-president. This was the beginning of the existence of the Roxburghe Club. The number of members was ultimately increased to thirty-one, and each member was expected to produce a reprint of some rare volume of English literature. In spite of the worthless character of some of the early publications (of which it was said that when they were unique there was already one copy too many in existence), and of the ridicule thrown on the club by the publication of Haslewood’s “Roxburghe Revels,” this was the parent of the publishing societies established in this country, which have done so much for English history and antiquities, to say nothing of other branches of literature; and Dibdin must be credited with being the originator of the proposal.

General

  Mr. Dibdin has now been for many years employed in composing and compiling some of the most expensive, thickest, largest and heaviest octavos which have ever issued from the press. The volume which is now before us, not the last we presume, is certainly not the least of the Dibdin family. The “Bibliotheca Spenceriana” beats in breadth—the “Bibliographical Decameron” and “Bibliographical Tour” in height, or, as he would say, in tallness,—but, for thickness and specific gravity, the intellectual, as well as material, pound weight, we will back “The Library Companion” against any of them. In all his long, many and weighty labours, Mr. Dibdin seems to have had but one object in view, and that neither a very good-natured nor in him a very gracious one: his ambition has been to raise a laugh at the expense of a very innocent, but not very wise, body of men,—the collectors of scarce and black-letter books. Under the masque of a more than common zeal in their pursuit, and of affectionate regard for their persons, he has bestowed much complimentary sarcasm upon the one, and placed the other with great gravity in exceedingly ludicrous situations.

  Was the prince of bibliographers…. By his writings and publications in this line he contributed largely to the extensive bibliomania which prevailed in England in the early part of the present century.