Of the several thousand noble libraries founded in family houses throughout the British Isles in the last three or four hundred years, only a few dozen or so may be said to have achieved a lasting public reputation. Among them the Bibliotheca Lindesiana is distinguished not only because of the remarkable collection formed, but because its dispersal began ninety-five years ago and it no longer exists.

            The library’s origins may be said to go back to the late sixteenth century with the establishment of the Lindsay family at Balcarres in Fife by Lord Menmuir, whose bibliophilic son David, the first Lord Balcarres, augmented it to a position of distinction among Scottish libraries. Its status was severely reduced through succeeding years and generations until the mid-nineteenth century and the appearance of Alexander William, twenty-fifth earl of Crawford and eighth earl of Balcarres (1812-1880, called Lord Lindsay for most of his life). As a schoolboy he was fired with a bibliophilic if not maniacal passion and determined to form a great library in which every branch of knowledge would be worthily represented. By degrees his obsession was controlled and directed so that, unlike the library of his eccentric contemporary, Sir Thomas Phillipps (whose desire at one time was to own a copy of every printed book), the Bibliotheca Lindesiana developed into a formidable general collection of books with much to offer in all fields and languages, and with superb strengths in areas of special interest to its architect and builder.

            Or builders, one should say. Rarely does the bibliophilic impulse transfer from one generation to the next, but Lord Lindsay early recognized an ally in his successor, James Ludovic (1847-1913), who continued the general program laid down by the father (in a Library Report of 1865 written for the son) and energetically added a series of personal subjects to the library throughout his adult life. Early manuscripts and printed books, and bibliographical treasures generally, continued to accumulate after the death of Lord Lindsay, while aggregations of importance in astronomy, broadsides, ballads, and documents of the French Revolution and Napoleonic period were added to them. In addition to these, the library had strengths in its collections of Bibles and liturgies, block-books, orientalia, papyri, proclamations, romances, Scottish printing, and voyages and travel. In the end it numbered close to 200,000 volumes.

            This was a collection created by two generations of a noble family for the family’s use, but in many ways it was equivalent to a research institution of international value. Ludovic employed a full-time librarian and staff. He wrote, or caused to be written, almost twenty catalogues of the collections, thereby organizing and publicizing their contents. Its use by others was a natural consequence of its reputation and of the dissemination of the printed catalogues, so that by the 1880s the library staff handled a worldwide correspondence with scholars.

            The 1880s also brought economic hardship to the coal and iron industries upon which the family depended. In 1886 the estate and library at Balcarres was repurchased by Ludovic from a younger branch of the family (Sir Coutts Lindsay), but in the following year he was forced to raise a large sum and turned to the books. Two sales occurred in 1887 and 1889 in which the Gutenberg Bible (now at Texas) and the better incunabula were sold. A few years later the astronomy books were presented to the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh. In 1900 Mrs. John Rylands imitated earlier benefactions to the library named for her husband at Manchester by purchasing all the Lindsay manuscripts with the exception of the documents of the French Revolution. Ludovic’s successor, the twenty-seventh earl of Crawford, parted with the bulk of the collections to Quaritch in 1924, and much of the remainder was sold by auction in 1947/48.

            The bookplate is found in books once shelved at Balcarres and at Haigh Hall, Lancashire, where the elder branch of the family had lived since 1822. Today examples can be found in almost every research library of any size or pretension. There are twenty-six known examples of the plate on twenty-one titles in the collections of the Humanities Research Center, among them works on ballads and photography, both special interests of Ludovic’s. One is a large paper copy of the five-volume catalogue of the sale of the Sunderland library (1881-1883) that began at the end of Ludovic’s first year without his father. It is priced throughout in manuscript, and Ludovic made significant purchases among the incunables. In addition, five of the books have the label of Balcarres, of which three were in the library of Sir Coutts Lindsay, maternal uncle of Lord Lindsay. The example illustrated is one of these, found in a copy of Sir William Fraser’s Coila’s Whispers (2^nd ed., London, 1872), a presentation from the author.

            The bookplate is a typical armorial of the mid-nineteenth century with name Bibliotheca Lindesiana below the arms (Lindsay quartering Abernethy) and the crest and motto above (endure fort: endure boldly).

            The above account is dependent on the published catalogues and the descriptions of the library written by the twenty-eighth earl, on the entries in De Ricci and Fletcher, and particularly on the remarkable biography of the library produced by Nicolas Barker (Bibliotheca Lindesiana [London: Quaritch, 1977]).

John P Chalmers

Humanities Research Center

University of Texas at Austin