Forty New Books From William Beckford’s Library

In 2022 Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and the Beckford’s Tower Trust at Bath received between them some fifty-two books, some multi-volume, as distributed from the treasure trove that was the Blavatnik Honresfield collection of some 1,500 printed books and exceptional Romantic-era manuscripts that had been saved for the country by the Friends of the Nation’s Libraries. On inspection, ten of the Walpole-related books were Beckford’s copies, as were thirty of the books given to Beckford’s Tower–a group of forty new books from Beckford’s library. These provide an opportunity to assess them in terms of subject-matter, binding, and annotation as a modest cross-section of Beckford’s library. They are books in English, many of them reading copies, and consequently approximately half of them bear the annotations for which Beckford is renowned, some of those annotations throwing further light on Beckford’s vexed relationship with Walpole.