Collecting the past: British collectors and their collections from the 18th to the 20th centuries

Today's libraries and museums are heavily indebted to the passions and obsessions of numerous individual collectors who devoted their lives to amassing collections of books, manuscripts, artworks, and other culturally significant objects.

This book brings together the latest research on a wide range of significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including Hans Sloane, Sarah Sophia Banks, Thomas Phillipps, Sydney Cockerell, J.P.

Morgan Jr., Alfred Chester Beatty, and R.E. Hart.