THE GRIM FATE of Victorian Church libraries is lamented by Christopher Howse in the Telegraph:

The sale of a 63-volume Bible for £55,000 in December 2006 was a thumping great clue in a detective trail to a scandal over which church people are still fuming.

The Bible in question was hardly even a book, for it had been "Grangerised" in the 19th century - hundreds of old drawings and prints had been added as illustrations, bulking it out to 20ft of shelf space.
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Shockingly, to some, the man who bought it removed 300 of the illustrations, leaving the carcase on the auctioneer's floor (from which it was sold on to a rich collector).

That Bible came from the same source as other old books sold by Sotheby's in June last year, which fetched £400,000. One was the great Complutensian Polyglot, printed for Cardinal Ximenes in 1520.

That is a proper Bible to be sure, with parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Syriac. Cranmer bought a copy. But this one, which fetched £69,000, bore the stamp of the Bishop Phillpotts Library in Truro.

It turned out that hundreds of old books from the library had been sold, for £36,000. What annoyed churchy people was that the dealer who bought them sold them on for more than half a million.

... In the Eighties, the building was sold and the books housed in diocesan offices. A committee entrusted with their care discussed selling them two decades later, but failed to notice valuable volumes in the decaying mass of books. Many that I saw later on sale were in very poor condition.

No one much, it is true, wanted to read the books. Few students, in Cornwall or elsewhere, can read even Latin. Only a specialist would use the Complutensian Polyglot.

A similar case was that of Dr Williams's Library in London, a Nonconformist collection that owned a Shakespeare first folio. What good was it to them? It was sold in 2006 for £2.8 million.

The Bishop Phillpotts Library was not so lucky. The dispersal of its books parallels that of libraries of many religious communities that are shrinking and closing. Mr Thornton also sold hundreds of books from the Cowley Fathers' library and that of the Church Union.

Ours times are like those of John Aubrey's grandfather, after the dissolution of the monasteries, when "manuscripts flew about like butterflies", only to be used to wrap gloves and line pies.

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