Reflections on librarianship: observations arising from examination of the Garrick Collection of old plays in the British Library

Abstract

• IN April 1980 it will be two hundred years since David Garrick's Collection of Old Plays was transferred from his house in the Adelphi to the British Museum. On a hand cart, so it is said, the volumes in their special binding, with the initials DG entwined on the spines, were carried, with an escort of two Museum Trustees and the Keeper, the Reverend Samuel Harper, in attendance. From the special bookcase in which it had been housed, where Garrick had preserved its integrity for some thirty years, the Collection passed as a bequest to the nation into the care of the Trustees and staff of the British Museum.