1 SATIRE AND THE BIBLIOMANIA Around the turn of the nineteenth century book the prices for rare books began to rise dramatically, reaching an apex of previously unthinkable sums for volumes that had previously in many cases been dismissed as suitable only for use as waste paper and in the process creating a financial bubble, similar to, albeit on a far smaller scale, the furores that have at other times surrounded tulip bulbs or South Sea Company investments. Antiquarian book collectors, who had so often and for so long been mercilessly lampooned for their obscure, somewhat eccentric pursuits, now gained in the public imagination a new, more conspicuous and altogether more objectionable aspect to their character, that of ostentatious wealth and often high social standing. The book-collecting portion of the antiquarian brotherhood had, despite themselves in many cases, entirely intentionally in others, created an interest in, and demand for, early printed books that had managed to reach the notice of a significant portion of the general public and the so-called bibliomania was born. We are accustomed to viewing this period of hyper-inflated book prices in serious terms and much of the commentary, both nineteenth-century and modern, is censorious in tone; bibliomaniacs are viewed as lacking sense, collecting books with wild abandon, favouring rarity over intrinsic literary value and approaching books in ways that lack in scholarship. In modern commentary on the period, the criticisms of their peers are often held up as proof that their foolishness, superficiality and avariciousness made them pariahs or laughing stocks among sensible men of letters, but this is to forget that the bibliomania was in many ways a media construct. Letter writers to the newspapers and journals of the day may have tutted over the exploits of these ludicrous book-collectors who cared only for the margin width or bindings of their