Such subtle and heady considerations are hinted at with his very early Romantic painting on loan from Prague Castle, "The Bibliomaniac" (33) which depicts three pretty girls seeking to divert a young man absorbed in a book.
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He had started collecting sixteenth century Italian books whilst a student and described himself as a "bibliomaniac".
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In his old age King regretted many passages, and at his death the remaining copies were burnt. The poem was reissued without the annotations in John Almon's New Foundling Hospital of Wit. A key to the characters is given in William Davis's Second Journey round the Library of a Bibliomaniac (1825). Original drawing (1735) for frontispiece to The Toast, by Hubert-François Gravelot About April 1737 King wrote a witty political paper called Common Sense, in which he proposed a new scheme of government to the people of Corsica [i.e.
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Humphries has spent much of his life immersed in music, literature and the arts. A self-proclaimed 'bibliomaniac', his house in West Hampstead, London supposedly contains some 25,000 books, many of them first editions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of the more arcane and rare items in this collection include the telephone book of Oscar Wilde, Memoirs of a Public Baby by Philip O'Connor, an autographed copy of Humdrum by Harold Acton, the complete works of Wilfred Childe and several volumes of the pre-war surrealist poetry of Herbert Read.
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Wishing to instill in Albert the artlessness of animals, Jules instructs his young charge to throw away his books. He advises Albert that it is easier to "fabricate a Jesus or Mohammed" than it is to dismantle the adulterated social being that each individual has become so that can return to the original purity of his status as a "Nothing." Jules is a self-contradictory and self-loathing character. He is a bibliomaniac who despises the artificiality of the knowledge found in books; when he comes to finagle from Père Pamphile – an old Trinitarian monk, who is both a double and the opposite of Jules – money he needs for his library, Pamphile indignantly refuses.
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The son of Thomas Halliwell, he was born in London and was educated privately and at Jesus College, Cambridge. He devoted himself to antiquarian research, particularly of early English literature. Beginning at the age of only 16, between 1836 and 1837, he contributed 47 articles to The Parthenon. A Weekly Journal of English and Foreign Literature, the Arts, and Sciences;Douglas Wertheimer, "J.O. Halliwell's Contributions to 'The Parthenon' -- 1836-37," Victorian Periodicals Newsletter vol. 8 (March 1975), pp. 3-6. in 1839 he edited Sir John Mandeville's Travels; in 1842 published an Account of the European manuscripts in the Chetham Library, besides a newly discovered metrical romance of the 15th century (Torrent of Portugal). In 1841, while at Cambridge, Halliwell dedicated his book Reliquae Antiquae to Sir Thomas Phillipps, the noted bibliomaniac.
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In the following year he became curate of Chorlton Chapel, and in December 1790 was appointed chaplain of the collegiate church of Manchester, a position which he retained until his death on 11 November 1821. He acted for a time as assistant master at the grammar school, but was exceedingly unpopular with the boys, who at times ejected him from the schoolroom, struggling and shrieking out at the loudest pitch of an unmelodious voice his uncomplimentary opinions of them as "blockheads". He was an excellent scholar, and one of his pupils, Dr. Joseph Allen, bishop of Ely, acknowledged, "If it had not been for Joshua Brookes, I should never have been a fellow of Trinity" - which proved the stepping-stone to the episcopal bench. Brookes was a book collector; but although he brought together a large library, he was entirely deficient in the finer instincts of the bibliomaniac, and nothing could be more tasteless than his fashion of illustrating his books with tawdry and worthless engravings.
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Ticknor, 1864, p. 286 Furthermore, de Gayangos assisted greatly by locating important documents in the British Museum and in the collection of the bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps, who owned around 60,000 manuscripts. He also borrowed several manuscripts from the archives in Brussels, having received letters from the respected Belgian diplomat Sylvain Van de Weyer in London. de Gayangos became Professor of Arabic literature at the Complutense University of Madrid in late 1842, and subsequently lent Prescott rare books and manuscripts from the university library.Ticknor, 1864, p. 288 By the summer of 1848, Prescott had over 300 works on the subject at his disposal, but he continued to have serious problems with his eyesight; an examination by an oculist confirmed that there was untreatable damage to his retina.Ticknor, 1864, p. 281 Prescott had been commissioned by the Massachusetts Historical Society to write a biography of the scholar John Pickering in 1848, which he wrote for publication later in that year.Ticknor, 1864, p. 283 Prescott was invited to write a history of the Mexican–American War, but declined, as he was uninterested in writing on contemporary events.Ticknor, 1864, p.
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