Roxburghe Club

The spur to the Club's foundation was the sale of the enormous library of John Ker, 3rd Duke of Roxburghe (who had died in 1804), which took place over 46 days in May–July 1812. The auction was eagerly followed by bibliophiles, the high point being the sale on 17 June 1812 of the first dated edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, printed by Christophorus Valdarfer at Venice in 1471, and sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at that time. (The Marquis already possessed a copy, but one that lacked 5 pages.) That evening, a group of eighteen collectors met at the St Albans Tavern, St Albans Street (later renamed Waterloo Place) for a dinner presided over by George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, and this is regarded as the origin of the Roxburghe Club.

A toast drunk on that occasion has been repeated at every annual anniversary dinner since to the "immortal memory of John Duke of Roxburghe, of Christopher Valdarfer, printer of the Boccaccio of 1471, of Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, the inventors of the art of printing, of William Caxton, Father of the British press [and others; and] the prosperity of the Roxburghe Club and the Cause of Bibliomania all over the world". It was decided to make the dinner an annual event: further members were admitted the following year. The club was formed by Thomas Frognall Dibdin, author of the book Bibliomania; or Book-Madness (1809), who served as its first secretary; and the club was formalised under Earl Spencer's presidency.