Roxburghe Club

The spur to the Club's foundation was the sale of the enormous library of the 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,[1] and sold to the Marquis of Blandford for £2,260, the highest price ever given for a book at that time.

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".

[4] A photograph exists of the membership in 1892, including the Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and anthropologist Andrew Lang, as well as American poet James Russell Lowell, Alfred Henry Huth, and Simon Watson Taylor.

Initially the volumes were editions of early blackletter printed texts (the first, in 1814, was the Earl of Surrey's translation of parts of Virgil's Aeneid, originally printed in 1557); but from as early as 1819 they began to include texts taken from manuscript originals.

In 2000 the publisher Susan Shaw completed the work that she had been given by the Roxburghe Club to create a facsimile copy of "The Great Book of Thomas Trevilian" in two volumes.