Thomas Phillipps
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sir Thomas Phillipps, 1st Baronet (2 July 1792 – 6 February 1872) was an English antiquary and book collector who amassed the largest collection of manuscript material in the 19th century, due to his severe condition of bibliomania. He was the illegitimate son of a textile manufacturer who inherited a substantial estate which he spent almost entirely on vellum manuscripts, and in doing so put his family into debt. Phillipps recorded in an early catalogue that his collection “was instigated by reading various accounts of the destruction of valuable manuscripts.” A.N.L. Munby notes that ‘’[h]e spent perhaps between two hundred thousand and a quarter of a million pounds[,] altogether four or five thousand pounds a year, while accessions came in at the rate of forty or fifty a week.”
