The order included Sebastien Gryphe’s 1542 edition of Livy’s history of ancient Rome,2 uniformly bound in four volumes, brown calf, tooled in gold to a geometrical design, with Wotton’s name and the “et amicorum” formula centred on each cover. The set descended within his family, then collaterally, until 1919, when it was consigned for sale to Sotheby’s by the Earl of Carnarvon, and dispersed in separate lots (two were bought by Quaritch, and two by Maggs). One volume has since entered the Houghton Library, Harvard University; another until recently was in the Bibliotheca Brookeriana. Two volumes have not been seen since the 1960s.
The binding atelier visited by Wotton was then busy with commissions received from François I, Jean Grolier, Charles de Lorraine, and Cardinal Granvelle, among other noted bibliophiles. Here Wotton presumably was introduced to the tooled Grolieresque “et amicorum” ownership inscription and to Grolier’s preferences for plain gilt edges and no ties. The shop, designated by bookbinding historians “Wotton’s Binder A” or the “Pecking Crow Binder”, closed about 1550, and on his subsequent visits to Paris, ca 1549, 1551, and ca 1552, Wotton visited other binders. “Wotton’s Binder B” executed mostly bindings adorned by armorial stamps (three sizes are known); “Wotton’s Binder C” produced more armorial bindings, with the date 1552 on the covers, and some plain bindings. In 1553 Wotton went to prison for his participation in Wyatt’s Rebellion.
Wotton’s taste for elaborate gold-tooled bindings and his adoption of the “et amicorum” formula have earned him the posthumous sobriquet “the English Grolier”. About 140 volumes from Wotton’s library are known. The main group passed by inheritance to the library at Bretby, which was sold by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon in April 1919 to fund Howard Carter's archaeology expeditions in Egypt. A second group descended through a different branch of the Stanhope family, to James Richard Stanhope, 7th Earl Stanhope, on whose death in 1967 the earldom became extinct, and the family seat (Chevening House) bequeathed to the nation. Valuable books were deposited by the Trustees of the Chevening Estate at the British Library, and in 1995 five Wotton bindings were sold privately to Sir Paul Getty. A few books appear to have followed another line of Wotton’s descendants and to have separately come to the market.
1. Howard Nixon, “Thomas Wotton and his bindings” in Twelve books in fine bindings from the library of J.W. Hely-Hutchinson ([Oxford] 1953), pp.32-48; Mirjam Foot, “Thomas Wotton and his binders” in The Henry Davis Gift: A Collection of bookbindings, Volume 1: Studies in the history of bookbinding (London 1978), pp.134, 137 (note 50), 145.
2. It is described as a set of five volumes by Henri-Louis Baudrier, Bibliographie Lyonnaise (Lyon & Paris 1910), VIII, p.173, with the Decadum XIIII Epitome designated “decas quintus”, the Glareanus entered separately (pp.163-164), and the Beatus Rhenanus also entered separately (pp.164-165). The set is considered by William Kemp to comprise six volumes; see his “L’historien latin Tite-Live chez Sébastien Gryphe au début des années 1540” in Le Livre médiéval et humaniste dans les Collections de l’UQAM: Actes de la première Journée d’études sur les livres anciens, suivis du Catalogue et l’exposition ‘L’Humanisme et les imprimeurs français au XVIe siècle (Montreal 2006), pp.93-98 (pp.95-96); W. Kemp, “Les historiens latins chez Gryphe au début des années 1540: Tite-Live, Tacite et l’humaniste Emilio Ferretti” in Quid novi?: Sébastien Gryphe à l'occasion du 450e anniversaire de sa mort: actes du colloque (Villeurbanne [2008]), pp.343-356 (p.343).
(1) T. Livii Patavini Latinae historiae principis decas prima (Lyon, apud Sébastien Gryphe, 1542) [FB 77966; USTC 122670]