A catalogue of duplicates in the Royal Library at Cambridge, which will be sold by auction …
Cambridge: William Thurlbourn, 1742
It quickly became clear that Moore’s collection included many duplicates, where he had purchased other collections wholesale and thus obtained multiple copies of standard works. In 1742 the local auctioneer William Thurlbourn was commissioned to sell off these duplicates–excepting the early printed volumes, where multiples were kept–and his annotated copy of the catalogue lists the winning bidders and prices paid for each lot. Purchasing (amongst others) items 265, 271, 276 and 278 on these pages is ‘Hon Townshend, Trinity’, youngest son of Viscount Townshend by whose intervention Cambridge obtained the Royal Library.
Cam.d.742.2, p. 28 and facing leaf
The duplicate sales were intended to raise funds to purchase other books still wanting in the Library. The two initial sales, in March and December 1742, raised only around £250. A more profitable exercise was the exchanging of duplicates for other books; such swaps cold be effected directly with booksellers, and this continued even until the twentieth century. The Library undertook extensive exchanges of incunabula with the British Library, including some from Moore’s collection; when copies are as scarce as is the case with many early printed books, the Library made the pragmatic decision to obtain that which it did not have in any copies by passing on one of many. A particularly notable case in point was the 1960 exchange with the bookseller H.P. Kraus. The Royal Library included two copies of the Recuyell of the histories of Troye printed by Caxton in Bruges in 1473-74. They were both imperfect, one more so than the other. Ten leaves were removed from the more imperfect copy and added to the more complete one. The then even more imperfect copy was exchanged with Kraus for another Caxton, his 1480 Vocabularius.
