From the Red Pale

Though the garden-variety 19th century English baronet was normally content with a small, showcase library, Sir Thomas Phillipps was a certified bibliomaniac. Eventually his passion for manuscript collecting carried him to the point of buying the entire stock of London wastepaper merchants. He collected to the extent that his wife complained that they were "booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other."

When Phillipps died in 1872, his grandson went to work selling off the collection of nearly 60,000 manuscripts and 50,000 books. It was not until recently that London rare-book dealers, still sorting through remnants of the Phillipps heap, found the prize of his collection. There, scattered loosely, in virtually perfect condition, were the 272 pages of what is believed to be the first book with English illustrations ever prepared for printing. They formed the first nine books of a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Books 10 through 15, unillustrated, were given to Cambridge University by Diarist Samuel Pepys 278 years ago. Put together by William Caxton, the 15th century Englishman who first set English in movable type, the first half of the Ovid manuscript brought a record auction price of $252,000 at Sotheby's last week from Lew Feldman, a rare-book dealer in New York, who has recently picked up such prizes as T. S. Eliot's manuscript of The Waste Land. Says he: "The Ovid is of such startling uniquity that I doubt anything comparable will come up again."

Caxton's version was designed to include a half-page illustration for each of the 15 books. Only four of these miniatures were actually completed. Stylistically, the woodcuts appear to be of Flemish inspiration, although they were conceived and executed in England. The manuscript may never have been published by Caxton's London press at the Sign of the Red Pale. In fact, the printer had to work hard to keep it from being proscribed as the product of a pagan. Ovid was a Roman, but Caxton illustrated the book with the ancient poet praying, described as "atte begynnynge of his booke maketh invocation for help and dyvyn ayde."

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