During the thirty-year period from the 1830s to the 1860s when book markets were sluggish and depressed and bibliophile opportunities abounded, Bertram Lord Ashburnham amassed one of the two or three most notable manuscript collections of the nineteenth century. The collection was famous, earning mention even in guidebooks to the Sussex coast, where Ashburnham Place (near Battle) and its library were described as "never shown." Yet the collector remains an enigma. Lord Ashburnham possessed a deep sense of privacy, and this trait was aggravated by accusations from the late 1840s onward that many of the manuscripts in his collection came from suspicious sources-that such manuscripts were in fact stolen from public collections. Although he published an elegant three-volume catalogue of 2,976 of his manuscripts, few of the descriptions were composed or even modified by his own hand. The even larger collection of printed books in his library received only...