Thomas Frognall Dibdin has been described as a "renowned bibliographer and librarian" and also, by Andrew Dyce (in William Jackson's "Thomas Frognall Dibdin"), as "an ignorant pretender without the learning of a schoolboy, who published a quantity of books swarming with errors of every description". Above all, he was a passionate enthusiast for books and book collecting, a man who devoted his life to communicating his enthusiasm in a series of sumptuously produced, if at times inaccurate or unreadable, works. Although he never had the means to be a great collector, he perhaps did more than anyone else to foster and then to document the period of bibliomania that occurred in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Although Dibdin was highly esteemed for much of his life, his vast and inaccurate compilations were subject to criticism during his last years-and to ridicule thereafter. However, those publications...