Now this is a library I'd love to see. From The Telegraph:
Posted on February 19, 2004 11:28 PM. Filed under: books & lit.One of Britain's greatest privately-owned libraries is to be sold for more than £10 million because a bitter family dispute has forced its owner, the Earl of Macclesfield, to leave his ancestral home in a medieval castle.
Thousands of books and manuscripts are to be sold in a series of auctions at Sotheby's beginning next month because the earl was ordered to leave Shirburn Castle in Oxfordshire after a court case which pitted him against his brother and other relatives.
Mr Justice Lewison ordered the earl and countess to leave the moated castle, where the family has lived since 1716 and which is a much sought-after film location, by August next year.
Because they have bought a smaller house, the earl and countess cannot take most of the 12,000 books and manuscripts with them and have asked Sotheby's to sell everything that will not fit into their new home.
When auction house experts arrived to catalogue the contents of the library, one of the finest but least known in Britain, they discovered what one of them, Paul Quarrie, called "an intellectual treasure house".
"The library really exists as it was left in about 1750, an extraordinary intellectual time capsule in a house that is itself a time capsule," said Mr Quarrie.
The most dramatic moment came when Mr Quarrie reached on to a shelf and pulled down a brightly illustrated medieval book which had been hidden away for centuries and was unknown to scholars. [continue]