The big house and the book-collecting game: notes on a partial twentieth-century library dispersal

The big house library in Ireland was on a precarious footing in the early twentieth century. Successive sales assisted the demise, or diminishment, of the houses’ book collections. Libraries were often the first country house collections to be sold, in Britain and Ireland, when money troubles arose. The contents of country house libraries thereby entered the field of what the American industrialist and book collector A. Edward Newton (1864–1940) termed ‘the book-collecting game’. A 1920 catalogue of the library at Springhill, Co. Londonderry, formerly home of the Lenox-Conynghams, provides a snapshot of their historic library in the decades immediately prior to the National Trust acquiring the property. Mina Lenox-Conyngham (1867–1961), compiler of the catalogue, played a key role in both the dispersal and the preservation of Springhill’s book collection. This article analyses and contextualises this catalogue, attempts to discern a strategy regarding collection integrity, and concludes by asking ‘what was Mina’s game’?