FROM THE LIBRARY OF COSMO ALEXANDER GORDON Lucretius De Rerum Natura 1-27 Sixteenth century 28-33 Seventeenth century 34-53 Eighteenth century 54-79 Nineteenth century 80-90 Twentieth century 91-92 BERNARD QUARITCH LTD List 2015/3
[email protected] +44 (0)20 7297 4888 Introduction by Nicolas Barker ‘Cosmo and I found our tastes and interests were always in harmony and I came to love his particular sense of humour and gentle goodness, as well as to respect his unusual style of scholarship and general culture.’ So wrote his life-long friend, Geoffrey Keynes in The Gates of Memory. All those who knew him shared the same feeling of calm and contentment, leavened by humour, in his company. Something of this radiates from this residue of a collection of books, never large but put together with a discrimination, a sense of the sum of all the properties of any book, that give it a special quality. Cosmo Alexander Gordon was born on 23 June 1886, the son of Arthur and Caroline Gordon of Ellon, Aberdeen. Ellon Castle was a modest late medieval building, with eighteenth-century additions and yew avenue, the river Ythan running by, where Cosmo fished for salmon and sea-trout. Dr Johnson stayed there in 1773 and admired the local antiquities. So did Cosmo; his taste had extended to medieval manuscripts before he left Rugby for King’s in 1904, where it was nurtured by M. R. James. Although Keynes had also been at Rugby, they did not meet until both were at Cambridge, where Gordon introduced his new friend to David’s book-stall and seventeenth-century literature; they shared a passion for Browne and Fuller.