C. H. St. John Hornby collected primarily Italian medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and early printed books. He also accumulated significant collections of paintings and china. He is best known, however, as the founder of the Ashendene Press which, with the Kelmscott and Doves Presses, formed the triumvirate of great British private presses established at the end of the nineteenth century. His work as private-press printer illuminates the understanding of his book collecting, since the content, lettering, typography, and design he so admired in the books he collected were, to a great extent, reflected in the books he printed. Though Hornby amassed a remarkably choice group of richly illuminated and decorated Renaissance manuscripts, which would have been the primary source of bibliophilic pleasure for most book collectors, he declared in a 5 March 1946 letter to English craft binder Sir Sydney Cockerell, who, with Emery Walker and Hornby, had designed the...