Frederick Locker-Lampson (Locker until 1885 when he added Lampson upon the death of his father-in-law, Sir Curtis Lampson) is best remembered as a bibliophile, an anthologist, and a widely respected poet of light verse. A prominent member of London literary society, his acquaintances included Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Austin Dobson, Kate Greenaway, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray and his daughter Anne, and Anthony Trollope. The great distinction of his library was its simplicity: a collection of the masterpieces of literature. Alfred W. Pollard believed that no collector before Locker- Lampson had ever achieved this goal with such skill and discrimination, and his 1886 catalogue of "the Rowfant Library" perpetuated his place in the gallery of book collectors. This catalogue, as the diary of a collector's soul, "is a record of one man's taste, patience and devotion, unaided yet unresting, serious but playful, who never allowed a hobby to...