The Ashley Library is a collection of original editions of English poets from the 17th century onwards, including their prose works as well as those in verse, collected by the bibliographer, collector, forger, and thief Thomas James Wise.[2][3] The library was sold to the British Museum by his widow, Frances Louise Greenhaigh Wise, in 1937 for £66,000.[4][A][B] It was named after the street in which Wise lived when he started the collection (Ashley Road, Hornsey Rise).[4][7]
In book-collecting as in other things, the sum of all is that what interests you is what concerns you. Now to this end and purpose alone I also hold the Ashley Library to be wonderful, but it has an added wonder in that it reveals so exquisite a discrimination and so great a reverence for our masterpieces of literature... the great catalogue of his life's work and love, which is in effect a history of English literature during the last 300 years, may well appear as a blazing star, or an Angel, to his sight.
- ^ "The Ashley Library". The Times. 11 September 1937. p. 14.
- ^ "Mr. T. J. Wise Bibliographer, Editor, And Collector". The Times. No. 47684. 14 May 1937. p. 17.
- ^ "Forging a Collection; Thomas J. Wise and H. Buxton Forman, the Two Forgers". University of Delaware Library, Special Collections. 21 December 2010. Retrieved 2011-01-28.
- ^ a b Maggs & Wise 1965.
- ^ "The Ashley Library; Purchase For The Nation, The Late T. J. Wise And His Books". The Times. 11 September 1937. p. 11.[dead link]
- ^ Marsden, W. A. (January 1938), "The Ashley Library", The British Museum Quarterly, 12.1, British Museum: 20–21, JSTOR 4422035
- ^ Named Collections of Printed Materials, British Library, archived from the original on 2011-02-10
- ^ Jackson 2001.
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