Printing and Publishing in Library Special Collections

The Sadleir Collection is generally regarded to be the world’s finest collection of 19th-century British fiction, assembled by the scholar, collector, connoisseur and bibliomaniac Michael Sadleir (1888-1957).

In 1951, at the urging of English professor Bradford Booth, UCLA purchased the bulk of Sadleir’s collection for $65,000, and over the years it has grown to some 18,000 volumes, comprehensively representing British novelists who wrote between 1750 and 1900. Sadleir did collect well-known fashionable writers like Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Bronte and Hardy, but he was always more interested in tracking down the works of authors who, at the time, were considered “minor” such as Ainsworth, Austen, Bulwer Lytton, Chatterton, Disraeli, Edgeworth, Marryat, Meredith, Ouida, and Trollope.

The collection reflects Michael Sadleir’s interest in the materiality of the book—the book as a physical object—rather than in its content. In particular he was fascinated with the structure and “casing” of books, and collected cheap and ephemeral editions mass-produced for the general reading public such as “yellowbacks,” “railway libraries,” and “shilling classics,” as well as important publishers’ bindings.

Sadleir also prized the “wholeness” of intact collections, many of which he was lucky to have been able to acquire, and it may have been for this reason that he placed his collections with academic institutions where he felt their integrity would be preserved: UCLA has Sadleir’s 19th-century fiction, the University of Virginia in Charlottesville owns his Gothic Romance collection, and his Trollope “firsts” are at Princeton.

Resources:

• Online exhibit: The Michael Sadleir Collection of 19th Century Fiction.
• Michael Sadleir’s 2-volume catalog, XIX Century Fiction: A Bibliographical Record Based on His Own Collection (London: Constable & Co.; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951) provides the collector’s own numbers, detailed notes and descriptions. https://catalog.library.ucla.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=2864937
• John Sutherland’s article “Michael Sadleir and His Collection of Nineteenth-Century Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Literature vol. 56, no. 2 (Sept. 2001): 145-159, from which much of the description above was taken, provides information on Sadleir’s life and collecting mania, his collecting philosophy, and an excellent overview of his work as publisher, biographer, novelist, and scholar-collector.
• See also numbers 2 and 3 of volume 56 of Nineteenth-Century Literature for six papers presented at the conference “Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A Celebration of the UCLA Sadleir Collection,” held Feb. 24-26, 2000 at UCLA.

Search tips:

• The call numbers for items in the Sadleir Collection are the same as the numbers found in Sadleir’s printed catalog; a call number search is the quickest and easiest way to locate a specific title (e.g. Sadleir 76, Sadleir 344a)
• In searching the online catalog, readers can locate records for items in the Sadleir Collection by including the access code SAD in keyword searches.