It is only thanks to the printed auction catalogues that so many collections can now be reconstructed; collections, it must be said, much more heavily used than the inherited library of many a noble house. … Yet what these printed catalogues, themselves often extremely rare, reveal to us is a critical moment in the history of collecting, when private individuals of less than extraordinary wealth assembled libraries that were bigger than many of the institutional collections of their day.

Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen, The Library- A Fragile Hist…, loc. 317