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Thomas Plume's Library is an extraordinary survival. In 1704 Dr Thomas Plume (1630-1704), Archdeacon of Rochester, bequeathed his collection of c. 8,000 books to his birthplace, Maldon, to establish a public lending library in the redundant Church of St Peter.In the early 20th-century, when Thomas Plume’s Library was still a lending institution, many books went missing. Since 1987 the Trustees have been actively buying replacement books – in a few cases the originals.

Thomas Plume's Library is an extraordinary survival. In 1704 Dr Thomas Plume (1630-1704), Archdeacon of Rochester, bequeathed his collection of c. 8,000 books to his birthplace, Maldon, to establish a public lending library in the redundant Church of St Peter.In the early 20th-century, when Thomas Plume’s Library was still a lending institution, many books went missing. Since 1987 the Trustees have been actively buying replacement books – in a few cases the originals.

A copy of this book is listed in the first catalogue of the Plume Library, 1704, but it subsequently went missing. Early in 2013 an opportunity arose to replace it, and with the generous support of The Friends of the National Libraries this has now been done. Philosophicall Poems was published when Plume had been in Christ’s College for only two years. We do not yet know if Plume heard More lecture or preach but the thinking behind these poems may have influenced his earliest formation as a scholar, and the beliefs on which his long career as a minister and archdeacon of the Church of England were founded.

Bought together with Slingsby Bethel: The Interest of Princes and States, 1680, Cotton: Burlesque upon Burlesque, 1675; Guicciardini: Historie, 1618; Antonio Neri: The Art of Glass, 1662 and Arthur Wilsons The History of Great Britain 1653.