This edition of Tacitus’s Orationes Omnes, which once belonged to John Keats, was purchased with the generous assistance of a grant received by the Friends of the National Libraries and with additional help from the Friends of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association.
Measuring just 14 by 8 cm, it bears Keats’s signature and inscription, ‘His Book’, in the centre of a page which also contains a bookplate bearing a stag’s head and the motto, ‘AD FONTES AQUARUM’, from the Latin Vulgate version of Psalm 42, meaning ‘Back to the Sources of Water’, which belonged to Charles B. Snepp, bibliophile and hymnologist. The other ex libris at the top of the page is not, in fact, a bookplate at all, but comes from another document, possibly an exhibition ticket, bearing the post-1837 Royal Arms.
The acquisition is of major importance to scholars. It brings the number of books known to have belonged to Keats to 28. It also emphasizes just how important classical culture was to the young poet, confirming the evidence of the other books (including works by Roman historians) in his possession during his life. Most of these belong to Harvard University Library or Keats House in Hampstead, the copy of Tacitus being the first Keats-owned book to join the collection in Rome.
That this is an Italian book makes it even more relevant to the collection in Rome, which is housed in the final dwelling place of Keats, who died in a room on its second floor overlooking the Spanish Steps in February 1821.
Keats-Shelley House is owned by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Assocation, which is a UK registered charity, hence its eilgibility for FNL grants.
This grant was awarded from FNL's B. H. Breslauer Fund, thanks to the generosity of the President and Officers of the B. H. Breslauer Foundation.