Roy G. Neville: Bibliophile Extraordinaire

Allen G. Debus, a pioneering scholar of the history of alchemy, examines a book from CHF's Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library. Photo by Douglas A. Lockard.

By James J. Bohning

Throughout most of his career Roy Gerald Neville has led two lives—one in chemistry, the other in books. While his passion for books allowed him to build a bridge to chemical history, none of that was applicable to his daily life as an aerospace-industry research chemist or later as president of Engineering and Technical Consultants, Inc., a chemical consulting firm. The two were so separate that when I interviewed him last year I spent one afternoon talking to Roy Neville, the chemist, and another afternoon talking to Roy Neville, the collector.

The result of Neville’s love of books is the magnificent and one-of-a-kind collection that now resides at CHF. What makes this 6,000-volume collection so unique is not so much its size (one Boyle Society member’s collection has 50,000 volumes) but rather its quality and content. Many of the works written before 1800 are especially rare, and some 400 titles are unique to the collection. One of the richest single deposits of books on the history of chemistry in the world, it’s a collection that could never be put together again. How did it all begin?

Growing up in Bournemouth, England, Neville was impressed by the old libraries he saw in the stately old homes he visited with his parents. “I’d look at the walls of books—brown books, red books, huge folios—and I thought I could never own anything like that. All I could see was the outside of the books.” He was particularly impressed with the folios and quartos, some in glass cases and others on the shelves, at the Wimborne minister Library about 10 miles from his home. In fact, the library of the Minster, dating to 1686, was one of the first public libraries in England.

In 1945 Bournemouth had several old bookshops; Neville’s favorite was the four-story Horace G. Commin bookshop. New books were sold on the ground floor, but soon Neville discovered a stairway that led to the older books upstairs. There he came across a little book by Percy H. Muir, Book Collecting as a Hobby In a series of Letters to Everyman (London, 1945), for 3 shillings and 6 pence. As he recalled, “These letters described how you could build up a nice little library of modern books, not-so-modern books, and just downright old books for not large sums of money.” Soon he was back in the shop, asking Mr. Thomas, the proprietor, what he could buy with 15 shillings (about 75 cents). Mr. Thomas was more than happy to encourage the “young collector” and directed him to a book from 1576 in Italian by Andrea Calmo; another called The English Spaw, published in York in 1649; and an odd volume of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. “I put those books in my saddle bag and cycled back home and gladly showed my father, who said, ‘Hmm. He certainly saw you coming.’”

Undeterred by his father’s doubts, it wasn’t long before Neville was back at Commin’s. His next find was a book by Sebastien Matte La Faveur titled Pratique de Chymie [The Practice of Chemistry] (Montpellier, 1671) in a box that had just come in from a country library. In those days one could buy these books on a schoolboy’s allowance, and before long Neville had several hundred books in a bookcase in his bedroom. He still has the bookcase, the glass doors of which are decorated with benzene rings—symbols of his love for organic chemistry.

Neville jokes that his wife, Jeanne, “always wanted to marry a chemist who loved books. Well, she got it with a vengeance.” Neville met his future wife at a seminar at the University of Oregon, where he was attending graduate school on a Fulbright scholarship. After taking her for a cup of tea at the student union, he asked her if she would be interested in seeing his “hobby” over in the main library. What she saw in the lobby of the library was a large glass display case that contained the first-place winner in a contest for the best graduate-student library. And there was Neville’s name, along with a 15th-century illuminated manuscript and works from the 16th through the 18th centuries—“just a few little things,” as he describes them. Three months later Roy and Jeanne Frances Russ were married. For Neville’s 26th birthday, the first after their marriage, she gave him a 1727 edition of Boerhaave’s New Method of Chemistry (London, 1727), which then cost the princely sum of £5, or about $18. Neville still has that book “for sentimental reasons.”

Neville’s collection was still modest when he finished his Ph.D. in 1954. Even so, he had already started cultivating relationships with European and American rare book dealers. He soon realized that he would need to specialize in one subject area if he were ever to have a private library of any importance; chemical books not only appealed to him intellectually, but were also still relatively affordable. He bought as many 16th-, 17th-, and 18th-century books as he could between 1954 and 1957. He even convinced Sotheran’s to reduce their catalog price on a Boyle third edition, to a price of about $100. Rare book prices rapidly increased in the 1960s and later.

Not all of Neville’s acquisitions came from his relationships with rare book dealers. One notable serendipitous acquisition came from a store in Long Beach, California, called Acres of Books where prices in the 1960s ranged between $1 and $2. He picked up one “modern” book that turned out to have the signature of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), the Scottish physicist who did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and thermodynamics. It had come from Kelvin’s personal library.

Managing the collection presented its own challenges. Neville started out with handwritten index cards, then graduated to larger cards, and eventually listed items in an alphabetical series of three-ring binders. But these were not just brief entries of the bare details of the volume in question. Neville began constructing a catalog that not only gave bibliographic details and physical descriptions but also placed volumes in their historical context. Neville’s entries form the basis of CHF’s recently published two-volume, 1,600-page guide to the collection.

Neville considered selling his collection around 1968, but in a moment of doubt he says some little voice inside him said, “No, I’m not through with collecting books yet and I’m going to regret this, so right now I’d better just not do it.” Little did Neville realize then how prophetic those words would be. The collection eventually arrived at CHF in 2004 with the generous assistance of a gift from Gordon E. and Betty Moore—an extraordinary legacy for a man and his books.