Broadway Tower

Built in 1798 so Lady Coventry could test if she’d see a beacon from her home 22 miles away, she could, this mock Saxon folly went from romantic gesture to “Lighthouse of Wisdom” when obsessive book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps crammed it with a printing press in 1822. The man who amassed 60,000 manuscripts coined the term “vello-maniac” for his bibliomania, and one French scholar wrote that the tower signaled “to the friends of letters that a hospitable roof exists.” After Phillipps, it housed glove makers, Pre-Raphaelite artists, farmers, and a Cold War nuclear bunker.

Phillipps ran his press the way he ran everything else in his life, which is to say with far more ambition than competence. He hired a thirteen year old neighbor as a typesetter to save money and quarreled constantly with his printers over wages, and the resulting publications were reportedly shoddy enough to embarrass a man whose actual manuscript collection was the envy of the British Museum. He eventually gave the tower up along with most of his fortune, having spent something like a quarter of a million pounds acquiring roughly fifty items a week for most of his adult life. By the 1870s the Pre-Raphaelites had moved in for working holidays, and William Morris once described himself as living “among the winds and the clouds,” which is either poetic license or a fair description of what happens when a bibliomaniac’s failed publishing venture becomes an artist’s retreat.