Selden’s collection was the largest received by the Bodleian in the seventeenth century, comprising around 8,000 items. Even this massive collection did not represent the extent of Selden's library. Duplicates, meaning books the library already owned, were given to Gloucester Cathedral library. A rumor also circulated in the decades after Selden's death that part of his library had remained in London and was destroyed by a fire. The 1704 edition of Edward Chamberlayne's "The Present State of England" claimed that a fire at the Inner Temple destroyed "8 Chests full" of Selden's manuscripts. Still, the collection the Bodleian received was large enough that it required several years and multiple librarians to fully catalogue. Since then, the original collection has been enhanced by further acquisitions, most notably by a group of forty Selden manuscripts purchased by the Bodleian from James Fairhurst in 1947.