A collection of entertainment bookplates are among the thousands of holdings from the James M. Goode collection. They are matted and framed and will be auctioned at the Waldorf Astoria.
Marsha Brown took the time to send this information from
The
Repository | Royal Society
Updates
about our work on bringing the history of science to life.
I always read your newsletter and so I thought you might be interested in the photo below.
If you have a bookplate crimes category,this is a candidate
No prizes to the owner of Barnsley Park, one James Musgrave, who has plonked his armorial bookplate squarely down in the middle of the great scientist’s handwriting (Sir Isaac Newton) – I think I shall have to lie down in a darkened room for a while to lower my librarianly blood pressure at this point.
You can see the entire blog posting by following this link .
Some further thoughts on the place of bookplates in
libraries
By Christine Downer
Some years ago I think I mentioned that a medium sized
collection of international bookplates was given to the State Library of
Victoria. This is not a stagnant collection, as funds have been made available
for purchases over the past 5 years. There is no endowment for this area of
collection, so funds come from two budget lines within the special collection
areas _Rare Printed and Pictures. Recently a collection of international
bookplates was purchased to add to the existing collection. This was formed in
Hamburg by Viktor (or Victor) Singer, a collector and publisher, who fled the
Nazis in late 1938, and came to Australia via England in 1939. The collection,
which was known to exist but seemed to disappear after Singer's death in 1943,
surfaced with a rare book dealer in Melbourne a year ago, and was purchased by
my bookplate mentor in order to prevent it being broken up and sold overseas.
The purchase funds were provided by 2 donors (2/3 of the total) and by the
Library for the remaining third. There are about 2000 plates in all, and the
arrangement is by country, and within each country, alphabetically by artist.
It took me about 4 months to archaically house and box the collection before
it went into the Library.
My point is
that, if collectors are worried about the future of their collections, and would
prefer them not to be broken up and dispersed, it might be as well to choose and
institution and begin negotiations well in advance. Patience and the long-term
view are both important when negotiating with public institutions - there's
always a reason for them to say there are no funds to support
future acquisitions. This is a
stock response to most initial negotiations., but money can always be found in
the end if a well thought-out case is presented, from my experience of working
25 years in such an institution.
The other avenue might be, if personal funds allow, to
leave collections to these institutions, with some kind of
endowment.
The final avenue of course it to allow collections to
be dispersed so that others can have the fun and discipline of building up a new
collection.
I don't know if this adds anything to the collection of
opinions that you have already assembled from people with much more experience
than I in these matters
10/26/2015 Received this Email From Gene Alloway
Hello sir -
I hope this note finds you well and with many new treasures
this fall. I read your posting re: Marsha Brown and the bookplate over
Newton's handwriting. I had a similar experience last week ( no
pictures, sadly). I was doing an appraisal of books a local public
library (not Ann Arbor, thankfully) had returned to a family after 60
years of not-so-benign neglect.
The family's grandfather had donated
hundreds of books, many rare, but the library decided (after losing track
of some 40% of them) that the remnant needed to be returned or destroyed.
Luckily, after some dithering, they did give them back to the
family.
One of the books was a presentation copy of a work by Charles
Knight to Dickens. the book had both the library bookplate put in the book
at the dispersal of the library, and the record of the book at the sale
pasted in as well. The library, in its infinite wisdom, had placed their
bookplate DIRECTLY on top of the personal bookplate of Charles
Dickens.
I used to be a librarian, and my disappointment and irritation
at the treatment of these books by the library was simply topped off by
the above. I cannot imagine either the ignorant placing of the
institutional bookplate of the famous one, or - a more inexcusable
action - the deliberate covering up of it. As I get older, I cannot
help but think that many librarians and library staff, despite protests
of their love of books, really didn't and don't know much about the items
in their care, nor are concerned to learn more.
In any case, I was able
to lift the institutional plate off with no additional damage to the plate
below, at least restoring the Dickens plate to view.
Best wishes
-
Gene Alloway Motte & Bailey Booksellers 212 N. 4th Ave Ann
Arbor, MI 48104 734.669.0451 www.mottebooks.com Member, Independent
Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) Open Mon-Sat 10 am -7 pm
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