William Stoneman, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, selected two anniversaries as the subject of his lectures which provided intriguing insights into the changing relationship between private collectors and public libraries.
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibition of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, the last in a series of exhibitions of such material usually held at private clubs for collectors.
This series of exhibitions held in London, New York and Liverpool, was extremely important in the growing scholarly understanding and appreciation of such material, but it also played another role, unarticulated and only perhaps unintended, namely to highlight the material still in private ownership and to create an increased market for it among private collectors and public libraries.
Stoneman demonstrated how such collectors as Henry Yates Thompson, Charles Dyson Perrins, J. Pierpont Morgan, Sir George Holford and Sir Alfred Chester Beatty used the exhibition to inform their later buying and selling of such material.
This year also marks to fiftieth anniversary of the first of the Dyson Perrins sales of medieval manuscripts. In his second lecture Stoneman demonstrated how private collectors and public libraries, such as the British Library, had learned over the preceding fifty years how to prepare effectively for such an important sale by acquiring material for their collections by private treaty before the sale and by carefully targeted bidding at the sale itself.
The Dyson Perrins sales were also notable as the occasion when the American rarebook dealer Hans P. Kraus began to play a dominant role in the market and to pay unheard of prices for medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.
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