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
