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Today's libraries and museums are heavily indebted to the passions and obsessions of numerous individual collectors who devoted their lives to amassing collections of books, manuscripts, artworks, and other culturally significant objects. Collecting the Past brings together the latest research on a wide range of significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, including Hans Sloane, Sarah Sophia Banks, Thomas Phillipps, Sydney Cockerell, J. P. Morgan Jr., Alfred Chester Beatty and R. E. Hart.
Contributors to the volume examine the phenomenon of collecting in a variety of settings and across a range of different materials. Considering the aims and motives that led these collectors to assemble such remarkable collections, the book also examines the history of these collections after the collector's death. Particular attention is given to the often complicated relationship between collectors and the public institutions that subsequently came to house their collections. Situated within the framework of cultural collecting more generally, this book offers an authoritative series of essays on key collectors.
Collecting the Past should be most interesting to researchers, academics and postgraduate students engaged in the study of museum studies, book history, manuscript studies, museum history, library history and the history of collecting. Professionals in libraries, museums and galleries will also find the volume of great interest.
List of contents
1. Collecting the Past: Manuscript and Book Collecting in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
2. Creating and Keeping a National Treasure: The Changing Uses of Hans Sloane’s Collection in the Eighteenth Century
3. Sarah Sophia Banks: A ‘truly interesting collection of Visiting Cards and Co.’
4. ‘There never was such a collector since the world began’: a new look at Sir Thomas Phillipps
5. American Collectors and the Trade in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts in London, 1919-1939: J. P. Morgan Junior, A. Chester Beatty and Bernard Quaritch Ltd.
6. Sydney Cockerell: a Bibliophile Director-Collector
7. Spending a Fortune: Robert Edward Hart, bibliophile and numismatist, an industrialist collector in Blackburn, Lancashire
8. Ossified Collections: the Past Encapsulated in British Institutions
About the author
Toby Burrows is Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford, UK, and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia.
Cynthia Johnston is Lecturer in the History of the Book and Communications at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK.
Summary
Collecting the Past brings together the latest research on several significant British collectors from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Considering the aims and motives that led these collectors to assemble such remarkable collections, the book also examines the fate of these collections after the collectors' deaths.
