Great Collector Research Articles

Changes in benthic community structure along an environmental pollution gradient

Seasonal sampling of the benthic fauna in the Saronikos Gulf was undertaken during 1989 along three transects with increasing distance from the Great Collector outfall. The faunistic composition, descriptive measures and Cluster and Abundance/Biomass Comparison analyses were all used to assess the different degrees of pollution around the study area. The results of the above univariate and multivariate analyses indicate that the area can be divided into three zones according to the degree of pollution affecting the communities.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Louisa Smith and Jack Zipes The American experience as interpreted in children's literature portrays a land interacting with characters and frequently providing a challenge that young people must meet and come to understand. The first three essays provide the reader with insights into the role of nature, borders, and pastoral values that are particularly American. 1994 celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. War presents a different challenge to American children whether it be a projected nuclear war or the American Revolution. Strangely, during World War II, few books mentioned the war. Only after a period of years did authors begin examining children's and young adults' involvement with the war, a subject explored by Caroline Hunt. Joel Chaston presents the paradox of the Oz fantasy. Where is our heart's desire? Has Baum situated it in America, in the heartland? J. D. Stahl will guest edit the next issue on Recent Developments in European Children's Literary Theory (June 1995), and Suzanne Rahn will edit the December 1995 issue on the topic Green Worlds: Nature in Children's Books. Future themes include Children's Literature and Film, Forgotten and Neglected Authors, and The Great Collectors. [End Page v] Copyright © 1994 The Johns Hopkins University Press

A Curious Conversation with Chrono Jasuel

People say that the Colombian cultural correspondent Chrono Jasuel [1899-1986] was the eldest son of a conjurer. Some said he was connected with carob companies in Caracaibo and Cruenta. Others pointed out that, after all, he was educated in Cordoba, Caracas, Cork, Canterbury, and Cleveland. His biographer, Itzhak Stylites Chiusa, asserts that Jasuel devoted his long life to cultural criticism, correspondence, and the composing of codexes, chiefly in Cartagonese.' Still others remember him as an indefatigable raconteur who would confabulate complex commentaries in order to cultivate commendation. What we do know is that Jasuel was a confidante and companion to many of the great collectors, connoisseurs, curators, and critics of the twentieth century, and a colossal collection of correspondence is extant, but virtually unknown. As in the case of his friend Foucault, Jasuel's work deals with the meanings of the perceived world amidst all its conundra and contradictory contexts.

MUSICAL PATRONAGE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SPAIN: THE MUSIC LIBRARY AND MUSIC INSTRUMENT COLLECTION OF THE XII DUKE OF ALBA (d. 1776)

When Spanish musicologist Jos? Subir? was entrusted with ?revising? the music library of the Dukes of Alba in the Palacio de Liria in Madrid in 1924, he expected to find ?a vast literature of genuinely Spanish chamber music from the middle of the eighteenth Century.? His disappointment was thinly disguised in his foreword to the resulting study published three years later as La m?sica en la Casa de Alba (Madrid, 1927). Subir? attributed the small number and incompleteness of the musical works and documents in the Palacio de Liria, in part, to the effects of ?the fire that in 1795 consumed the libraries of the Houses of Villafranca and Alba, as well as a great number of bound documents of the Count-Duke of Olivares, housed in the Palacio de Buenavista.? (The Palacio de Buenavista is located diagonally across from the Plaza de Cibeles in the center of Madrid. It now houses the Ministry of Defense, the Spanish Army headquarters. The Duke of Alba acquired the property and the old palace in 1769 from the crown for 1,250,000 reales. He lived there for the last seven years of his life. His heir and grand-daughter, Cayetana de Silva, razed the old palace in 1777 and constructed the present Palacio de Buenavista. The Palacio de Liria was built in 1770 by the Dukes of Berwick y Liria, inheritors of the Alba title in 1802.) A recently discovered inventory and appraisal of the music and musical instruments belonging to Don Fernando de Silva y Alvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, who died in the Palacio de Buenavista on 15 November 1776 at the age of sixty-two, shows the Duke to have been a great collector and patron of chamber music by Spanish composers and

Correspondence

Correspondence To the Editor: Readers of this journal concerned witii die pervasive influence of Henry James wiU find his presence in the recently pubtished novel Possession, by A. S. Byatt (New York: Random House, 1990), interesting and even amusing . In Possession, we are presented widi die search for the biographical facts about Randolph Henry Ash, an invented Victorian poet, probably based on Robert Browning. A contemporary young research feUow, Roland MitcheU, finds two letters from Ash to the equaUy celebrated invented woman poet, Christabel La Motte (reminiscent of Christina Rossetti), in a volume of Vico in a London library . Witii the help of a young professor, Maud BaUey, he unearths evidence for a romance between the two poets and assists in die discovery of the existence of a child born of their love affair. In an authorized biography of Ash caUed The Great Ventriloquist, Ash is presented as having die abüity to place his voice into the poetry of others. At least this is how I understand one of the many poems (and diere are many) in the novel caUed "The Great Collector," for it is composed of words and phrases from Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The poem by Ash is as foUows, and I have italicized the words taken from James's passage: His taste, that was his passion, brought him men To bourgeois parlours, grey and grim back rooms, All redolent of Patriarchal teas, Pacing behind a lustrous, smiling Jew, AU decorous, 'twixt brute mahogany, Meuble or chest, and solid table, clotiied Smug in its Sabbath calm, in indigo, Faded maroon and bistre cotton stripes— He'd see, perhaps, extracted one by one, From three times locked, but plumply vulgar drawers From satchels soft of oriental silk, To spread in ordered and in matched array, So tenderly unmuffled and revealed The immemorial amethystine blue Of twenty ancient Damascene glazed tiles As bright as heaven's courts, as subtle-hued As living sheen upon the peacock's neck. And then his soul was satisfied, and men He tasted honey, dien in diose dead lights Alive again, he knew his life, and gave His gold, to gaze and gaze. . . . (103) Here is the relevant passage in The Golden Bowl, and I have italicized tiie words by James used in Ash's poem. Adam Verver, the great coUector, is at Brighton 182 The Henry James Review with Charlotte Stant, and together they visit the house of Mr. Gutermann-Seuss to look at some Damascene tiles: Such places were not strange to him when they took die form of bourgeois back parlours, a trifle ominously grey and grim from tiieir north light, at watering-places prevailingly homes of humbug, or even when they wore some aspect still less, if not perhaps still more, insidious. He had been everywhere .. . going ... so far as to risk ... life, healui and die very bloom of honour; but where while precious things, extracted one by one from thrice-locked yet often vulgar drawers and soft satchels of old oriental silk, were impressively ranged before him, had he, til now, let himself, in consciousness, wander like one of the vague? . . . [Mr. Gutermann-Seuss had a] repeated act of passage between a featureless mahogany meuble and a table so virtuously disinterested as to look fairly smug under a cotton cloth of faded maroon and indigo, all redolent of patriarchal teas. The Damascene tiles successively, and oh so tenderly, unmuffled and revealed, lay mere at last in tiieir full harmony and their venerable splendour. . . . The infinitely ancient, the immemorial amethystine blue of the glaze, scarcely more meant to be breatiied upon, it would seem, man the cheek of royalty—this property of the ordered and matched array had inevitably all its determination for him. (Penguin, Chapter 12, 171-72) From the journal of EUen, Ash's wife, we leam that Ash died on November 25, 1889, at 2:00 a.m. (480). We know that The Golden Bowl was pubtished in 1904. Therefore, does Byatt wish us to believe diat Ash, "the Great Ventriloquist ," wrote a poem anticipating James's beautiful passage on his encounter with Gutermann-Seuss and die "ametiiystine" tiles in Brighton, and that the...

ALEXANDER PETROVICH BASILEVSKY: A Great Collector of Medieval and Renaissance Works of Art

ALEXANDER PETROVICH BASILEVSKY: A Great Collector of Medieval and Renaissance Works of Art

An Arabian Trinity

In 1875 the collector and scholar Wilhelm Froehner published a short text incised on a gem of red jasper that had been offered to him in Nazareth for possible purchase. Of the six lines of this text only the first three have been much cited because they consist of three gods’ names, and reference has customarily been not to Froehner's original publication but to Louis Robert's quotation from it in his Collection Froehner of 1936. In making an apposite allusion to the Froehner gem in her excellent study of the cults of the Hawran in the Roman period, Dominique Sourdel was under the impression that the great nineteenth-century collector had actually acquired the piece; but Froehner himself reports unambiguously that he refused to pay the dealer's price. The object has therefore been lost to the world of scholarship. Nonetheless Froehner's transcription, entirely baffling to him in its second half, is worth resurrecting in the light of more recent discoveries in the Roman Near East. It bears upon several important cults among the inhabitants of provincia Arabia.

Another ten years in education.

Opening remarks by the President, Sir John Walton: The Lloyd Roberts Lecture is one of the major events of the Society year. It is given in rotation at the invitation of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Medical Society of London and the Royal Society of Medicine, and this year it is our turn. For those of you who do not know who Lloyd Roberts was — he died in 1920, at which time he was the Consulting Obstetric Physician, a very modern term indeed, to Manchester Royal Infirmary because, although he practised throughout his professional life as an obstetrician and gynaecologist, he was also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London and was particularly interested in medical aspects of obstetrics and gynaecology. He was one of that long line of medical polymaths who distinguished British medical affairs in the last century and in the early part of this century in that he had a major interest in literary matters. Quite apart from publishing his very well known Students' Guide to the Practice of Midwifery, he also published a revised edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, and was responsible for writing a major work on The Scientific Knowledge of Dante. A great collector of art treasures, including a specially fine collection of mezzotints, glass and books, he was in many, many ways a man of outstanding breadth of interest and culture. One of the most interesting things that was said about Lloyd Roberts in a very long obituary after he died was that, even if he had died thirty years earlier, his biography would have had a very large sale. Hospital work done, he was to be found by midday standing, always standing, compact, alert, close cropped, by his consulting room fire with a glass of milk warming in the fender and, amongst the instruments on the mantelpiece, there were walnuts, which he cracked at intervals with explosive violence. These served for lunch. One of his most famous quotes, which apparently has always been remembered, was that he used to say he was not a consultant but ‘a general specialist, with a leaning towards women’, and his definition of gynaecology was ‘anything either curable or lucrative’. But everyone said that he was a born healer and it did people good merely to see him, so that he was clearly one of the most notable members of our profession of the day. Now, who could we have chosen better than Baroness Warnock to deliver this year's Lloyd Roberts Lecture? Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, subsequently Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy at St Hugh's College and then later Headmistress of Oxford High School for six years, she has chaired many special enquiries of particular interest to this profession, such as the Committee of Enquiry into Special Education. She served on the Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments as Chairman until recently and we know very well of her work in chairing the Committee of Enquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology. She has also found the time to write widely on Existentialism, Imagination and Education, and other topics. Now, if there has been an occasion when simultaneously a husband and wife have been respectively Head of House, one in Oxford and the other in Cambridge, then as a very new boy at Oxford it is not something which I personally have been aware. Interest in education makes it particularly fitting that she should have chosen tonight, following upon the lecture given in this series some fifteen years ago by Lord James of Rusholme, to talk about ‘Another ten years in education’.

Cylinder Seals from the Horniman Museum, London

The founder of The Horniman Museum, Frederick John Horniman (1835–1906), was engaged in the tea trade and in this capacity he travelled throughout many countries of the world. He was a great collector of objects relating to the study of man and his environment and among the Museum's famous collections of ethnographica from all parts of the world there is also a small number of Mesopotamian cylinder seals. Nothing is known about the provenance of these 13 seals. They are illustrated on Plates XI and XII.

History of Western sources on Japanese art

Learning about Japanese art has been difficult for Westerners. Limited access, language barriers, and cultural misunderstanding have been almost insurmountable obstacles. Knowledge of Japanese art in the West began over 150 years before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1853. Englebert Kaempfer (1657-1716), sent to Japan as a physician for the Dutch East India Company, befriended a young assistant who provided information for a book on Japanese life and history published in 1727. By 1850, more ethnographic information had been published in Europe. Catalogs of sales of Japanese art in Europe exist prior to 1850 and collection catalogs from major museums follow in the second half of that century. After the Meiji Restoration (1867) cultural exchange was possible and organizations for that purpose were formed. Diaries of 19th century travellers and important international fairs further expanded cross-cultural information. Okakura Kakuzo, a native of Japan, published in English about Japanese art and ultimately became Curator of the important collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The advent of photography made visual images easily accessible to Westerners. Great collectors built up the holdings of major American museums. In the 20th century, materials written and published in Japan in English language have furthered understanding of Japanese culture. During the past twenty years, travelling exhibitions and scholarly catalogs have circulated in the West. Presently monographs, dissertations and translated scholarly texts are available. Unfortunately, there is little understanding in the West of the organization of Japanese art libraries and archives which contain primary source material of interest to art historians.

Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford (review)

Book Reviews UkJM WWW™ Jones, Loyal. Minstrel of the Appalachians: The Story of Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Boone, North Carolina: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1984. Born in North Carolina's Madison County in 1882, Bascom Lamar Lunsford died in 1973 in neighboring Buncombe County. It took Îim nine decades to complete life's journey across a county line—meanwhile, traveling to concert platforms at the Pacific's rim; to recording labs at Columbia University and the Library of Congress; to a performance, in 1949, at the Cecil Sharp House, London. Sharp had collected English folksongs in the Southern Highlands during 1916-1918. Bascom, banjo in hand, returned some of the great collector's findings to their native soil. In a sense, Lunsford defined his long purpose as that of returning gifts to mountain people and strengthening their resolve to extend these same gifts beyond local communities. Within learned or literary journals, we often blur the distinction between book review and personal essay. In my comments on Loyal Jones' biography of Lunsford, I open by noting that the author and I have been friends for nearly three decades. Further, I had read this book in its several manuscript drafts. Hence, I cannot claim full objectivity in my review. I like the biography; I am partial to Bascom's role; I anticipate that this book will serve as a building block for young Appalachians as they continue to construct notions of identity. The word "minstrel" sounds an antique knell, deriving from tested usages: Latin terms for public officials, medieval descriptions of wandering troubadours, nineteenth-century names for black-face comics skilled in reversal and inversion. Long -ago, someone tagged Bascom the "Minstrel of the Appalachians." He glowed in its color and wore the phrase as a proud cloak, as he did the tongue-in-cheek honorific "Squire of South Turkey Creek." Literally, Bascom as a child learned old songs at his mother's knee. At about the age of ten, beginning an informal apprenticeship in minstrelsy, he entertained at school and puzzled over a magic-lantern show's mystery. During 1914, Lunsford posed grandly in white tie and black swallowtail coat while lecturing to collegians on "North Carolina Folklore, Poetry and Song." During 1928, he added a folksong and folk dance component to Asheville's Rhododendron Festival. In time, the Chamber-of-Commerce hoopla withered as the Mountain Dance & Folk Festival continued to bloom. Indeed, Lunsford's guiding notions of festival structure, to this day, have influenced strategies at thousands of local and national "folk" events. I shall not recapitulate Lunsford's pilgrimage in this compass; rather, I shall attempt to assay his journey's meaning. In the immediate months after his death, Bascom's children desired a laudatory memorial. Loyal Jones, himself a Blue Ridge native, had known him since 1956, and had written an article on Bascom, raising issues of Appalachian consciousness. From 1970 to 1983, Jones worked on the book considered here. As the decade since Lunsford's death has slipped away, the need for an official biography has receded. Those of us removed from Bascom's corner of the mountains, as well as from the minutiae of his daily life, can address questions of his place in the larger society: What did he add to understanding about regionalism? Is his special vision of folk tradition still useful? Will he be remembered as the American scroll of expressive culture continues to unroll? 66 In formal employment, Lunsford took many trails: beekeeper, fruit-tree salesman, newspaper publisher, teacher, lawyer, legislative clerk, promoter. In all these guises, one linked "calling" dominated: ballad collector /folksong performer/folklore partisan. Bascom knew that the rubric "American folksong" encompassed black spirituals, cajun fiddle tunes, cowboy laments, Mexican border corridos, and Polish polkas, for he had been exposed to such diversity at a series of national festivals. Regardless, he defined American folksong as essentially Appalachian. Within these mountains he favored the Blue Ridge chain; within this latter configuration he cherished his own community 's traditions. Not only did Lunsford focus narrowly (perhaps compulsively) on one strand within the national tapestry, but he cleaved to a particular view of proper presentational modes for his favorite music and narratives. Bascom worked...

Grolier bindings in the Netherlands

After the death of Jean Grolier in 1565 his library was kept intact in his house, the 'Hotel de Lyon', in Paris until 1676 when it was publicly auctioned. Even before that sale a number of Grolier bindings had come onto the market from the estates of his friends. In France there was little demand for these bindings, for the style of bookbinding had changed entirely. English collectors, however, passionately devoted themselves to collecting precisely these older bindings as specimens of the art of bookbinding in earlier times. In many cases, however, the English bibliophiles did not purchase these bindings in France but rather in The Hague, where important French libraries were sold by auction in the 'Ridderzaal' [Great Hall] under the direction of Abraham de Hondt. The author discusses the auctions of the libraries of the marquis de Menars (1720) and Petau pere et fils (1722), both rich in Grolier bindings, the greater part of which was bought by English collectors. The auction of Baron von Hohendorf's Grolier bindings which was planned for 1720 did not take place because Emperor Charles VI had bought the entire collection. Some years afterwards the Hague bookdealers Vaillant Bros. and Groenewegen & Van den Hoek settled in London where they sold Grolier bindings among others. The crisis that affected the Hague book trade in about the year 1740 was to bring an end to these activities. The last antiquarian bookdealer from The Hague to have a Grolier binding sold by auction was Jean Neaulme in 1765. The history of the eighteenth-century 'Grolieriomania' in England was concluded by the eccentric William Beckford. The author next discusses the Dutch collectors who had Grolier bindings in their possession. The first of these is the notorious classicist and pornographer Adriaan Beverland (d. 1717), who had sold his library, including a Grolier binding, to the Duke of Sunderland. The second is the great collector Pietro Antonio Crevenna, of Amsterdam, whose treasures-which included three Grolier bindings-came up for sale in 1790. In the famous 'Bibliotheca Meermanniana', sold by auction in 1824, there were two Grolier bindings one of which, a plaquette binding, was bought by Baron van Westreenen van Tiellandt. One had to wait for over a century before encountering further Grolier bindings in the collection of a Dutchman- until 1936 when the magnificent library of the art dealer Anton W. M. Mensing (of the firm of Fred. Muller & Co) came under the hammer at Sotheby's. Mensing possessed two Grolier bindings, one of which originally belonged to Leiden University Library, which had sold it as a duplicate. The plaquette binding in the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in The Hague was then the only Grolier binding in a Dutch public collection. This situation changed in 1967 when the Koninklijke Bibliotheek managed to buy Grolier's famous Chrysostom in five volumes-each bound to a different design-at the third Abbey sale. In 1975 the University Library of Amsterdam acquired a 'white' Grolier binding from the Edmee Maus collection-one of the three white kid bindings known to exist.

Close Encounters of the Architectural Kind

An interest in architecture and in public spaces quite naturally led us to art collecting and, eventually, to collecting large-scale monumental sculpture. But Texas is a big state, and nothing seemed quite monumental enough until we discovered that group of works long neglected by the world's great collectors. It was then that we began to acquire, on sight/site, our first real monuments—architectural and environmental works scaled to the world-scape rather than to a local landscape.

Art and the General Welfare

Our judgment of the level of civilization of any specific epoch in Western culture may well hinge upon the propositions which it takes for granted. That today one is forced to ask: Does art promote the general welfare? What, after all, does culture contribute to the common good or general enlightenment? indicates an aesthetic skepticism endemic to a narrowly pragmatic or commercial age, where the cash nexus reigns supreme and even the arts themselves have become corrupted by the values of mechanical efficiency and private profit. Le Corbusier thinks that a city street is a machine for traffic to pass through as efficiently as possible. Other urban architects are under the quaint delusion that a home is a housing project. And serious books are now written with the title Art as Investment to aid collectors whose collections perform the same role as portfolios of blue chip stocks and bonds. In other ages it was profoundly different. Cosimo de Medici, Sigismondo Malatesta, and Federigo da Montefeltro were also great collectors, and in some cases great businessmen, but they would have been scornful and contemptuous of a collector's passion guided by the principles of investment and tax deduction. The streets of the agora in Athens permitted rapid passage when necessary, but Alcibiades used them to meet and greet his friends, and Socrates lingered in them talking ethics and politics with sophists and young aristocrats as if they were a private club. And when Bess, Countess of Shrewsbury, commis-

J. D. C. Pfund, a botanist in the Sudan with the Egyptian Military Expeditions, 1875-6

From 1962-5 I was engaged on vegetation survey work in the two central Sudan provinces of Kordofan and Darfur and as a result became interested in the history of botanical collecting in the region. It soon became apparent that this was an area visited little and late by botanists. The great collector and botanist Theodor Kotschy was in Kordofan in 1837 and again in 1839-40 (Tothill, I942), but the first collections known from Darfur date from the Egyptian Military Expeditions of exploration and survey carried out in 1875-6. These were made largely by a certain 'Dr. Pfund', naturalist to the expeditions, of whom no complete biography exists but of whom a fairly complete picture may be assembled from the writings of Maiwald (1904), and Douin (194I). In addition, although Pfund's scientific notebooks cannot now be traced, he left a fairly extensive account of his travels in the form of letters to his wife Ida, and friends in Cairo, the German Consul Herr Travers and Herr A. Kaiser. These were published, without comment or editing by Friederichsen (1878). Though largely of a domestic and episodic nature they include occasional observations on the nature of the terrain and vegetation as well as inexplicably, exact obervations on the depth and temperature of the water in the wells, of little interest, one would have thought, to his wife and friends. It seemed worthwhile to assemble what is known about this pioneer Darfur botanist because, for historical reasons explained later, his records and collections remained the only source of knowledge of plants of the area for half a century. I have drawn largely on Hill (1967) for information about other characters mentioned by Pfund in his letters.

Books, Opera, Chess, and the Gout: A Bibliographical Excursion

You ARE right in supposing that I should feel a warm interest in your enterprise, wrote Charles Coffin Jewett, Librarian of the Boston Public Library, to George Allen, professor of Greek at the University of Pennsylvania, July 8, 1859. Jewett continued: Its consummation will make an era worthy of notice, in the typographical annals of America. These choice copies-so fascinating to bibliographers, numbered and garnered among congenial rarities-will be described with fond enthusiasm by some future Van Praet or Dibdin, who will I hope be a lover of chess too, & appreciate the book highly for its intrinsic merits, as a contribution to the literature of the most delightful of games.' Jewett was referring to Professor Allen's intention to print copies of his book, The Life of Philidor, on vellum. And, in a way, he was referring to me; for it is a personal identification with the interests of Professor Allen-books, chess, military science, and music-and with the interests and infirmity of Philidor-chess, opera, authorship, and the gout-that makes this, inevitably, a personal essay as well as a bibliographical excursion. I was led to Professor Allen's Life of Philidor through a long interest in the American Civil War-led to it by references in letters of James Bartram Nicholson2 to his son John Page Nicholson, one of the great collectors of Civil War books, while the younger Nicholson was serving as a first lieutenant in the Twenty-eighth Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry. I cannot claim to be a Dibdin, but perhaps I can make identification with van Praet, for my own bibliographical work will probably be as little remembered a few years hence as his exhaustive records (compiled in the 1 820's) of books printed on vellum are remembered now.3 But the record of Professor Allen's enterprise should not be forgot, though tastes have changed and the book collectors of the i 960's look for a different kind of volume from that sought by the bibliomaniacs (their own word) of the

The Library at Abbotsford

NO MAN OF LETTERS has ever more closely identified himself with his country's historical lore and traditions than Sir Walter Scott: as poet and novelist his place in Scottish literature is secure. Abbotsford, the house he transformed into a replica of a medieval Scottish baronial castle, all turrets and gables, weapons and armour, is a national literary shrine. The memoirs of his life and work written by his son‐in‐law, John Gibson Lockhart, are widely acknowledged as a biographical tour de force. All this is well known and needs no emphasizing here. It is therefore all the more strange that the library he built at Abbotsford and the sizeable collection of books he amassed there have received very little attention in recent years. He has rarely been mentioned as one of the great book collectors, yet many of the books and broadsheets to be found in his library are now almost unprocurable elsewhere. A study of an eminent author's library always proves rewarding and the library at Abbotsford is no exception. Indeed, perhaps even more than usual, this particular library reflects the literary interests of its owner. Certainly, Scott's love of books very quickly emerges.

The Great Medical Bibliographers

No one appears on the horizon in American medicine to take the place of John Fulton. Perhaps no one will. In the literal sense he is irreplaceable. For some time I have had on my shelf of books, working itself into the gerundive position of those I am about to read, and at length have finished Fulton's study in humanism entitled The Great Medical Bibliographers . It was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1951 and dedicated to the memory of Conrad Gesner, Albrecht von Haller, and John Shaw Billings. What a triumvirate! Anyone with interest in scholarship, in medicine, and in books ultimately comes to know something of great private collectors and private collections of books, as well as great or even meager libraries which ultimately become their repositories. This is true even when collections are shuffled and redealt by dealers or must be dissolved by importunate survivors.

Connoisseurship and the Training of the Eye

I see no basic difference between the essential qualifications or necessary talents required of a curator of a public collection and the sincerely interested, active private collector. Probably the most pronounced characteristic with which the great curators and collectors of the past have been endowed by nature is the eye.

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