[XI]
A CENTURY
OF AMERICAN
AUTOGRAPH
COLLECTING
A CENTURY OF AMERICAN AUTOGRAPH COLLECTING
The great collectors and collections of the United States—The autograph sale-rooms of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia
"How very inconsiderate some of our great people have been in the matter of epistolary correspondence! If Thomas Lynch, jun., and Button Gwinnett, and John Morton had only understood the feelings of a collector, they would surely have favoured their friends more frequently with an A.L.S. or even an A.N.S. When they were signing the Declaration on that warm July afternoon, and committing themselves to the famous fallacy that 'all men are created equal,' they might have foreseen the day when every American collector would begin his colligendering career by gathering 'signers.'"—Adrian H. Joline.
If the conscript fathers of autograph collecting can be fairly claimed by the country of their birth, the majority of their most ardent and enthusiastic successors are to be found to-day on the other side of the Atlantic. It is in New York, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, Savannah, and elsewhere that one must now look for many of the choicest and most priceless literary MSS. in existence, and it is obvious that the New World has in a measure become the guardian of many of the traditions and treasures of the Old. Before me lie the calendar of the Emmet collection of papers relating to American history, presented some ten years ago to the New York Public Library, which fills no less than 563 closely printed pages; next to it is the catalogue, in three parts, of the Louis J. Haber collection, sold in December, 1909, by the Anderson Auction Company of New York, the successors of the historic firm of Bangs; the monograph, "Privately Illustrated Books," by Daniel M. Tredwell, of New York—the largest and most carefully written book on the subject yet produced in America (475 pages, handsomely printed in De Vinne's best style), the exhaustive catalogue of that treasure-house of Southern history, beneath the laurel and jasmines of historic "Wormsloe," Georgia, recently sent me by Wimberley J. De Renne; the already often-referred-to "Meditations" of Mr. Adrian H. Joline; the standard American book, "Autographic Collections of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution," by the late Lyman C. Draper, LL.D., the interesting MSS. so carefully arranged by Chas. De F. Burns, of New York, whose knowledge of early American collecting is very great; and, last but not least, a pile of valuable notes and statistics from the pen of my excellent friend Mr. Telamon Cuyler, without whose aid the present chapter could never have been written. My initial difficulty is a plethora of interesting information. I must not even attempt to summarise the autographic trophies to be found in such famous libraries as those of Mr. Pierpont Morgan, Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet (at the present moment the Nestor of the world's great collectors of MSS.), Mr. W. J. De Renne of Wormsloe, or Mr. W. H. Bexby of St. Louis.