"Other Properties": London Booksellers as Collectors of Manuscripts c. 1890-1914

At the turn of the twentieth century collectors such as J. P. Morgan, Henry Yates Thompson, and Henry Huntington helped to drive up prices for medieval manuscripts. Such names now appear in provenance records for rare books and manuscripts, but some volumes spent much of the period in the possession of booksellers, whose ownership is rarely documented. Nevertheless, some booksellers, including Bertram Dobell and Bernard Quaritch sometimes presented themselves as collectors. This talk will explore the circumstances in which dealers acquired manuscripts, and how including them in the study of collectors can shed new light on both the rare book trade and the formation of the libraries we use today. Laura Cleaver is Professor of Manuscript Studies at the University of London. Her research focuses on illuminated manuscripts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and on the trade in pre-modern books in the early twentieth century.