Contracts for the Sale of Rare Collections and the Role of Museums

2021 closed out with some disturbing developments in the comments section of the blog.  Blog contributing editor Sidney DeLong insisted on the ubiquity of unilateral contracts, coloring my New Year’s celebrations in the gray hues of imposter syndrome.

Sid will explain his position in a forthcoming post.  Shudder. 

Elsewhere, blog founder, Frank Snyder affected a blasé attitude when confronted with the hypothetical possibility that the world and everything in it, including this very blog that he created, would be destroyed.  He pluckily prognosticates that if our world and everything on it is destroyed, including this very blog that he created, something better might come along or nothing will come along.  Either way, no biggy.  I cannot concur.  Along the way, in the context of my grousing about the predicted value of a newly discovered drawing by Albrecht Dürer, Frank also commented that “Art IS the business of creating collectibles for rich people and museums are in the business of propping up values of those collectibles.”

But I hope that Frank will concede that museums can serve other purposes.  Witness this story from the Washington Post about how a private library containing, inter alia, original manuscripts of works by the Brontë sisters (left) was preserved as a public good when private donations to the Friends of the National Libraries (FNL) enabled that charitable organization to purchase the collection. 

According to the Post, the collection, in the hands of the Law family since the nineteenth century, has been available to virtually nobody since the 1930s.  The library was to be auctioned at Sotheby’s, but FNL, and its patron, Prince Charles (pictured in 2005 right), intervened and persuaded the auction house to allow the organization to try to raise enough money to make the collection available to the public.  A $10 million donation by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, described in the Post as an “American-British-Ukrainian petrochemical-finance-entertainment mogul,” got them halfway there.  Prince Charles chipped in, as did many less well-endowed bibliophiles and literary savants.  You can read FNL’s press release on the subject here.  As a result, the collection will be shared with public libraries and made available to researchers and scholars in archives available to the public.