The Source of the Idea for the Lomax-Wade Collection?

 A very short post today, as I need to finish preparing my talk for next week's CULTIVATE MSS conference.

Regular readers may remember a series of posts about the "Lomax-Wade" collection of cuttings (here and following weeks): a collection of 120 illuminations (one of which is shown above) mounted on card and bound into a copy of Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments Selected from Manuscripts of the Middle Ages (London, 1833):

"Henry Shaw, Illuminated Ornaments Selected from Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, extra-illustrated with one hundred and twenty cuttings from manuscripts [...]"

Although the book was published in 1833, this copy was in a binding signed by the noted London binder Charles Lewis, dated 1838.

I have recently discovered that in his catalogue for 1834, just a few years before the Lomax-Wade volume was bound, the London bookseller William Pickering offered some Italian illuminated cuttings for sale (doubtless from the Celotti collection, largely dispersed during the previous decade), recommending that they might be bound into a copy of Shaw's book!

"These original specimens would make an admirable addition to a copy of Mr. Shaw's Illuminated Ornaments."

More Ege Acquisitions from Dawson's Book Shop

Last week we looked at a manuscript sold by Dawson's Book Shop of Los Angeles, and broken up by Otto Ege (or perhaps Philip Duschnes). Today we'll look at a few more.

For the catalogue of French manuscripts in the collection of Bob McCarthy I traced eleven leaves with historiated initials from a Parisian Bible of about the 1330s  (of which a detail is shown above), and about sixteen more without historiated initials:

Dawson's of Los Angeles and Otto Ege's Aquinas (HL40)

[Photo by Mildred Budney]

One of the better-known and easily recognised ex-Ege manuscripts was a copy of Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, Book I, of which a leaf is shown above. Leaves from the manuscript are included as no. 40 in Ege's most famous portfolio: Fifty Original Leaves of Medieval Manuscripts, issued by his widow two years after his death in 1951.

Although Philip Duschnes of New York was apparently the first dealer to offer single leaves of the manuscript, it is likely that Ege was responsible for breaking it up: not only did he have enough leaves to include in his 1942(?) portfolio of Original Leaves from Famous Books, Nine Centuries as well as the posthumous Fifty Original Leaves portfolios, but a cache of 32 leaves from his collection was sold by his heirs at Sotheby's in 1985. The finest leaf of the manuscript was retained by the Ege heirs as part of the "Family Album", acquired by the Beinecke Library several years ago; if Duschnes had broken up the volume, he would doubtless have sold this leaf.

I wrote a blogpost about the provenance of the manuscript last year. We know that the volume was still intact in 1925-26 when offered for sale by the bookselling firm of Davis & Orioli, based in Florence and London. It was also still intact when owned by an "Unidentified American bookseller", but was broken by 1941, when Duschnes offered leaves in his Catalogue 48.