British Library Journal (volume 14, number 1, spring 1988)

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British Library

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British Library Journal (volume 14, 1988)

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A preliminary check-list of Sir Hans Sloane's catalogues
(1988-05)
Jones, Peter Murray
THE purpose of this article is to provide a convenient means of locating the extant original catalogues of Sir Hans Sloane's collections. With the notable exception of Sloane's catalogue of coins and medals these have survived rather better than the collections themselves, and with their aid it is possible to gain an idea of what the collections must have contained when they were bequeathed to the nation in 1753. Numerical estimates of the items in Sloane's staggering bequest were provided at the time, but it would be impossible to add bare flesh to these bones without the catalogues. With their aid it is possible to identify many items of all sorts which belonged to Sloane and still survive (despite the very rudimentary descriptions provided in most entries), and even to glean significant information about provenance which may be of great value to students of particular objects. Taken as a whole, the catalogues will not only enable us to reconstruct Sloane's activities as a collector in the virtuoso tradition, but also to recognize him as a pioneer cataloguer who perceived the need to document his collections in a systematic way, and as a citizen of the enlightenment who saw them as a type of universal Baconian natural history in museum form, and as such a public scientific and cultural resource.
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Hans Sloane, book collector and cataloguer, 1682-1698
(1988-05)
Nickson, M. A. E.
IT is well known that the immense library of printed books and manuscripts collected over a period of more than seventy years by Sir Hans Sloane and unsurpassed in his own time as the work of a single collector eventually became the foundation collection of the library of the British Museum and hence of the British Library. Surprisingly enough, however, bibliographers have been very little concerned with the history of this remarkable collection. A chief reason for this is that soon after its entry into the Museum in 1753 Sloane's library ceased to exist as a separate entity, although the books themselves, with the exception of some dispersed as duplicates, remained in the British Museum and so became part of the British Library. Most were incorporated into the general library without any mark or catalogue annotation to distinguish them as having belonged to Sloane, so that they may now be identified in a random way only by means of inscriptions on the flyleaves and title-pages. Some items have found their way into specialized departments of the British Library (i.e. the Map Library and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books); others into departments of the British Museum (particularly the Department of Prints and Drawings and the Department of Oriental Antiquities) and of the British Museum (Natural History). One major part of the original library which has remained virtually intact is the collection of manuscripts, most of which are preserved in the Department of Manuscripts as Sloane MSS. i to 4100, though these are not Sloane's own numbers.
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Sir Hans Sloane and the Russian Academy of Sciences
(1988-05)
Thomas, Christine G.
THE year that Sir Hans Sloane became president of the Royal Society marked the beginning of formal Anglo-Russian scientific relations. His predecessor Newton, at his last meeting as president before his death in March 1727, read out a letter received from the newly-founded Russian Academy of Sciences, proposing scientific cooperation between the two institutions. In the past, the flow of scientific information had been in one direction only. The Russians, especially since the beginning of Peter the Great's programme for modernizing his Empire, had been eager to gain scientific and technical information and expertise from the West. After the founding in 1725 of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which provided a centre for the serious scientific study of a country endowed with a wealth of unexplored material in the fields of natural history, geography, mineralogy, and ethnography, the interest of Western scientists was aroused, and exchange of information became reciprocal. In the early years at least, this exchange was effected mainly through correspondence between individual scholars rather than through any official exchange of publications. All the founding members of the Academy were foreigners, mostly Germans, and they kept in touch with colleagues they had known before going to Russia. The Sloane Manuscripts contain letters to Sir Hans Sloane from six members of the Russian academy written between 1721 and 1742, and of these correspondents, four had known or at least met him in England.
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Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1983
(1988-05)
McKendrick, Scot
Recent acquisitions: manuscript collections: acquisitions January-December 1983.
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The Hastings Hours and the Master of 1499
(1988-05)
Brinkmann, Bodo
THE book of hours once belonging to William, Lord Hastings (now BL, Additional MS.54782) is both a fascinating historical document and a work of art of the highest quality. It is of interest to the student of English history because of the important role Hastings played at the court of Edward IV. More specifically, having been produced and illuminated in Flanders, the manuscript appears to be an appropriate testimony to the connections between England and Burgundy which Hastings's diplomacy helped to establish. To the student of Flemish art it is important as one of the early masterpieces of a group of illuminators of the so-called 'Ghent Bruges School', who achieved a remarkable standard of technical skill and realistic representation. The exact place of the Hastings Hours in the history of the Ghent-Bruges School has, however, not yet been determined and, as we shall see, the attribution of this manuscript is far from clear. This is at least partially due to the fact that the Hastings Hours was in private hands until 1968 and therefore comparatively little studied. Thus the late D. H. Turner, in his brilliant introduction to the facsimile edition, drew largely upon the broad range of valuable information on the owner himself and gave only a brief and sensible summary of art historical opinion on the manuscript.
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Shorter contribution: An addition to the bibliography of Nantes
(1988-05)
Rhodes, Dennis E.
PRINTING began at Nantes with an isolated venture in 1493, when on 15 April an otherwise unknown printer named Etienne Larcher completed an edition of Jean Meschinot, Les Lunettes des princes, Vingt-cinq ballades. Commemoration de la passion. Of this exceptionally rare incunable the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has two incomplete copies, one of them printed on vellum; and there are copies also in the Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, Paris, and at Le Mans, the last-named being also incomplete.
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Sir Hans Sloane, scientist
(1988-05)
Ultee, Maarten
'ECCE Gloriae Mathematicarum et Physicarum'; so reads the inscription on an eighteenth-century engraving showing Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane. While Newton has remained a household word for scientific genius, Sloane is remembered (if at all) as a collector of curiosities, the founder of the British Museum, and Lord of the Manor of Chelsea - but not as a scientist of note. Famous in his time as a physician to high society and as the natural historian of Jamaica, Sloane was criticized even then as a mere 'virtuoso', an undiscriminating collector who lacked understanding of scientific principles. Yet Hans Sloane was First Secretary to the Royal Society for two decades and served as President, after Newton's death, from 1727 to 1741. He published three volumes of natural history and edited the Philosophical Transactions, contributing articles and comments on many subjects.
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A friend of the Clementis
(1988-05)
Wright, C. J.
ON 10 March 1832 Muzio Clementi, 'The Father of the Pianoforte', breathed his last in the unlikely setting of Evesham in Worcestershire. The 'Land without Music' had lost its most distinguished resident foreign composer since the death of Handel over seventy years before. On 2 January, realizing that his life was drawing to a close, he had made his will. One of the witnesses was an Elizabeth Banks, spinster. As his biographer Unger noticed, this was not the first appearance of a Banks in Clementi's life. Two of his works were dedicated to a John Cleaver Banks. The question arises as to whether there was any connection between these two and, if there was, as to what exactly was their relationship to Clementi.
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British Library Journal (volume 14, number 1, spring 1988)

British Library Journal (volume 14, number 1, spring 1988)

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