ABSTRACT

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a great age of manuscript and book collecting in Britain and North America. Historic collections in Britain and Western Europe were being sold in the face of changing economic, social and political conditions for aristocratic and landed families. Identifying and reconstructing these collections is not necessarily a straightforward process. In the case of Alfred Chester Beatty, on the other hand, the present-day Chester Beatty Library in Dublin does not reflect the totality of his collecting in the twentieth century. Karen Attar uses the term 'ossified collections' to identify those handed over to institutional care and maintenance, as opposed to the dynamic nature of collections being formed and added to by private collectors. Manuscripts and printed materials were only one aspect of their collecting, in most cases. One of the notable features of the period from the later nineteenth century was the increasing dominance of North American collectors.