posted May 10, 2006 01:14 AM
Here's an interesting story (to me, anyway), that has nothing to do with space artifacts but might illustrate how some museums manage their collections:My wife and I went to a bed and breakfast for one of their "set dinners" ... we had to make reservations, but we had heard great things about the food at this place. The owners were antique collectors, and before the meal they took all of us on a tour of their place where we saw many American colonial-era pieces.
After dinner, the owner announced that he would like to share a piece of history he and his wife had obtained recently -- he told the story of a letter written by a secretary who had been with his boss for 16 years at the time of the writing. The secretary was very loyal, and he was at the bedside of his boss on the day he died in December 1799. The letter he wrote was to the President, John Adams, announcing the death of George Washington -- the letter writer was Tobias Lear.
I asked afterward how he had obtained the letter, and he told me that he had won it at an auction. He was a telephone bidder, and he had an agent at the auction house who he was on the phone with during the live bidding. As the auction went up in price, he and one other bidder were the only ones still bidding, and he finally placed the highest bid.
About a year after obtaining the letter, he and his wife were at Mount Vernon visiting, and he asked to see the curator, saying that he was the owner of the Tobias Lear letter announcing Washington's death. The curator came out of his office immediately.
As it turned out, Mount Vernon had originally held the letter in its own collection for many years, but decided decades ago to sell the letter in order to obtain other pieces for the collection -- and they had lost track of where the letter was. On the day of the auction, Mount Vernon was the other bidder who was beaten out (although that was not known at the time).
The curator said that, if he ever wanted to sell the document, Mount Vernon would like the opportunity to buy it back.
So, in this case, the museum made a decision to sell the letter in order to improve its collection in other ways -- so why should we prevent museums from making decisions such as these?
A good lesson learned is: If you are the owner of a valuable piece of memorabilia, and you want to ensure it never enters private hands, you should form an estate and lend the item to your museum of choice with the agreement that they keep it on display and return it if they choose to no longer display it.
Otherwise, museums can sell items from its collection if it chooses to do so, and collectors help meet the museum's goals by purchasing those items for cash. Hopefully, the new owners will protect these historical items carefully ...
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John Capobianco
Camden DE