Week 22/23: How do you pronounce Honresfield?
real world examples that would've been useful last week
The New York Times reported a few weeks ago on the skeevy practice of money laundering through art, which is basically the exact opposite of what I wrote last time about divesting from collecting as necessarily a competition about who has the most wealth and power. Money laundering through art objects fraudulently inflates the value of the object, which serves no one except the person sneaking in their payout. It does not reflect the real-time market price of the work, nor does it accurately reflect the cultural significance of the work. To Fran Lebowitz’s point in “Pretend It’s A City”—which I recommend if you want to watch Fran Lebowitz opine about New York City for three and a half hours, I admit, it’s not for everyone—at art auctions, the attendees don’t always applaud when the piece is brought out, but they always applaud the hammer price.
I realize I’m wading into art collecting here, which is different and adjacent to book collecting. Sidenote, and mind-numbingly, the art world and the book world significantly overlap in vocabulary, but we each use the same terms to mean different things. Art and book cataloguers will also describe materials differently in their systems, so if you’re a book person searching in an art catalog or vice versa, what you search for is often not what you get: how many pages, for example, but not how many colors the text is printed in. Or the design of a textile, but not whether it was printed in addition to being woven. Tantalizingly useless! I digress.
The addendum to all of this is that seven of the top ten most expensive paintings ever sold were in private sales. I don’t think all of us have to make our expense reports public, but it does point towards how much of the top echelons of art exchange happen quietly. What does that silence tell us about the premiums we place on discretion, power, and control?
To that end, the Honresfield Library of Bronte and Austen manuscripts recently came up for sale at Sotheby’s, throwing the book world into a tizzy. The original collectors, brothers Alfred and William Law, bought many of the manuscripts directly from Charlotte Bronte’s widower, as well as neighbors and family with literary keepsakes. True motherload type situation with these materials. Also, the direct line highlights to me just how recent this all was: the Laws began collecting in the 1890s, just four decades after the sisters died. They passed their collection to a nephew, and there was public knowledge of the collection through 1939.
So the collection comes up for sale, and after what I imagine was a series of hectic emails exchanged between every major British institution that has a modicum of interest in these materials, Sotheby’s agreed to delay the sale and allow a consortium of institutions to bid on the collection together, then distribute the materials to their logical homes—the Bronte manuscripts to the Bronte Parsonage, for example. The consortium was in part born from the concern that wealthy private buyers would bid on individual items, break up the collection, and disappear materials into private hands for some unknown number of generations. The institutions, conversely, want to break up the collection and make the materials available for public use. Illustratively, if you google “honresfield library,” six of the top nine hits feature the words “Save the Honresfield Library.”
This slogan has ruffled some feathers. Some collectors reasonably pointed out that the history of the collection itself is worth preserving: these manuscripts weren’t “lost,” they were kept by the descendants of three collectors who dotingly amassed a collection of heavy-hitting 19th century texts. Nor would these materials necessarily have survived if not sought out and preserved by said collectors. “Saving” materials from private collectors undercuts how they have, in many ways, underwritten the growth of many institutions, both materially and financially. There’s a whole other argument to be made here about how we shouldn’t have to rely on private collectors alone for funding and donations, but this issue is not about the history of government funding for arts and public services.
This whole Honresfield Library shindig is a great, concentrated example of how collectors can significantly influence an institution’s holdings, all while speaking to the discomfort of breaking up a collector’s life work,1 the ethics of selling cultural heritage, and the obligation of the heritage sector to consider where materials will be best cared for.
Recall one of my curatorial questions: How will these materials be cared for, both physically and culturally? The Laws, their nephew, and their descendants physically cared for these materials for 100-odd years, which I would argue is of service to cultural heritage, even if the Laws did not initially intend for the materials to end up in public hands. Public institutions are not singularly capable of conserving materials (and some pale in comparison to what I imagine wealthy collectors have on retainer to maintain their books). But it seems these objects have reached a moment when caring for them culturally and publicly is of priority. Making the manuscripts available for study, exhibition, and conversation is more pressing than ensuring they live together with their long-time literary neighbors in a centralized home.
Private and public ownership are not bad and good, respectively. They are both neutral realities of this strange system we’ve found ourselves in of creating property and then staking claim over it. Setting hard and fast rules about what we should buy and when makes it really difficult to account for circumstances and caveats. Hence, question-asking.
It’s pronounced “honors-feld.”
housekeeping and birdseeking
house
What I am currently reading: The Five Wounds by Kirsten Valdez Quade.
two edits: I called Elaine “Eileen” by accident, which goes to show that I really haven’t watched a lot of Seinfeld. Also, I realized after I sent this email out that Microsoft Word autocorrected “Honresfield” to “Honresfeld,” which I didn’t notice. It’s now fixed.
bird
My father purchased this game for our trip down the shore. A whole family of birders!
More later.
Granted, all parties involved are since deceased, but it’s courteous!