Friday, April 12, 2013

More On ALA's 1893 Model Library


In response to my previous post about ALA and the 1893 World's Fair, Tom Ray, Collections Management Coordinator of The Library of Virginia, informed me that The Library of Virginia had recently acquired one of the actual books from ALA's model library collection at the Fair. The book that they have is The Colonel's Daughter by Charles King. The really neat thing about the book is that it has an example of the bookplate used for the model collection (shown above). All 5,000 books in the model collection were donated by book publishers. Originally, the U.S. Bureau of Education was going to pay for the collection, but at the last minute couldn't do it. A successful appeal to publishers of the books saved the day. The bookplate in The Colonel's Daughter indicates that it was donated by the J. B. Lippincott Company.  The collection of books was arranged half by the Dewey decimal classification system and half by the Cutter classification system. The bookplate shows that The Colonel's Daughter was classified by the Cutter system with the call number K58c based on the author's last name (King). I wonder what happened to the other 4,999 volumes in the collection. Any thoughts or insights out there?

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