Archives du mot-clef Heidelberg University Library

The smartest bookseller in London’ Leon Kashnor (1879–1955) and the Museum Book Store

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Published in The Book Collector, Vol. 74.4, Winter 2025,  ‘The smartest bookseller in London’ Leon Kashnor (1879–1955) and the Museum Book Store’. The following paragraphs from the article introduce the subject.

At both ends of his career, Leon Kashnor received glowing recognition from knowledgeable specialists. H. R. Wagner, who produced the first modern historical bibliography of economic texts, identified him as ‘the smartest bookseller in London’[1] in the 1900s. Ten years after Kashnor’s death and three years after the publication of his seminal The Making of the English Working-Class, E. P. Thompson, spoke of the ‘gifted bookseller’’s ‘splendid collections of early economic theory, English Jacobinism, Chartism, and so on’.[2] Leon Kashnor dealt intensively, but not exclusively, in the niche market of political and social economy. This expertise and specialization led the major collectors of economic history to use Kashnor as their supplier in London of works in English, some almost exclusively.

The collections compiled by H. S. Foxwell (the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library at London University and Harvard), E. R. A. Seligman (the Seligman Library at Columbia), Henry Raup Wagner (the British Economics collection at Yale and collections at the Huntington), Auguste Dubois (collection at Poitiers) and Emanuel Leser (collection at Heidelberg) now forming the basis for the major collections of economic literature, all contain works purchased from The Museum Bookstore, some to a large extent (Seligman, Wagner and Dubois). In addition, the Huntington Library acquired whole catalogues or collections of Americana and British history from the same, as did other American university libraries, the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Feltrinelli Institute, the National Library of Australia. The collections and the correspondence to and from Leon Kashnor found in the archives of these varied collections bear witness to these dealings and to his central position in the specializations in which he dealt.

In view of these remarkable collections in institutions of international repute, it is legitimate to ask why Kashnor is not better known. He is absent from the 1906 list of Founder Members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association.[3] Neither Kashnor, nor the Museum Book Store, appear in the index of the history of the rare and second-hand book trade published in 2006,[4]  nor in a more recent study of ‘Americanists and the Rare Book Market’.[5] It is hoped to remedy this oversight here.

[1]. H. R. Wagner, Bullion to Books: Fifty Years of Business and Pleasure  (Zamorano Club, 1942), p. 99.

[2]. E. P. Thompson ‘History from below’, Times Literary Supplement, (1966) April 7.

[3]. Giles Mandelbrote, Out of Print & Into Profit, A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the Twentieth Century (London: British Library, 2006), Appendix 3, pp. 337–340.

[4]. Out of Print & Into Profit.

[5]. William Reese, Collectors, Booksellers and Libraries: Essays on Americanists and the Rare Book Market (New Haven: Overland Press, 2018).

Un bouquiniste spécialiste d’ouvrages anciens d’économie politique

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A paraître dans The Book Collector, Vol. 74.4, Winter 2025,  ‘The smartest bookseller in London’ Leon Kashnor (1879–1955) and the Museum Book Store’.

Cet article est consacré au bouquiniste qui a fourni de nombreux exemplaires d’ouvrages anciens aux collectionneurs qui ont fondé le corpus d’économie politique dans les collections des universités de Harvard, Columbia, Londres, The Huntington Library, l’IISH (Amsterdam), de Heidelberg et Poitiers.

Exploring the collection of Emanuel Leser, Professor, Heidelberg University

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A new addition to the project on collectors and collections of antiquarian books on political economy warrants the exploration of the University of Heidelberg Library Special Collections. For that purpose, a week’s mission (27 November to 1st Dec. 2023) has been organised.

 

 

Emanuel Leser (1849-1914) taught at Heidelberg from 1879. As a young ‘docent’, he had E. R. A. Seligman (Columbia) as a pupil, who recounts that it was Leser who passed on his love of old books

 

 

The books and the collection as a whole bear the hallmarks of a working collection. The library contains every work of importance published in English from the 17th century on (Malynes, Mun, Petty, …) to the works of the Classical School (Smith, Ricardo, ….) and those of Leser’s fellow economists throughout Europe and the United States (Cunningham, Marshall, Gide, Pareto, Seligman etc.). But it is the four-hundred volume whole library of tracts that is the most intriguing. This appears to be the library of a gentleman, already bound and labelled, then sold as one item. Unfortunately no archives remain allowing the provenance (stately house or dealer) to be ascertained.

The previous work done on this collection dates back to 1973 (Coing), and considers the collection from a librarian’s point of view. It does not compare it to other similar collections. It is hoped that the previous work done on the Dubois, Wagner, Foxwell and Seligman collections will throw light on the Leser collections’ holdings, and bring a new understanding of the context in which this German library was built up.