Archives du mot-clef history of collections

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).

A History of Collections, the History of Economics as an Academic Discipline – A Cambridge Field Study

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Vient de paraître : ‘The history of collections, the history of economics as an academic discipline: a Cambridge field study’, in Anny King & Paula Laycock (eds.) Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the French Government Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, Saturday 20th July 2024, Churchill College, Cambridge, with the kind support of the French Embassy, London, pp.76-80.

(See the account of the 2024 meeting here)

Extract from the opening and the closing paragraphs of the paper written for the occasion:

« Following the serendipitous discovery of a first edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in Poitiers University Library Special Collections in 2009, I embarked upon a project which sought to unravel the whys, hows and wherefores of a collection of early rare economic books in English at Poitiers. The Humanities project for which I was awarded the French Government Fellowship at Churchill College for 2020-2021 resulted from this quest and focused on issues of collection formation and the sourcing of rare economic history books with reference to significant collections and collectors, networking and nodal connections in the world of antiquarian books and academic scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very period during which Winston Churchill was collecting books about Napoleon.[1]

[1] Allen Packwood, “France and the French – A Tale of Two statesmen – CHURCHILL AND NAPOLEON”, Finest Hour, 157, Winter 2012-13, Page 14. International Churchill Society, February 28, 2015.

(…)

The intellectual environment at Churchill, the access to archives and libraries in Cambridge and London, the tranquil walks from the College to the Library and the other colleges, the quiet, studious and congenial setting, the social occasions – including strawberries and champagne on the Cam – provided the stimuli needed not only to explore Foxwell’s work, but to kick-start the writing of a book. It was in Sheppard Flats, that I was able to clearly establish the structure of the book resulting from this project, provisionally entitled A Wealth of Rare Books.The Making of the Economic History Corpus.  Academics, Bibliographers, Collectors and Dealers in Political Economy in France, Britain, the United States and Germany, 1880s-1930s, and where I wrote the introduction and several chapters in the spring – summer of 2021. The [first draft of the] manuscript, completed in spring 2024, along with several articles, has been submitted for publication. The motivation and encouragement provided at Churchill were crucial to achieving this result. (…)