Posted on 06/03/2007 8:18:10 PM PDT by blam
One filing cabinet held 500 years of history
By Nigel Reynolds, Arts Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:09am BST 04/06/2007
One of the greatest collections of historical letters ever amassed has been found in a laundry room.
A Winston Churchill letter is valued at £10,000
Susannah Morris was called in to examine the hoard after the death of the secretive collector and was astonished to be led not into a library or a safe room but to the basement.
In the laundry room, wedged between a washing machine and a tumble dryer, was a plain metal filing cabinet. Miss Morris, who works for the auction house Christie's, opened it and could not believe her eyes.
Inside was the most remarkable collection of letters she had seen outside a national institution: a love letter by Napoleon; a diplomatic note to the king of France in the hand of Elizabeth I; a letter of condolence by John Donne; a tragic account written in 1545 by John Calvin, the theologian of the Reformation, about the suicide of a friend; and a withering letter by Charlotte Brontë on male shortcomings.
As Miss Morris delved through files, where the papers were arranged by size rather than alphabet, date or subject, her eyes grew wider.
There was a letter by Beethoven, one by Albert Einstein, by Isaac Newton, Hemingway, Frederick the Great, Darwin, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Pushkin, Monet, Churchill, Gandhi, Defoe, Tchaikovsky and Dostoevsky.
Napoleon wrote his love letter to Josephine in 1795
By the time she had finished her first trawl she had counted almost 1,000 letters written by the great monarchs, scientists, authors, painters, philosophers and musicians from the 15th to the 20th century in almost every European language.
After months of research Miss Morris has valued the find, which is to be sold in separate lots at Christie's in London on July 3, at £2 million.
She said yesterday: "It was an extraordinary find in such an improbable place. It is a history in miniature of the last 500 years of western civilisation and is the most remarkable collection on the market for a generation or more."
The man who spent half a lifetime putting it together was Albin Schram, who died two years ago. The son of an Austrian industrialist, he was born in Prague 1926 and, after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1943.
He was soon wounded and captured by the Russians and thrown into a PoW camp in Konigsberg but escaped and made his way on foot through Germany to rejoin his family in Vienna. He worked at the ministry of justice there but later went into banking and moved to Lausanne in Switzerland where he spent the rest of his life.
It was in 1973 when the collecting bug took hold and he made his first purchase, buying a 1795 love letter from Napoleon to his future wife, Josephine, one of just three known to exist from the period when they were engaged. It is fiercely passionate - they had had a quarrel the night before. Christie's have estimated it at £30,000 to £50,000.
Much later Schram bought a letter from Josephine to her brother Eugene, written in 1807 during the build-up to her divorce from the emperor. It is a bitter commentary on her relationship with the Bonaparte family who detest her.
The most valuable item in the collection is Donne's letter of condolence in 1624 to Lady Kingsmill the day after the death of her husband. He says that man should not judge God's actions "although we could direct him to do them better".
Miss Morris said that Schram never showed his letters to others nor wrote a catalogue of them. Even his family barely knew of their existence.
She said: "He would buy at all the European auction houses. I remember him coming to Christie's sometime. He was a white-haired, gentlemanly figure. In the early days he bid under the name Henry. He was marked out by an extremely stubborn bidding style.
"Only two weeks before his death he was handing out the last of a series of wish-lists which contained not only well-known figures as Walt Whitman and, rather oddly, Richard Nixon, but a series of eastern European authors and historical figures whose obscurity would have had the most learned polymath running for his biographical dictionary - Jan Zizka, for example."
Zizka, it transpires, is a Czech national hero from the 15th century.
Everyone needs a hoby, but come on, this guy made multiple purchases at Christie’s yet “no knew about his collection?!”
Good thing that washing machine didn’t leak!;)
history ping
Great article, Blam. Thanks for posting it.
What an interesting hobby, collecting priginal letters by well known people.
These notes records what could be expressed as ordinary events, but provide a look in to the inner most feelings of famous people.
Some collect inanimate objects, but this person chose to collect the writings of famous people that give us a glimpse of their human frailties and goodness.
Even if it did not leak,it would seem that the laundry would be about the worst place to keep paper goods in good shape.
Wonder how much his collection had appreciated. After all, these papers would have been sought after even in the 1970’s.
vaudine
I’m guessing he thought that a burglar would never look in the laundry room.
I thought you might find this interesting.
Were there more of the Rose Law Firm billing records in there?
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She's the expert, not I. But my gut feel is that this is an extremely conservative estimate.
Very, very fortunate to get out alive/escape from any Russian prison camp. Almost very German soldier captured died in those prisons - or while working as a slave to Stalin after the war.
This is amazing.
Remind me to use acid-free paper for my torrid love letters...;o]
Hey, aren’t those supposed to be *our little secret*?!?
If they’re really torrid, they’ll probably catch fire anyway.
*ooops!*
Uh, yah *heh-heh* they do get a little warm when conditions are right!
(Imagining the reaction of the assessor)
Definitely a WOW story and the letters are neat. Too bad they won’t be auctioned off as one item after the individual bidding. Perhaps they leters would then land in a museum for all to read.
This is amazing that they are even readable. I havejust come into possession of a diary and some albums belonging to my great grandparents — the oldesr piece dating from 1862. Most of the writing is so faded that I can barely make it out. It was written on acid free paper in those days, but most of it is written in pencil which is really dim by now. I have a big job ahead of me to transcribe it.
Good luck. You may try running it on a copy machine with the toner turned on high.
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