I have bought very many second hand books over the years, and sometimes there are clues as to their previous owners. I have collected the works of Louis Golding since 1972. This one is a collection of his poems from 1921, mostly war poems inspired by his time in the trenches. This one must have been presented by him to the salon hostess who hosted him in 1928 during a visit to America.
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| Josephine Crane |
Josephine Porter Crane (née Boardman; November 14, 1873 – July 8, 1972) was an American socialite and patron of the arts, co-founder and original trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and supporter of the Dalton School of New York City.
Born Josephine Porter Boardman, in Cleveland, Ohio, she was from a well-to-do family. Her father, William Jarvis Boardman (April 15, 1832 – August 2. 1915), a lawyer and political activist, was the grandson of United States Senator Elijah Boardman. Her mother, Florence Sheffield, was the granddaughter of Joseph Earl Sheffield, a major benefactor of Yale University. She had five siblings, including Mabel Thorp Boardman. The family moved from Ohio to Washington, D.C. in 1887-8, although they maintained connections to Ohio politics including a friendship with the Taft family.
In 1906, she married Winthrop Murray Crane, an American millionaire 20 years her senior, a former governor of Massachusetts and US Senator, with whom she had three children: Stephen, Bruce, and Louise. Winthrop M. Crane died in 1920. After the Senator's death, she moved to New York City, where she was a founder of the Museum of Modern Art and was elected to the board of trustees in October 1929.
Crane was the benefactress of the prestigious Dalton School, which took its name from the location of the Crane family estate, "Sugar Hill", in Dalton, Massachusetts. She was the original sponsor for implementing the Dalton Plan in 1920,a much-copied experiment in education.
Crane hosted a weekly literary salon at her apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue, New York City and at the family home on Penzance Point, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Guests included Marianne Moore and William Somerset Maugham.[
She died of pneumonia on July 8, 1972, aged 98, at Falmouth Hospital in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
The Josephine B. Crane Foundation continues to support the Sierra Club, scientific research and various scholarships.
The New York Times
FALMOUTH, Mass., July 8— Mrs. W. Murray Crane, a founder of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Dalton School of New York, died of pneumonia tonight at Falmouth General Hospital. She was 98 years old and resided at her Cape Cod home in nearby Woods Hole and at 820 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
Born Josephine Porter Board man on November 14, 1873, in Cleveland, Ohio, she moved to Washington, D.C., in the early nineteen‐hundreds. There she married United States Senator Winthrop Murray Crane of Massachusetts, who died during his second term of office in 1920. He was president of Crane & Company, Inc., of Dalton, Mass., the stationery firm founded by his father.
After the Senator's death, Mrs. Crane moved to New York City. Her daughter, Miss Louise Crane, recalled that along with Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 2d, Mrs. Crane founded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929.
Trustee of Dalton School
Miss Crane also recalled that her mother was a founding trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and the Dalton School of New York, which she said used a liberal‐education plan first tried out in the public school system of Dalton.
In 1935, Mrs. Crane was named to the original executive committee of the newly organized American National Theatre and Academy, the first organization of its kind to receive a Federal charter. She worked to foster a national interest in the theater, to the benefit of both amateurs and professionals.
The family home on Penzance Point in Woods Hole, Mass., was the scene of “many literary summer evenings,” according to Miss Crane, who recalled such house guests as William Somerset Maugham and Marianne Moore.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sons Bruce, of Dalton, the president of Crane & Co.; and Stephen, of Los Angeles; two grandchildren and nine great‐grandchildren.
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I bought this book many years ago, I have no recollection when or where, but it must have reflected my interest over the years in Anglo-Saxon poetry. I never read the whole book, nor do I think did the dedicatee, "Nen". The donor was the Icelandic postgraduate Torfi Hjartarson, who spent 1930-31 studying in England.
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| Torfi Hjartarson |
Torfa Hjartarson's brothers were Snorri, a poet and a librarian, and Asgeir, a teacher and a librarian. Children Torfa og k.h, Anna Jónsdóttir mistress: Hjörtur, fv. Supreme Court Justice; Honor, teacher and fv. Rector Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík, Sigrún, who was a housewife in Canada, and Helga Sóley, a nurse in Reykjavík. Torfi completed a matriculation examination from the Reykjavík High School in 1924, a law degree from the University of Iceland in 1930 and stayed in London for a postgraduate degree in 1930-31.
Torfi enjoyed great trust as a reliable and diligent civil servant, since the director of customs in Reykjavik in 1943-72, a mediator at the same time from 1945 and to seventy-eight years of age and the point of departure of the senior electoral commission at municipal elections in Reykjavík in 1949-70. Then, once, he was strongly considered as the mayor of independence and as a minister in the government council. He became the first chairman of the Association of Young Independents, who was founded on June 27, 1930, and made a memorable speech on the SUS anniversary of Thingvellir, 1990. There he strongly argued against EU membership, and said that Icelanders did not break away from Danes to let them reign in. through Brussels. Torfi was plain and cheerful in the interface, maintained good health in his old age, and drove like his commander half a century old Willys jeep that he himself had reached in his twenties. He died on October 8, 1996.
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| Arnarholt |
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I purchased a Megillat Esther, a handwritten scroll of the book of Esther, via eBay, and was surprised to discover that it bore the inscription 'ex libris Athelstan Riley, A.M., 1890'. He must have acquired the item as a young man of 32, not long after his ordination to the Anglican priesthood.
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| Athelstan Riley |
John Athelstan Laurie Riley (10 August 1858 – 17 November 1945) was an English hymn writer and hymn translator.
Riley was born in Paddington, London, and attended Pembroke College, Oxford, where obtained his BA in 1881 and MA in 1883. Active in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, he energised the development of The English Hymnal (1906) and was chairman of its editorial board. His best-known hymn is "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones". He also created an English adaption of the eucharistic hymn "O Esca Viatorum".
Riley's London house, at 2 Kensington Court, is the subject of an extensive article in Liturgical Arts Journal. The house contained an altarpiece by Ninian Comper, later knighted and a major designer of Anglo-Catholic church furnishings. The article also includes information about the sources of Riley's fortune.
In later life he moved to Jersey in the Channel Islands, where he purchased Trinity Manor in 1909, thereby acquiring the feudal title of Seigneur de La Trinité. Finding the manor house in a ruined condition, he undertook an elaborate restoration (or "imaginative reconstruction", which has been criticised as turning the building into a French-style château). The reconstruction was carried out 1910–1913 by C. Messervy to designs by Sir Reginald Blomfield. Riley also bought the historic property L'Ancienneté in Saint Brélade, and removed architectural features of interest to incorporate into Trinity Manor, carefully recording the provenance of items and nature of alterations made in his project. He remained in Jersey through the German occupation, and died shortly after its liberation.
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| Athelstan Riley |
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My great grandfather became a keen amateur genealogist in the first decade of the twentieth century. He was a subscriber to this book, but despite the geographical closeness of the Reade and Gent families in Staffordshire there was hardly a mention of the Gent family in this large volume. My great grandfather wrote to the author in 1919 thinking it might be of value but was sadly disappointed, but he did receive this letter from Mr Reade.
There is an autograph letter by Reade for sale at present on the internet for £180.
Aleyn Lyell Reade, 1876-1953 . The youngest son of Thomas Mellard Reade, the Liverpool geologist and architect, and of Emma Eliza, the daughter of William Treleaven Fox, Aleyn Lyell Reade was born at Blundellsands in Lancashire on 23 April 1876 . He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School in Great Crosby. Between 1916 and 1919 he served as a rifleman and, later, a postcorporal on the Western Front, with 2/6 King's Liverpool Rifles.
Reade displayed a great interest in the history, culture and social nature of his local environment, often contributing to various Liverpool publications, and, at one time, planning to compose a work discussing the lives of Liverpool's great literary figures. He also wrote articles and contributions in various national papers and periodicals, such as The Times Literary Supplement and Notes and Queries. He was interested in genealogy, and compiled a history of his own family, which was privately printed as The Reades of Blackwood Hill and Dr Johnson's Ancestry by the Arden Press in 1906 . This work was significant because it displayed a link between the Reade s and the maternal ancestry of Dr Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century lexicographer. This led Reade into a life-long study of the origins and early life of Samuel Johnson, investigating many aspects of his life, and also the history of many Lichfield families of the period, with whom Johnson was either related, or came into contact with. His extensive research led to the production of the ambitious, eleven-volume series, Johnsonian Gleanings, which was privately printed for Reade between 1909 and 1952 . His research led him into correspondence with a large number of individuals, both at home and abroad, who were all involved in the study of Johnson, including R W Chapman, L F Powell, James L Clifford, Ernest A Sadler, Percy Laithwaite and W B Bickley. He became known as the leading exponent on the early life of Samuel Johnson, and was awarded honorary Master's degrees from Oxford in 1935 and from Liverpool in 1939 . Amongst his other works was a series of pedigrees of the Audley family, and a history of the Mellards and their descendants. Never married, he died on 28 March 1953 .
For further information, see The Single Talent, 1947 , Reade's autobiography, at ALR.A.1.1 ; and Who Was Who, Vol. V , 1951 -- 1960 , London, 1961 , p. 911.
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