By Michael W. Harris
When the members of Team Stainforth discuss his library, we always like to say that it was one of the largest collections of women’s writing in the nineteenth century. But there is always the qualifier of “one of the” because we can never really say for sure.
The one library that the Team knew about and have always compared his library to is the collection assembled for the 1893 World’s Fair held in Chicago. At that exhibition, there was a “Women’s Building” that housed a library of works by women authors, representing twenty-four nations and included some 8,000 volumes, all arranged and cataloged by librarians handpicked by Melvil Dewey, he of the famous decimal system. (Read about that collection here.)
Recently, however, another library came to the attention of project director Kirstyn Leuner from an unlikely source: George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Continue reading “The Mystery of Count Leopold Ferri of Padua – Library Archeology and the Stainforth Catalog”
