How a public library, playing high stakes auction poker, scored at the Pirie Estate sale

We've been covering the Robert Pirie estate auction with interest for some months, to get- and share- an idea of what happens when a truly world-class book collection comes to market.

Today's installment is article about how the Folger Shakespeare Library, a public body with a limited budget, decided to jump into the Pirie sale with both feet and won big:

Like many other institutions, our buying usually takes place over the course of an entire fiscal year. Sales such as this, however, come along only once in a generation, so we made the decision to “Go Big or Go Home,” and commit the remainder of our year’s Acquisitions budget. We went into the sale firmly convinced of the truth that acquiring any single item would mean acquiring our most important item of the year, so to come home with 47 items was cause for extreme celebration. We attribute much of our success to our Collection Development team’s ability to work together, support one another’s needs, and to engage in patient, thoughtful discussion about what would be best for our collections. Buying at auction necessitates a delicate balance of our best guess at the market value of an item combined with its value to our institution, and that can be nearly an impossible decision to make. This team made those decisions very well, after spending hours researching, reading the catalogs, discussing, and going back to the beginning of this cycle multiple times, often late at night or in the wee hours of the morning.

Part 2 of the Folger's Pirie adventures is here, discussing the books purchased.

Part 3 is here, and goes over the manuscripts The Folger acquired.

Henry Bemis Books' previous posts on the Pirie auction are here: publication of the Sotheby's catlogue in November; a December 3 profile of Pirie the collector; and how the Morgan Library fared, here.