Amassing Treasures For All Times. Sir George Grey, Colonial Bookman and Collector.
New Caste, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2006,
First Edition. octavo, cloth in dust jacket. 352 pp. Oak Knoll Press, Item #15988
Sir George Grey, governor of New Zealand, South Australia and the Cape Colony, was an outstanding British colonial statesman in the nineteenth century. Less well-known of Grey is that we he was also an obsessive collector of rare books and artifacts, which he selflessly bequeathed to the people he governed. It is through these items that we are given a look into Grey's less publicized private life. There are actually two "Grey Collections" in the southern hemisphere, each with almost identical statues and similar collections. He assembled an extraordinary collection, then donated the entire assemblage to Cape Town in 1861. He then continued to purchase rarities and other manuscripts and donated his second collection from his private library to Auckland. Grey gathered items from classic European book culture as well as artifacts and items from the indigenous peoples of the southern continents and islands to preserve their culture. He had a very real hunger for knowledge in his pursuits of the rare, due to his Victorian upbringing. A timeline of Grey's life is included after a lovely foreword by Christopher de Hamel and some Acknowledgements from the author. New.
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