CitizenWald, 
The Complicated Ethics of #RareBook #Collecting: Literary treasures are too often hidden away from the public—but the world of private collecting isn’t all bad. - The Atlantic
Not sure it's as complicated as all that 😀 (especially compared with other fields), the more so as it's from a collector and in effect answers its own question (attached). But good to put the issues out there. Also nice that features local collector Lisa Baskin
#books #BookHistory #RareBooks
Many rare books, manuscripts, and items in the collections at these institutions are donated by or purchased from private collectors. In other cases, a donor supplies the funds for an institution to make general or specific acquisitions. If you've visited the permanent “Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures,” you might have seen one-of- a-kind items on rotation, such as an early manuscript draft of Oscar Wilde’s 7he Importance of Being Earnest, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, and a page from the manuscript of an unpublished chapter of 7he Autobiography of Malcolm X. These pieces were “acquired through the generosity of” a donor or were donated by a collector.
Collectors tend to donate or sell their collections to institutions if they don’t put them back into the marketplace via auction houses or rare-book sellers. “Collecting isn't mere shopping,” Heritage said. “The best collecting requires vision, passion, knowledge, and creativity—and, above all, persistence.” Collecting, for Heritage, has the capacity to be a form of advocacy through the creation of knowledge and the ability to tie together strands of knowledge that otherwise couldn’t be done unless one has a lifelong devotion to a particular subject. Some collectors have honed niche collections that have since been deposited in libraries (either wholly or partially). Walter O. Evans collected Black artwork and literature that now constitute mainstay collections—such as the Walter O. Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers and the Walter O. Evans collection of James Baldwin—at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Douglass papers in Evans’s collection have been digitized so that scholars, students, and the public can access them.