Music Meets Drama

  A letter dated October 31 st , 1940 written by Gena Branscombe.  Her penmanship is its usual “difficult to read” or “hard to decipher” words yet her message is of friendly warmth and happiness to have helped a friend of a friend.  Written on The Branscombe Choral stationery, she is returning to a Mrs. Grambling a piece of autographed linen.  Autographed linen?  Someone had a hobby of collecting autographs on linen?  Intriguing!   Collecting famous people’s autographs and letters was a popular hobby a century or more ago.  Once collected they were put in a scrapbook.  This letter was found in one of those books, though the autographed linen piece was not.    As Gena says, “What an interesting idea!”  My thoughts on that “idea” is someone was creating a table cloth of autographs, a blanket or making an artistic piece to be framed – my idea. Who was Mrs. Grambling to whom the letter is addressed or Mrs. Davis who Gena me...

Collecting manuscripts, letters and autographs as a business and hobby dates back to Aristotle who amassed a library of maps and scholarly papers.   During the era of the Ptolemys beginning in 306 BC, autographs were acquired and preserved.   Empires conquering other empires helped themselves to these collections storing and preserving them until some other empire “borrowed” them.   Centuries of fallow collecting occurred until the 17 th century when a rekindling of interest in autographs and preserving documents became de rigeur.  England created a market place for autographs with auctions.   Collecting became a profit centered business.   Ushering in the Victorian era, people created autograph albums of a wide range of people who were unconnected.   One autograph may have been from a person famous in one field of expertise with the next autograph from someone far ranging from that knowledge.   Autograph hunting became an insatiable mania!...