First edition. Albin Schram (1926-2005) was born in Prague to Austrian parents and, following an education in Prague and Bavaria which was interrupted by World War II, was awarded a doctorate in law by the University of Vienna. Schram’s collection began with the gift of a love letter from Napoleon to Empress Josephine, which he was given by a family member in 1973 (lot 435 in this catalogue): ‘it was an inspiring beginning, and Schram’s passion for this form of collecting took hold immediately: not a year went by between that serendipitous moment and his death more than 30 years later without him adding at least a few items, often no more than a dozen, to his collection: indeed his last purchases were made in Paris, only two weeks before his death. Schram was a notably independent collector: he preferred to buy at auction, and to bid in person, and he travelled a regular circuit each year to the main sales in Marburg (later in Berlin), Paris and London. [...] Schram’s guiding principle was his own insatiable intellectual curiosity, pursued through Iris voluminous reading: he would issue regular lists of “desiderata”, the last of which, dated March 2005, gives some impression of the extraordinary breadth of his interests, ranging from Red Adair to Jan Neruda, from Walt Whitman to Fernando Pessoa, from Richard Nixon to the 14th century Bohemian patriot Jan Zizka. [...] it is a remarkably comprehensive collection, in all the principal fields: literature (from Donne and Defoe to Kleist, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Hemingway, Borges), the visual arts (Goya, Bernini, Vasari, Gauguin), history and politics (Napoleon, Calvin, Elizabeth I, Churchill, Cromwell, Gandhi), music (Telemann, Beethoven, Smetana, Tchaikovsky) and science and philosophy (Newton, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Einstein, Hume, Kant, Locke). The Schram collection is at once a history in miniature of the Western world, and a monument to a most remarkable collector’ (p. 5).

The catalogue comprised some 570 lots – which were divided into five sections: ‘Literature’ (lots 1-220), ‘Art’ (lots 221-278), ‘Music and Theatre’ (lots 279-320), ‘History’ (lots 321-471), and ‘Science and Philosophy’ (lots 472-570) – and the collection realised a total of £3,857,208.

Order this book directly from our website: www.typeandforme.com