Content area
Full text
RR 2000/144 The British Library Stefan Zweig Collection: Catalogue of the Music Manuscripts Arthur Searle The British Library London 1999 xliv + 158 + 154 pp. ISBN 0 7123 4600 7 L75.00 Keywords Special libraries, United Kingdom, Music
The Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) left Salzburg in 1934 for London where he stayed until 1939 when he moved to Bath. He became a UK citizen. The final wanderings of his last two years, to North America, to South America, and finally to Brazil, where in February 1942 he committed suicide, were, as Arthur Searle points out in his fascinating and full introduction to this catalogue, "a fruitless attempt to find refuge from the mental oppression as well as the physical horrors of war". Zweig began collecting literary, historical and musical manuscripts from the time he was 14 years of age when he was at a gymnasium in Vienna. Searle describes in detail the various phases of Zweig's collecting habits from his earliest youthful enthusiasm to the developed and sophisticated acquisitions of the last decade or so of his life. There are four ingredients in the Zweig Collection at the British Library: the materials Zweig chose not to include in his gifts and sales made during the 1934-1937 period; his acquisitions up to the summer of 1940; the return of unsold items after his death; the acquisitions in the post-war period of Zweig's English heirs.
C.B.Oldman (1894-1969), the head of the Department of Printed Books at the British...