01 May Stories From the Stacks: Museum Donations
A regular series about the museum’s motoring memorabilia and behind-the-scenes activities, compiled and written by FMM’s Assistant Curator Sian Theron. This month, Sian travels up the east coast to accept a superb donation of motoring books…
The Franschhoek Motor Museum is proud to have a rather good library (even if we say so ourselves!). Our car collection covers practically all aspects of motoring and includes magazines, manuals, brochures, marque histories, biographies, motor sport, along with tomes on motorcycles and bicycles. The contents of the library have been carefully preserved throughout the years, with much of the collection coming from benefactors who have generously donated their collections to the museum to ensure they are preserved and kept for reference and posterity.
FMM recently took ownership of a large motoring book collection that has been donated by the family of the late James ‘Jim’ Morgan. Jim had been an avid motoring fan and book collector for most of his life. While he was away during WWII, he had a massive collection that his mother gave away as scrap for the war effort. This understandably devastated him, and he then spent the next 50 years trying to recover his collection. And thank goodness he did, as it is easy to see the amount of passion and love for motoring that went into assembling this true gem of a collection.
The collected works had been in storage in Durban for some time, and while simply arranging for a courier to collect and deliver them to FMM, as curators we have to ensure that any donated material will not put the current objects at risk. Consequently, when it comes to items that have spent many years in storage, and in particular items that are made of natural fibres such as books, we have to be circumspect. As a result, I was sent to KZN to unpack the books and assess them for damage and any danger signs of mould or insect activity. The boxes had not been opened in years, and as we know, Durban recently suffered from severe flooding, and the coastal town perennially has the added element of high humidity, which never bodes well for paper collections. So it was with some trepidation that I set off, although images of the boxes that had been sent to us showed that they appeared to be in good condition, which gave me a lot of hope.
Thankfully, that hope was well founded when I finally got to open the boxes. First, there was a small task of temporarily repacking the books into smaller boxes to allow me to be able to carry them as the originals were too heavy for a single person to move around. I then got to spend a glorious two days of doing a more comprehensive health check on each book, adding them to an inventory as I went. As a trained librarian and a lover of all things historical and motoring, this was a huge treat and I must admit that even now I keep having to pinch myself as the collection is magnificent. It was quite hard to not get side-tracked by delving into each book, particularly as a fair number of the volumes include some legendary signatures from the motor racing world. Eventually all was packed, and I gained a number of bruises from hauling the boxes about while helping getting them into the courier van. Afterwards, I travelled back to the museum and two days after sending the books on their way, I was able to unpack them in their new home.
The James Morgan collection is now safely ensconced in the FMM library and is in the process of being added to our unique referencing system. We offer our thanks to Peter Morgan and Karine Fenton for the donation in their father’s name.
NB: FMM does make the library available to researchers subject to prior arrangement with the curator or assistant curator. No items will be allowed to leave the library area.
