The most eagerly competed lot among the 270 offered at the Thomson Roddick (20% buyer’s premium) book sale in Carlisle on June 6 was a bound notebook, part filled with cuttings, manuscript notes and watercolour sketches and titled On Meteorites.
Consigned by a local Cumbrian vendor with a guide of £30-50, keen pre-sale interest was the first indication that the estimate was possibly somewhat conservative. Competition on the phone and online led the notebook to eventually hammer down at £1200, won online by a Scandinavian buyer.
Although the author is probably destined to remain anonymous, On Meteorites had been the work of someone intimately familiar with the meteorite collection at the London Natural History Museum towards the end of the 19th century.
Handwritten in sepia ink, it described: ‘The South Kensington Collection - On entering the building, pass the skeleton of the whale in the central hall, and around the staircase to the right, turn to the right at the top of the stairs and pass the cases of stuffed waterbirds … on reaching the end of that gallery, turn to the left, through the doors, into the mineralogical collection, and passing through that, reach the Meteorite Collection at the end of the room; (called in the Museum, “The Pavilion”). The Meteors are in three sets of cases, and are supplemented by large specimens on separate pedestals…’
Bound notebook, part filled with cuttings, manuscript notes and watercolour sketches and titled On Meteorites, £1200 at Thomson Roddick.
Only natural
The meteorite collection at the Natural History Museum started when the British Museum acquired three specimens in 1802, just as people were beginning to accept that meteorites were natural phenomena. The collection had grown to around 250 pieces by the time the natural history section of the British Museum moved to South Kensington in 1883.
The two key figures in the collection were Department of Mineralogy keeper Nevil Story- Maskelyne (1823-1911), who began the compilation of a descriptive Crystallographic Catalogue, and his successor geologist Dr Leonard James Spencer (1870-1959). Joining the department in January 1894, it was Spencer who rearranged some of the collections, setting up the meteorites in ‘The Pavilion’ between 1895-97.
The Adelaide Advertiser of March 1931, on learning that the Natural History Museum was interested in acquiring a fragment of the enormous Karoonda Meteorite that had landed in southern Australia in 1930, stated that “Dr LJ Spencer MA, keeper of the mineral section at South Kensington … collects meteorites as other folk collect autographs or old china”.
