Collecting Antiquarian Music

Fine Books and Collections Magazine has a story about composing a collection of sheet music.

From the piece...

In this respect, antiquarian music is not very different from any other book-collecting field—if it’s famous, and you’re interested in first editions, it’s likely to be popular among collectors and expensive to acquire. This hasn’t, however, always been the case in music collecting. Book collectors are often looking back to a more glowing past, but you don’t have to look too far to find a golden past in music collecting. In 1934, John Carter edited New Paths in Book Collecting (London: Constable), an influential and interesting anthology of essays by various authors, on collecting fields that were not within the then-current collecting mainstream. The untrodden fields discussed in the book included, among others, such now heavily collected subjects as detective fiction, American first editions of the period 1900-1933, and English book illustrations from 1880-1900. The book also included an article by bibliographer, librarian, and collector, C. B. Oldman, on “Musical First Editions,” which was described as being the first effort of its kind in English. Oldman included a great deal of information on the first editions of some of the works of major composers, and he pointed potential collectors toward many of the standard reference works and bibliographies in the field. He was also careful to say that there was still a great deal to be done in the field of music bibliography, and this is still the case today.