The J.R. Keach Mystery

I finally finished the shelf list for the Keach collection. I had no idea how time-consuming transfering a long list organized by author name into one organized by Dewey Call Number would take. All together it took me about 6 hours of data entry alone, this was after the 12 hours of annotating the original shelf list with Dewey Call Numbers and damage notes. The other tedious part of this process was going back over my list and correcting any sequence mistakes I made. I was surprised by how often I had jumbled the Dewey sequence, when I thought I had been going very slow so as to avoid that very issue.

I've also been able to check in with Frank Faulkner, the head of the Texana department, and he shared with me the documents he had dug up relating to the original donations of the collection by Mr. J.R. Keach back in 1916 and 1917. He gave me 3 different copies of articles from the San Antonio Light and San Antonio Express News, along with a history of SAPL that was published in the Express in 1927 that mentions the Keach “mystery gift.”

These articles help flesh out the mystery (sort of, there are still a lot of unanswered questions) of who this J.R. Keach was and why he donated so many wonderful books to the Library in a city so far away from his home in Chicago. Frank has so far not been able to locate J.R. Keach in any of the census records either. The problematic thing is that in every article his name is spelled differently and his initials are even different in some! Clearly, this is a good mystery - I hope to investigate it further.

Here's the first article, San Antonio Light, 4/30/1916, p.4:

J.R. KEACH GIVES BOOKS TO LIBRARY

Collection Includes More Than 300 Volumes; Many Are Valuable

A collection of more than 300 assorted volumes, all of them worth and a great number of great value, has been presented to the Carnegie Library by J.R. Keach, who resides at the Traveler's Hotel. The gift has been estimated by the library staff to be worth approximately $500 [$300?].

The collection consists of fiction, travel, history, biography, essays and some are rare volumes. Many of the books are practically new and some in beautiful bindings. One of the interesting books in the collection is one published in 1609. It is "On Divorce" by John Reynolds and is called "a defence of the judgment of the reformed church that a man may lawfully put away his wife." Another interesting volume is a reprint of a translation of a medieval romance, "The Kisses," written by Johannes Secundes Nicolaios, who was born in 1511. There were only 800 of these reprints made.

Still another is a reproduction in facsimile of the first edition of Shakepeare's poems which were published in 1593. The binding of the edition in leather with the leather strings to tie it together is reproduced. The edition was editied by Sir Sidney Lee. There were only 1,000 of these books published and one is worth $35."

There are many wonderful things about this article, mostly the charming values assigned to the rare volumes. It's also neat to think that many of the volumes published in the 1910's were actually new at the time of this article's writing. The other interesting thing is that I do not remember either On Divorce or The Kisses, on the shelf or on the original shelf list...I wonder where they got that one from...or what became of them.

The other articles will be posted shortly...stay tuned!