Music, like books, has attracted collectors for centuries; but whereas book-collecting has been well served by innumerable scholarly monographs and studies, the history and techniques of music-collecting have been largely ignored. In choosing British music collectors as the subject of his Sandars lectures, Mr King did much to redress this neglect; and here, in this 1963 volume, these lectures form the first book on the subject in any language. In the course of four lectures Mr King describes the interests and activities of nearly two hundred collectors. He gives details of the rare or interesting items owned by each, and in doing so says something of the character and purpose of collecting in different periods. His researches into the transmission and location of manuscripts and rare printed items carry us through an absorbing range of musical topics, and reveal a remarkable breadth of taste and interest among amateur collectors.
