Museum Books Back Where They Belong
after 92-Year Loan
Ten Chinese volumes, two of which were printed in 1585, have returned to New York City’s American Museum of Natural History after an inadvertent 92-year loan to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
Soren Edgren, a bibliographer hired in 1990 by the American Museum to aid in its cataloging of 500 books it bought in China between 1901 and 1904, realized that a few volumes were missing from several encyclopedia sets. He discovered that Bertholt Laufer, a China scholar who purchased some of the missing volumes for the American Museum, was hired by the Field in 1908. “It was evident that Laufer was busily in the middle of some research project when he moved to Chicago,” Edgren said in the November 5 Chicago Tribune. “He was a scrupulous individual, so I’m sure he intended to return [the books], but somehow he didn’t.”
The Field Museum, which is planning to digitize its own catalog, returned the books in early autumn following an internal review that confirmed the rightful owner was indeed the New York institution.
Posted November 13, 2000.
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