Biographical sketches of the main collectors, with a survey of their manuscripts

George Arthur Plimpton

In an address before the International Mathematical Association at Bologna on September 6, 1928, George Arthur Plimpton (1855–1936) summed up his rationale for book and manuscript collecting as follows: ‘I am a publisher of text-books; my firm (Ginn and Company, of Boston, New York and London) seeks to make the best text-books possible, and I felt that, to do this, it was necessary to know thoroughly the historical development of books of this nature. I, therefore, began to collect such material, both in the manuscript form used in the Middle Ages and in the printed form beginning in the Renaissance period. As a result, my library covers the entire field of education.’ The same philosophy underlies his two books, The Education of Shakespeare (London, 1933) and The Education of Chaucer (London, 1935), which discuss medieval and Renaissance education largely by way of reproductions of books and manuscripts from Plimpton's own collection.

Plimpton was born in Walpole, Massachusetts and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1872 and Amherst College in 1876, where he was a classmate of Melvil Dewey, founder of the library school at Columbia and inventor of the Dewey decimal library classification system (forerunner of the now more widely used Library of Congress system). After a year at Harvard Law School, Plimpton accepted a position running the New York office for Ginn and Heath (later Ginn and Company). He began collecting early American textbooks such as the New England Primer, then expanded to European books after a first trip abroad in 1885. At about the turn of the century he befriended David Eugene Smith (1860–1944), from 1901 a Professor of Mathematics at Columbia Teachers College, who began to buy books for Plimpton and would later catalogue a part of his collection (including about one hundred manuscripts) in Rara Arithmetica (Boston, 1908; Addenda, 1939; see also Donoghue).