The Cover

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Bookplate courtesy of Hillwood Museum & Gardens, Washington, D.C.

The personal bookplate of Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) was a regal representation of her coat of arms. Measuring 8.3 cm by 11.5 cm and colored in gradations of red, blue, and gold with black details, it was an elegant component of Post's grand lifestyle. Serving its purpose well, her bookplate was modified for use in the library. It was re-created in a more affordable black-and-white copy with a decorative border and stylized, less detailed coat of arms in 1987, coinciding with the creation of a new building to house the library.

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Figure 1. Hillwood Museum Library Bookplate

The coat of arms contains the Latin phraseIn Me Mea Spes Omnis, which approximates to "All My Hope Is in Myself." This motto reflects Post's outlook on life. A highly spiritual person, she was a practicing Christian Scientist. A lifelong philanthropist, Post did not take for granted her vast wealth and supported groups such as the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, the Boy Scouts of America, and, in later years, the National Symphony Orchestra. She believed in healthy living and maintained a strict diet, exercised daily, and abstained from drinking alcohol. Post was one of the wealthiest women in the world during her lifetime, and her life motto is an interesting balance of self-sufficiency with the grandeur and spectacle in which she lived.

After assembling the largest collection of Russian decorative arts outside Russia and one of the finest collections of eighteenth-century French decorative arts in America, Marjorie Merriweather Post bequeathed her collections, along with her last Washington, D.C., estate, Hillwood, as a public museum in 1973. An extraordinary art collector, Post initially collected fine French furnishings such as furniture, tapestries, and porcelain. During her brief sojourn in Russia as the wife of ambassador Joseph E. Davies from 1937 to 1938, Post began to collect ecclesiastical objects such as chalices and church vestments. The Russian experience dramatically expanded her collecting focus. Once back in the United States, she would continue to collect imperial Russian arts throughout her lifetime.

To research and develop further her Russian and French collections, she hired Marvin Ross as her full-time curator in 1958. Ross, a first-rate scholar educated at Harvard, had already served as the curator of medieval art at the Brooklyn Museum, curator of medieval, Byzantine, and decorative arts at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, and chief curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With the start of his new career at Hillwood, Ross began gathering reference materials for his research on Post's collections, and thus the library at Hillwood was formed.

However, the library was not an effort to build collections through mass donations or aggressive purchasing and it was not separated from the functions of Ross's office. Ross himself as curator/librarian carefully documented every purchase for the library and naturally supplied a rationale for purchasing more expensive items. Ross remained with the institution until 1976.

After Hillwood opened to the public as a museum in 1977, the reference library was still located in the curatorial offices. In 1986 the trustees of the museum converted Post's former chauffeur's house and garage into the current library. The contents of the library were moved to this new facility, and, as so often happens, the library quickly outgrew its holdings capacity. Today the collection has approximately 8,500 titles.

To maximize shelf space, a reassessment of the library's holdings was begun in 1997 that brought to light an interesting new dimension of the library's and Post's history. It seems that one thanks a beautiful, curious, and intelligent woman who has everything she could possibly need by giving her a book. We discovered many titles that had no relation to the scope of the art collections but always had her colored bookplate and were almost always inscribed as presentation copies...