karpeles manuscript library museums tacoma

About 125,000 people visit them a year and some - for instance, the Buffalo museum - are expanding. Question: Is that why you’ve chosen smaller cities as sites for the museums?ĭavid Karpeles: We wanted places where the collection would be appreciated. Then we took it to Jacksonville, Fla., where 5,000 people came in one day. So we put on a Hitler exhibit and had him speak.ĭavid Karpeles: In 1991, we opened a museum on Central Park West in New York, with an exhibition of the original 1787 draft of the Bill of Rights. Kenneth Rendell, a rare manuscript expert who was analyzing them, contacted us because he wanted to see a couple of our Hitler speeches to help him make a verification. Marsha Karpeles: We exhibited some manuscripts in Montecito in 1983, when a collection of purported Hitler diaries came to light. Question: How did the museums get started? Walking down the street with it, I was so excited I was trembling in my boots. But once I went to New York to buy George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation from a dealer. I got it for exactly that much, though now it’s worth $2 to $3 million.ĭavid Karpeles: No, I used a broker. It showed the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, at an estimated sale price of $40,000. Most of the things for sale were unimportant, but then I turned a page and almost fell off my chair. All of the sudden, everything changed for them.Īt the library I was told that if I wanted to buy rare documents, I had to go to Sotheby’s or Christie’s auction houses. He made mistakes just like me!’ They knew they were looking at originals famous people had touched, a completely different thing from just reading the documents. But then my daughter Leslie said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, here’s a letter written by Thomas Jefferson.’ My son Mark found one by George Washington and said excitedly, ‘Look at the cross-outs. We had two cases left to see when they started asking if we were ready to go.

Question: What made you start collecting?ĭavid Karpeles: In 1977, we took two of our kids to the Huntington Library in San Marino. Morgan, founder of Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. They’ve been married 46 years and have four grown children, and they are more like the down-to-earth retired couple next door than they are like, say, magnate and renowned manuscript collector J.P. Gandhi.ĭavid Karpeles, a tall, courtly man in his late 60s, is a mathematical analyst and real estate tycoon who met petite, energetic Marsha on a blind date. In April, the museum will open “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” juxtaposing documents that evoke the darkest moments in history, such as a speech written by Adolf Hitler, with brighter reflections of mankind, including a letter written by Mohandas K.

When I recently visited the Karpeleses at the museum in Santa Barbara, documents commemorating Black History Month filled the wooden cases, including a letter written in the careful hand of civil rights activist Rosa Parks.

Karpeles manuscript library museums tacoma