Sometime in the early 1970s, David Karpeles, a former math professor who was
beginning to make his fortune in real estate in Santa Barbara, Calif., took his
family for a day's excursion at the Huntington Museum, where Thomas
Gainesborough's famous portrait,The Blue Boy, was on exhibit.
Karpeles liked the painting; but what fascinated him was the library's
manuscript room, where he found such items as a signed pass giving Abraham
Lincoln's bodyguard the night off so Lincoln could go to the theater.
What surprised Karpeles was that documents that seemed historically
significant, that bore the signatures of men such as George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson, were in a private collection, not the National Archives (when
he asked about that, Karpeles was told that the National Archives hadn't existed
until 1934).
Karpeles was also fascinated by the way his children reacted to the
manuscripts. They had ignored the paintings in the museum but seeing the
signatures of Washington and Jefferson seemed to intrigue them.
Karpeles, who had collected stamps and coins during his Minnesota boyhood,
began to check the catalogs of Sotheby's and Christy's, the two largest firms
handling art auctions, in search of manuscripts he might buy. But it was not
until 1978 that he bought his first, a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation
signed by Lincoln. He paid $40,000 for it at auction and was delighted with the
bargain. "To me it was worth millions," Karpeles said during a visit to
Jacksonville last weekend.
He was in town for theng of Sprinkles' When I Grow Up, an interactive
children's museum on the ground floor of the building which houses his
Jacksonville Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum.
Once Karpeles began collecting manuscripts, he began accumulating them
rapidly. In those days, Karpeles said, most manuscripts were owned by
universities, which regularly put them up for sale to aid in fund-raising.
Karpeles jumped into the market and used a simple bidding strategy: He
presumed he was bidding against experts, who knew how much was appropriate to
bid on any item. He simply kept bidding until the experts quit.
That strategy eventually stopped working for two reasons. One was that "this
crazy nut" began to corner the market on manuscripts, maker them a much scarcer,
more prized commodity. (He was the crazy nut.) The other reason was that a
couple of other amateurs, Malcolm Forbes and Ross Perot, got involved, so it was
no longer a sure thing that he was bidding against experts who knew when to stop
bidding.
But in the interim, Karpeles had accumulated a collection that now numbers
more than 1 million documents.
Realizing that what he liked was not just collecting documents, but sharing
them with other people as well, Karpelesd his first museum in 1983 near
his home in Montecito, Calif. A second Karpelesd in New York City and
remained on Central Park for several years. But attendance was so poor there
Karpeles decided to close that museum and look for locations that weren't
already teeming with cultural life.
When his son-in-law and daughter, Bob and Cheryl Alleman, were offered a
choice of cities to locate (Bob Alleman is a sales representative for the
company that manufactures Gore-Tex), they chose Jacksonville partly because it
seemed a good spot for a Karpeles museum.
It helped that they found a wonderfully, architecturally appealing building,
a former church built in Greek revival style, on First Street in Springfield,
between Boulevard and Laura Street about a block and a half from Florida
Community College at Jacksonville Downtown Campus. "He falls in love with a
building first," Cheryl Alleman said of her father. The Karpeles Manuscript
Library Museumd here in 1992.
Using a computer to keep track of the documents, which are filed in a climate
controlled, steel-lined room, Karpeles personally organizes four manuscript
exhibits a year for each of his seven manuscript libraries (the others are in
Santa Barbara; Tacoma, Wash.; Duluth, Minn.; Buffalo, N.Y.; and Charleston,
S.C.).
The Jacksonville Karpeles includes 26 display cases for housing the exhibits.
Currently, the cases are filled with documents relating to medical history,
including one drawn up by Benjamin Franklin, incorporating America's first
hospital, one from Clara Barton announcing the formation of the Red Cross, and
documents signed by such medical pioneers as William Harvey, Francis Crick,
Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner.
Almost all the documents in each exhibit are originals. Occasionally
photocopies are used, usually because the originals are too fragile to travel.
The Jacksonville Karpeles also maintains a collection of photocopies, either to
fill out exhibits that don't fill all 26 display cases or to circulate to
schools that want them.
The museum also houses rotating art exhibits, about six a year. The current
exhibit, which will continue through the end of February, features assemblages
and prints by Jim Smith, who teaches art at The Bolles School.
There is no admission charge to the Karpeles, which isto the public
from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. Last year, an estimated 50,000
people either visited the museum or were involved in one of its community
outreach programs.
Marsha Karpeles, who married her husband when she was a freshman at the
University of Minnesota and he was a young math professor, said operating the
free museums is an outgrowth of the idealism they both absorbed growing up in
Minnesota. "It's our chance to do public service, our chance to give it back,"
said Marsha Karpeles, who has gone back to college to earn bachelor's and
master's degrees in creative writing. "Some people travel the world; some people
collect jewelry. This is what we do."
