On Tuesday 24th February, members of the Postal History Society, in association with 2 other like minded organisations met with a group of Academics at a University in Oxford to discuss ways of building bridges between Collectors of Postal History and their Academic counterparts. A number of high profile auction sales in the past have seen important collections of early letters broken up, many of which now reside in private collections. This has made it hard to cross reference those letters with others from the same sender or to the same recipients. By reaching out to collectors of such letters it is hoped that eventually pieces of interest to both academics & collectors which are in private hands could be made available using a database to assist in filling gaps in the knowledge base. We are still discussing how such a scheme might work but it has been stressed that the personal details of the current owner of any piece on the database will not be made public. 3 such collections have been mentioned in the course of discussions. The Corsini letters, Baldesi/Baldexi letters (a c.1480s Venice merchant) & Biagio Dolfin’s (a Venetian consul in Aleppo, 1418-1420) letters. If you have letters from any of these collections then please write to me with details to secretary@postalhistory.org.uk. Initially just a description of the letter is all that is required. Images will be the next stage. If this goes to plan it will be of enormous benefit to all those interested in how we communicated with each other on a daily basis in late Mediaeval Europe.
Postal History Society