Ex Libris: Stuyvesant Peabody
Fourth in a series highlighting the book collectors whose subject expertise, passion, and resources have contributed to DePaul’s Special Collections
As the quarter ends and summer approaches, we are all thinking about how to spend time outside, get some sun, and spend time with our friends. We will play frisbee, swim, play volleyball, basketball, and tennis...How about foxhunting? Any plans? Perhaps we are a few hundred years too late – foxhunting was an important sport for the English aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This sport was so important in fact that prized books and periodicals were written about it. Stuyvesant Peabody collected such things.
Chicagoan Stuyvesant Peabody was a wealthy man who headed several coal firms such as the Peabody Coal Company, founded by his father. Although his work was in the coal industry, his passion was for sports. He owned his own horse stable and was active in many riding clubs and associations in the Chicago area. In addition to being an athlete himself, Stuyvesant Peabody collected materials from the nineteenth century on a range of sports. His extensive assembly included periodicals, novels, and books on the history of a variety of sports and competitive leisure activities such as foxhunting, horseracing, and gambling.
After his death in 1946, Mr. Peabody’s widow, Anita, donated the Stuyvesant Peabody Sports Collection to DePaul University. This collection of more than 900 items includes
books and periodicals printed in England in the nineteenth century on a
variety of sports-related topics, and specifically caters
to those interested in materials on foxhunting and horseracing –
activities that were representative of the daily lives of the upper
classes. Many of the materials are richly illustrated by Victorian artists such as Robert Seymour and H.K. Browne (“Phiz”), whose work are also featured in DePaul’s Dicken’s Collection. Currently, a selection of these illustrations are on exhibit in Special Collections and Archives through August 2009.
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Many book collectors paste bookplates inside the front covers of their books and the Latin words ex libris, meaning “from the library of,” were often used.
