https://iandonmitch.wixsite.com/booksai
In about the year 1978, while on a visit to London, I purchased my first antiquarian West Indian book. I no longer recall its title or its cost. Acquiring antique books about the Caribbean became my hobby that lasted for two decades. Well, perhaps it was an obsession.
By the time the passion dimmed, I had acquired over two thousand books and pamphlets.
My only rules were that the books must be in the English language, concern the West Indies, and be non-fiction. There were hundreds of travelogues, studies on geology and geography, politics, economics and sociology, biography and autobiography, and ethnographic studies. History and travel predominated, but included were volumes of Parliamentary Papers concerning the colonial administration of the West Indies, and items on both sides of the slavery abolition controversy.
In the early days one was required to visit antiquarian bookshops and conduct physical searches to find a book, but gradually bookstores began to issue catalogues which one could request by mail. Additionally, one could subscribe to publishers of West Indian books and scour their annual catalogues. These proved useful for adding to the collection and to the list I had begun to keep. Published bibliographies on a number of relevant topics proved invaluable for developing the booklist. Later, when the catalogues of the British Library and the Library of Congress became searchable online, the number of West Indian books published over the previous 500 years grew exponentially. A visit to the ILAB and ABAA websites proved invaluable as a source of inexpensive second-hand items for the collection.
On a bus tour through South Island at the 1990 Commonwealth Lawyers Conference in Aukland, New Zealand, I found a book that was on my must-get list. I saw the price and realised I could get it for less than half the price I had previously seen it listed elsewhere. I purchased it immediately. When I got home, I found I was adding it to two other copies that I had forgotten I had. This happened several times.
I realised I had to do something to stop accidentally purchasing unneeded duplicate copies. The solution was to make a list of the books in my collection noting the author, the title, the edition number, and whether it was a hard-back or a paper-back. Thereafter, I travelled with the list everywhere so I could consult it before purchasing anything. Eventually, I added to the list the titles that I would like to see in the collection but had not yet collected. I noted the editions of each item that I had, noting every other edition that existed. If I had the first edition, and came across a third, I did not hesitate to buy it, even though it might be counted as a duplicate.
At first, the list was on paper. By 2001, when I last printed it out, it was over 500 pages long in Ariel .9 font, and too cumbersome to carry with me on my visits to bookstores. I decided to abandon paper and use only an electronic version.
My definition of the West Indies for the purposes of my collection was a personal one and not a conventional one. It was any English-speaking Island or Country in or bordering the Caribbean Sea, excluding the United States. The list of Islands and Countries of the West Indies was eventually to become quite long: https://iandonmitch.wixsite.com/booksai/islands-and-countries.
As the collection grew over the years, the problem of housing them also grew. I was not happy keeping them in my law chambers in the Valley in Anguilla on exposed shelves. I worried about silver fish, termites, and other tropical vermin doing damage. I was concerned about the possibility of damage from ultraviolet radiation from daylight coming through the windows and from fluorescent bulbs. Published studies on archival documents recommended they be stored on bookshelves closed by glass fronted panes. A windowpane filters out as much ultraviolet light as several feet of water. There was the risk of damage from passersby handling them with oily fingers. Then, there was the danger of theft from leaving them lying on exposed shelving. With the help of Anguilla’s renowned furniture maker brothers, Arthur and Albertus Richardson of Richardson’s Furniture Makers on the Waterswamp road, I had eight-foot high, glass-fronted, mahogany bookcases made to house them. Each of the bookcases was kept locked in my law chambers. The number of bookcases grew over the years, until there were ten of them. I stored the books in alphabetical order by name of the author or editor.
By the time I turned the books and pamphlets over to the Anguilla National Trust (ANT) in about 1999, as I was temporarily leaving Anguilla to take up a judgeship in St Vincent, the numbers had increased to over two thousand. I decided it was time to donate them to the Anguilla National Trust. Because the ANT did not at the time have room to house the collection, it was temporarily placed for safekeeping in the national library in a locked room normally used by the chief librarian where it is to be found today. A visiting librarian from the University of the West Indies complimented me by describing the collection as one of the best in private hands he had ever seen.
Some of the items were quite old, others were recently published. Two of my proudest acquisitions were:
The 1666 History of the Caribby-Islands by Charles de Rochefort…Rendered into English by John Eden of Kidwelly;
Aucher Warner – Sir Thomas Warner, Pioneer of the West Indies...(A limited edition of 500 copies most of which were lost during WW II)
Ken Evoy, a Canadian computer expert resident in Anguilla and the publisher of one of the first on-line travel websites about Anguilla, first published the booklist for me on the web. We called it books.ai. He, and subsequently his daughter Nori, kept the publication up for several years until unknown to me it was abandoned, and I lost it. I recently found a somewhat distorted version of the Eleventh Edition on Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20160113224400/http://www.books.ai/. It took another twenty years for me to find a young and talented website designer, Carlton Smith of East End, to help me publish online a revised edition. He used the Wix platform. The result is the Twelfth Edition which went live in February 2024: https://iandonmitch.wixsite.com/booksai.
Some of the antiquarian bookstores I visited on my travels included sections of antique maps, including maps of the West Indies. I began collecting them and shipping them home to Anguilla. I had no specialisation, the only requirement being that it must generally be a map of Anguilla or of the West Indies, preferably showing a mention of Anguilla. Some of my prouder acquisitions included:
Benedetto Bordone – Isolaria, (first published in 1528, of which I had two copies of his map of the West Indies from later sixteenth century editions);
John Alder Burdon – The Presidency of St Kitts-Nevis (Printed in 1921, the first work to contain a map of Anguilla correctly shaped. Carter Rey was credited with having done the survey. Previous maps tended to show Anguilla as tadpole shaped).
I kept the map collection in large, hardcover portfolios in no particular order. Each map was stored in archival quality, transparent envelopes for protection from light and from handling. I included this collection in my 1999 donation to the ANT. The portfolios are stored laying flat on the tops of the bookcases.
I have reminded ANT’s executive director and the Chief Librarian of the danger of damage or theft. No visitor to the library, local or foreign should be left alone with the collections. Some of the illustrations and plates are on sale internationally for substantial sums of money and can be easily removed with a razor blade. Some of the more valuable books and maps would fetch thousands of pounds today. For the collection to be kept safe and intact, it is best to assume that any foreign visitor asking to see the collection, is, especially if he is a collector or a dealer, intent on stealing what he can. The keys to the cabinets should be kept secured, accessible only to a very few senior staff.
I am happy to have been relieved of the responsibility of keeping the collections safe in my possession. My hope is that if they are preserved well into the future, they will prove useful to future generations of Anguillian scholars needing to refer to them for research purposes. The box of white cotton gloves I provided with the collection will help to ensure the paper is not damaged by handling, if use of the gloves is insisted on.
