Looking for a book about antique swords? How about a catalog of vintage wallpaper samples?
You can now find those - and 15,000 other books on antiques and collectibles - at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The research collection of Terry and the late Ralph Kovel has found a new home at the museum’s Ingalls Library.
Leslie Cade, director of the library, said they were "very, very lucky" to acquire the Kovel archive.
"It was very important to us to not only keep the collection together, but also keep it in Cleveland," she said. "The Kovels are a Cleveland treasure, and it was important to us to keep it here in town and intact."
The Shaker Heights couple spent more than six decades as leaders in the field, ever since publishing their first book, 1953's "Dictionary of Marks: Pottery and Porcelain." Nationally syndicated newspaper and magazine columns followed alongside nearly 100 books and several television shows - including "Kovels on Collecting" on Ideastream Public Media's WVIZ.
Cade said the Ingalls, as the third largest art research library in the country, is known primarily for art research. It's the library for the museum's joint program in art history and museum studies with Case Western Reserve University. The Kovel donation expands that.
"It's deep in all of the areas that they have expertise, and it will add a larger dimension to our library by including antiques and collectibles where we don't have as many, if any, research resources,” she said. “For example, one of the topics… is books on metal work. There is a collection of books about toys.”
Transporting the collection to the museum took several weeks.
“She had several shelves, actually, of fakes and forgeries,” Cade said. “So, we selected a small number of those, and I think our first exhibit of Kovel three-dimensional objects will be on fakes and forgeries and how to identify them.”
That exhibit is slated for the library itself, which will make the collection available starting Oct. 27 – Terry Kovel’s 96th birthday. Titles will be searchable at the Ingalls Library website.
“For us, it was kind of book nerd heaven,” she said. “We were very lucky because the Kovels cataloged their entire library. We knew exactly where the books were on the shelf, what the topics were that they were covering. We knew what we could just simply box up and send to the archives without looking at individual titles.”
Some of the books themselves proved to be works of art.
“Those are the things that would stop us in our tracks and then everybody would gather and we'd be ogling these items,” she said. “One in particular that I can think of… a trade catalog of fabric for men's fashions. This is a very interesting book at this point in time as the museum begins to collect fashion. And it provides samples of fabrics that were used to make men's suits. There's also books that have been autographed by authors who are well known, including the son of Gustav Stickley.”
Ralph Kovel was an executive with the Sara Lee Corporation and died in 2008. Terry Kovel taught for many years at Hawken School. The donation of their library follows a gift to the museum in 2022 of James Tissot’s “Two Figures at a Door (The Proposal?).”
