Alexander Mackay-Smith

"The collection was not brought together by writing big checks to leading dealers. On the contrary it represents days and weeks spent in the bookstalls and shops of London, Paris and Berlin, thumbing over dust-laden stacks of music and piles of books. It represents many hours of study, many hundreds of letters. It was never the sort of collection gathered just for exhibition purposes, but a working library..." 1

Alexander Mackay-Smith's "working library" today forms the nucleus of the University of Virginia's Music Library. The Mackay-Smith Collection, presented to the University in 1946, includes complete runs of what at that time constituted virtually all the major musicological journals, an impressive array of major reference works, bibliographies, printed library catalogues, monographs, and, above all, scores.

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