User:Andy02124/sandbox/Olga Hirsch

Olga Anna Henriette Hirsch (26 March 1889 – 18 June 1968 in Cambridge, England), was an historian of decorated papers and the founder of the Olga Hirsch Collection of Decorated Papers now held by the British Library.

Biography
Olga Anna Henriette Ladenburg was the daughter of Mannheim-born banker Ernst Ladenburg (1854-1921) and Sophie Friederike Georgine Ladenburg, née Schramm (1866–1895). She married Paul Hirsch (1881–1951) in Frankfurt am Main in 1911. They had two sons and two daughters, born between 1911 and 1920.

Paul Hirsch was a well-known collector of publications relating to music performance, history and theory. His music library had been available to the public since 1909. In order to help care for bound items in the library, Olga Hirsch studied bookbinding at the Buchbinderei Ludwig in Frankfurt. In 1922 Paul co-founded the Frankfurt Bibliophile Society, serving as chairman from 1922 to 1934; his wife was also a member of the society.

Hirsch died on 18 June 1968 in Cambridge and was buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, alongside her husband. She left the paper collection to the British Museum. It is now the British Library's Olga Hirsch Collection of Decorated Papers.[24] The aesthetic richness of the collection is reflected in a 2015? publication by P.J.M. Marks.

Collecting
In January 1916, fascinated by the beauty of decorated papers, Olga Hirsch acquired a 2000-piece collection of marbled, printed or embossed colored paper from the antiquarian Jacques Rosenthal (1854–1937) in Munich. She studied the holdings of the colored paper collection in the Staatliche Kunstbibliothek (State Art Library) in Berlin and was granted a thorough insight into the operations of the colored paper factory AG, Aschaffenburg.[13] She dealt with the statements[15][16] by Paul Kersten and complained about his view that focused on Germany and that Italy and France were not sufficiently taken into account.[13]

She divided her own collection into four groups defined by production method: coated and paste paper, Marbled paper, embossed and brocaded paper, and printed paper. She devoted particular research effort to her collection of embossed papers, which she had classified according to the depicted subjects and whose origins she sought to determine with a focus on Augsburg, Fürth and Nuremberg as well as Italy. When it came to printed paper, she was interested in the close relationship to textile printing and the correspondence of the pattern with the respective fashion.[13]

In Frankfurt, the collection of decorated paper was housed with the music library in a long, gallery-like wing of the house at Neue Mainzer Straße 57. Before emigrating, Hirsch managed to acquire duplicates of colored paper from public museums in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Kassel.[18] The news spread in Germany in 1937 that the decorated paper collection had fallen victim to a fire after it had been brought to England in 1936. However, the story turned out to be false. Rather, in the decades that followed, she supplemented this collection with further acquisitions, including valuable book covers.

Emigration
Because of increasing persecution of the Jews after the National Socialists seized power in 1933, the couple prepared to emigrate to England with their collections. After Paul Hirsch left the country unnoticed in May 1936, substantial parts of the music library were taken to England on August 12, 1936. Olga Hirsch's entire paper collection was packed in some of the twelve crates that had not yet been shipped and which were confiscated from the warehouses of Spedition Fermont in Frankfurt. After protracted negotiations in which the city demanded seven volumes "as a gift", the remaining crates were sent on to Cambridge.[5] In 1948, the Hirschs initiated a claim for restoration of the seven "gifted" items; they were not located and returned until 1953, two years after Paul had died.

In the early years of exile Hirsch was in close contact with an American collector, Rosamond B. Loring (1889-1950), who like herself was also bookbinder, decorated paper maker, and author. The two women were able to trade paper samples, enriching the collections of both. For half a century she corresponded with museums, booksellers, bookbinders and restorers and, on her travels and from her wide circle of friends, she collected whole sheets and sections of colored paper. This collection and its extensive specialist library enabled Albert Haemmerle to work with her within two years to publish an internationally recognized basic work on the history of colored paper on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Buntpapierfabrik Aschaffenburg AG.

Although her husband never set foot on German soil after emigrating, Olga Hirsch accepted an invitation from two groups in Cologne, the Bibliophilen-Gesellschaft and the friends of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, to deliver a lecture on woodcut covers and colored paper on 25 October 1958.