The Savoy Autograph Book
<i>"After the Houses of Parliament, the Law Courts, the National Gallery, St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, the Savoy Hotel is probably the building that the well-to-do Londoner knows best” (from The Gourmet's Guide to London, 1914). </I>
A WHO’S WHO OF INTERNATIONAL CULTURAL LIFE, WITH AUTOGRAPH MATERIAL FROM THE MOST IMPORTANT CULTURAL AND POLITICAL FIGURES FROM 1894 THROUGH 1935.
An extraordinary and unique monumental album compiled at London’s Savoy Hotel between 1894 and 1935 by Suirham Notweg, a Savoy employee of unusual artistic ambition and accomplishment. Extending to over 550 pages (approximately 282 leaves) and lavishly hand-illuminated throughout by Notweg, the volume preserves a vast assemblage of autographs, inscriptions, musical quotations, letters, photographs, and documentary fragments gathered from the hotel’s celebrated guests over the course of four decades. Notweg, evidently aware of the historical and cultural significance of the visitors passing through the Savoy, transformed what might have been a mere autograph album into a work of art in its own right, embellishing the pages with elaborate illumination before having the whole sumptuously bound.
The Savoy, opened in 1889, was Britain’s first great luxury hotel and one of the principal social stages of the late Victorian and modern eras. Notweg’s position there gave him access to a remarkable range of public figures—writers, composers, royalty, statesmen, scientists, actors, dancers, athletes, explorers, and military leaders—many of whom contributed to this album not simply signatures but inscriptions, manuscript quotations, signed photographs, and other more personal traces. Because the album was assembled contemporaneously and over such a long period, it offers not merely a gallery of famous names, but an unusually vivid cross-section of international cultural and political life from the fin de siècle through the interwar years.
Among the many highlights are material from major literary figures including Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Alexander Dumas, and Sir Walter Scott; composers and musicians including Claude Debussy, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Giacomo Puccini, Maurice Ravel, Jules Massenet, Edward Elgar, Jean Sibelius, Gabriel Fauré, Fritz Kreisler, and Pablo Casals; scientists and inventors including Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, Guglielmo Marconi, and Marie Curie; and political and royal figures including Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, and numerous European sovereigns, aristocrats, and ministers. The album also contains notable material from the worlds of stage, film, ballet, and sport, including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Sarah Bernhardt, Anna Pavlova, Sergei Diaghilev, Jack Dempsey, Suzanne Lenglen, and Babe Ruth.
Particularly striking is the variety of contributions. Some guests supplied only signatures; others offered much more. Maurice Ravel contributed an extended musical quotation. Puccini inscribed a photograph with musical notation. Jack Dempsey and D.W. Griffith signed on the same evening, after dinner at the Savoy, on 21 April 1922. Babe Ruth, one of the final major additions to the album, signed on Valentine’s Day, 1935. The cumulative effect is less that of an autograph collection in the ordinary sense than of a richly layered historical artifact documenting the social networks and ceremonial culture of one of the world’s great hotels.
Provenance:
In the late 1930s, Notweg sold the album to its second owner, Robert Lee Humber—American lawyer, Rhodes Scholar, international businessman, collector, and later an important advocate of international federation and world peace. Humber, who had studied at Harvard and Oxford and lived for many years in Paris, assembled a distinguished collection that reportedly included the Rembrandt copper plates later given to the North Carolina Museum of Art. With the German invasion of France in 1940, Humber fled Paris with his family and possessions, including the Savoy Book, escaping just before the city fell on 14 June 1940. He eventually reached the United States via Lisbon, arriving in July of that year. Humber would later play a notable role in internationalist circles connected with the Dumbarton Oaks conversations and the broader movement that culminated in the founding of the United Nations.
Humber’s family later sold the book to the third owner where it has remained in a private collection ever since.
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The Savoy Autograph Book stands at the intersection of manuscript culture, celebrity, diplomacy, music, literature, and collecting history. It is both a spectacular visual object and an important documentary witness to the international world of the Savoy in its great years. As an object, the album is remarkable not only for the breadth of its contents, but for the improbable circumstances of its survival: conceived over forty years by a hotel employee with the eye of an artist and the instincts of an archivist; preserved through transfer to a cosmopolitan collector in Paris; and carried out of Europe in the opening days of the Second World War.
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London: The Savoy Hotel, 1894-1935. In spectacular original binding (as assembled by Notweg) of nineteenth-century carved Anglo-Indian rosewood boards. Size: approx. 8 1/2 x 10 x 8 1/2 inches. Only minor wear: extremely well-preserved.
Price: $125,000 .