The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, is a very active Museum with an unequaled library and archives of materials concerning glass. Because of a very generous gift, a researchers will soon have available to them images from one of England’s oldest glass companies known to paperweight collectors as Whitefriars. The Museum of London acquired the Whitefriars’ extensive collection of design drawings and cartoons and because of space limitations offered them to the Corning Museum of Glass. The drawings and cartoons represent the Whitefriars Collection of stained glass drawings used to plan a stained glass window. Now the Rakow Research Library will develop an innovative methodology for preserving and digitizing, and making accessible a collection of approximately 5,000-7,000 large-scale, paper-based designs of historical significance from the James Powell and Sons (Whitefriars) glass company.
PCA TX is also represented in the Rakow Collection with a sampling of issues of The Paperweight, the organization’s newsletter. Plans are underway to make the entire body of newsletters available to researchers at the Rakow Research Library. This will allow researchers to follow the history of the Paperweight Collectors Association of Texas, Inc.
