Word: isham
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...sense, the papers had been on their way to New Haven for 23 years, ever since Ralph H. Isham (Yale '14) first heard of them. One batch had been uncovered in Ireland's Malahide Castle in 1927, another in Scotland. Isham bought the Malahide papers, and after years of dickering acquired the rest. Scholars hailed them as the greatest literary find of the century...
...Frighten. How quickly Davy did, and how painfully Sam Johnson had to struggle for his bread, is the story Margaret Barton undertakes to tell. The book is one more in the succession of works on Johnson and his circle, many of them no doubt stimulated by Lieut. Colonel Ralph Isham's astonishingly successful search for missing Johnson and Boswell manuscripts since World War I (TIME, Nov. 29). Miss Barton's book is highly readable biography in its own right and one of those solid English performances as thick and tasty as an English pudding...
...Boswell's great-great-grandson Lord Talbot. U.S. Bibliophile A.S.W. Rosenbach immediately cabled an offer of $250,000 for the lot. Lord Talbot huffily refused ("Who is this person?" he demanded). Another U.S. collector tried a different approach: he dropped in for tea. Courtly Lieut. Colonel Ralph H. Isham, a Yale man who had served in the British Army during World War I, got along famously with Lord Talbot. A few months later, he had bought the Malahide papers...
...only the beginning. In 1936, a second wandering scholar announced that he had stumbled upon another cache of papers scattered throughout Scotland's Fettercairn House, home of Lord Clinton, descendant of Boswell's executor Sir William Forbes. Under the terms of his deal with Lord Talbot, Colonel Isham claimed those papers too, and after years of wrangling over Boswell's will, won half of them from a Scottish court. The other half, which had been awarded to the heirs of Boswell's granddaughter, he bought. Meanwhile, Malahide had yielded yet another batch-a cache as large...
Wealthy U.S. Bibliophile Ralph Heyward Isham made out better. He showed up at Malahide Castle in person, got on well with the family, in 1927 came away with the Malahide Papers for a rumored $300,000 to $500,000 (TIME, March 9, 1936). Three years later he got another batch that Lady Talbot discovered in an old croquet box. She had carefully inked out all of Boswell's uninhibited indiscretions, gave experts the 18-month job of restoring the deletions. Not until the mid-'30s were the Malahide Papers issued, in a $900 limited edition...