Sheppard, T. (ed.), Transactions of the Hull Scientific and Field Naturalists' Club, Hull,...

Sheppard, T. (ed.), Transactions of the Hull Scientific and Field Naturalists’ Club, Hull, 1911, including ‘A List of the Seventeenth Century Tokens of Lincolnshire in the Hull Museum’, Hull, 1911 (Manville 706); Sheppard, T., Hull Museum Publications (8), nos. 68, 100, 102, 119, 126, 127, 141, 208 (A List of Yorkshire Medals in the Municipal Museum at Hull; Yorkshire Tramway Tokens and Counters and Yorkshire Seventeenth Century Tokens; Saxon Relics from Barton and Elloughton; Catalogue of Love Tokens and other engraved pieces in the Hull Museum; Quarterly Record of Additions (4), Hull, 1909-40; Smith, S.H. (ed.), Yorkshire Philosophical Society, Annual Report, 1910, including Wakefield, C., ‘Description of the Coins of Edward the Confessor in the Collection of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society’, 12pp, 1 plate; Pickersgill, T., Hull Museum Publications, no. 80 (Roman Coins from South Ferriby), 1911; Sheppard, T., and Musham, J.F., Money Scales and Weights, London, 1923, vi + 221pp, engraved illustrations in text (Manville 840); Whitting, P.D., Coins, Tokens and Medals of the East Riding of Yorkshire, York, 1969, iv + 80pp, 16 plates (Manville 1206); Anon, The Origin and Adventures of a Hull Eighteen-Penny Silver Token, Hull, 1981 reprint, 36pp; Schadla-Hall, R.T., Tom Sheppard, Hull’s Great Collector, Beverley, 1989, 38pp, illustrations in text [15]. Publishers’ bindings, a good group £100-£150 --- Provenance: Burgess Williamson Library. Thomas Sheppard (1876-1945), the indefatigable curator of Hull’s Municipal Museum for 40 years (1901-41), was the eldest of a family of 10 from South Ferriby, Lincolnshire. As a youth he was a railway clerk at Hull docks, but his interests already lay elsewhere, particularly in geology. Taking over a run-down museum, he spent 18 months entirely redisplaying the collection and cataloguing it, before the museum was reopened on 2 June 1902. A prime believer in local museums displaying local material, Sheppard’s ability to coax that material into the collections that he curated by whatever means was legendary, particularly during the period 1910-1925; indeed, one of his contemporaries commented that he had ‘filled his museums and store rooms by the laudable exercise of the same traits as Viking raiders, having, like William the Conqueror, an ingrained habit of annexing objects first and asking, or not asking, permission as seemed expedient afterwards’. His retirement in September 1941 came shortly after the Hull blitzes in May and July of that year, when the city suffered the worst bomb damage outside London and much of what Sheppard had collected and curated was destroyed