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“Collecting Passions” will remain on display through the second week of November
(LITTLE ROCK, ARK.) – Autographs are among the earliest things known to have been
intentionally collected: autograph manuscripts were prized in the days of the
Caesars, and are no less so today. Autographs (including not just signatures,
but original letters, manuscripts and documents) are historical records—but
they can be much, much more. The information contained in an autograph
may be equally accessible from a facsimile, but there is no romance in a
replica; for autograph collectors, there is no substitute for a document, even
small a fragment of paper with a scrawled signature, that is a physical
survivor of a time and place in the past.
This autumn, the Capitol displays a choice collection of
autographs and other papers that testify to personal collecting enthusiasms of
a person well known to the Capitol: Cory Cox, attorney and Chief of Staff for
the state’s Attorney General. Our exhibit, “Collecting Passions,” offers
a rich sample of originals—signatures and other items—that reflects Cox’s love
of Arkansas’s history, particularly its political leaders.
Notable materials include the signatures of Governor John
Little, who suffered a mental and physical collapse days after his inauguration
in January 1907, and United States Senator Stephen Wallace Dorsey, a post-Civil
War Republican after whom an Arkansas county was named, only to be later
renamed by a Democratic-controlled state legislature.
“Collecting
Passions” will remain on display through the second week of November.
Narrated by Capitol Historian, Dr. David Ware
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