The Edward Heron-Allen Collection in the Royal College of Music Library‪.‬

Edward Heron-Allen (1861-1943) is now mainly remembered for his book on the violin, Violin Making, As It Was and Is (2), despite the fact that this volume represents but one of his extraordinary achievements in the field of the literature of stringed instruments. While some may know of the Edward Heron-Allen collection in the Royal College of Music (RCM) Library, where it has resided for over 50 years, it is probable that few researchers have studied the collection's contents in any detail. Some libraries may have his bibliography of writings on stringed instruments, De Fidiculis Bibliographia: Being an Attempt Towards a Bibliography of the Violin (3), a work remarkable in scope for its time and still well-respected for its comprehensiveness, but relatively few may know the sheer scale of his musical addictions. Heron-Allen was a collector, a bibliographer, and a violin-maker. He was much more besides, as will be related. Writing in November 1890 an introductory note to the first volume of his great bibliography of the violin, De Fidiculis Bibliographia, Heron-Allen describes how the process of researching and checking the entries in that work led to the development of his collection. Whether the process of collecting had always been as important to him as the information which the collection provided is a debatable point, but the results were indisputably important, as he acknowledges: