The Harold E. Johnson Jean Sibelius Collection at Butler University: A Complete Catalogue.

How much unnecessary spadework musical biographers are forced to put in, either in ignorance of large private collections of source materials, or under the usually correct assumption that such collections are jealously guarded and will eventually be dispersed through a bookseller's catalogue or lodged in the bowels of an out-of-the-way library! How much preferable it is to have the contents properly preserved and brought to the attention of scholars by means of published catalogues such as this one.

Harold Johnson's well-known book on Sibelius appeared in 1959. Although it was generally well received in English-speaking countries, its Finnish reviewers were highly …