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2. The Donation of the Collection
By 1985, petitioner was running out of room to store the
collection, and he had begun to consider selling it. He read an
article about a new museum, AMMI, that would be opening its doors
to the public in Astoria, New York, in the then-near future. He
telephoned Eleanor Mish, the Registrar of AMMI, to inquire
whether the museum would be interested in receiving the
collection as a gift. Ms. Mish told petitioner that AMMI was
interested in receiving such a gift. On September 24, petitioner
wrote to Ms. Mish confirming his offer to donate the collection
to the museum. At some time prior to December 31, 1985,
petitioner donated the collection, consisting of 7,378 pieces, to
AMMI. The December 31, 1985, deed of gift, for which petitioner
supplied an initial inventory, misstates that inventory as 4,347
items. After making the donation, petitioner retained his print
block collection and a large number of stills.
AMMI performed subsequent inventories of the collection and
assigned accession numbers to all items except duplicates. The
duplicate items were physically separated from the rest of the
collection and held for subsequent sale or trade. None of the
duplicates had been disposed of at the time of trial, in part
because of the pendency of this proceeding.
In 1985, AMMI was in the process of preparing a venue in
which to publicly display the collection it was then developing.
The museum did not open its doors to the general public until
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