Moses Znaimer’s MZTV Museum of Television and Archive seeks to protect, preserve and promote the receiving instruments of Television History. Whereas other North American museums of broadcasting feature programs, ours is unique in its focus on the history and evolution of the technology, as well as on the sets themselves. The Museum exhibits the world’s most comprehensive collection of television receivers for the formative sixty-year period from the 1920s to the 1980s. It also offers specialized displays devoted to receiver design, to TV signals in space, and to the museum’s signature Philco Predicta line of sets. It is home to celebrity sets from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley; to the 1939 Worlds’ Fair RCA Phantom Teleceiver, the rarest television on the planet; to Felix The Cat, the first star of television; as well as to special tributes to John Logie Baird and Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventors of mechanical and electronic television. The Museum works to tell the story of the medium, to contribute to the understanding of the impact of television on the people who watch it, and to recover the names and reputations of the Pioneers who invented it. Together with original papers, discs, books, magazines, toys, spare parts, and other pop culture artifacts and ephemera, the collection offers over 25,000 objects to scholars and students as well as the general public.
CQ refers to The Cinémathèque québécoise OML refers to Olympus Management Limited I have appraised the CQ and OML collections separately, but I wish to add some comments that apply to both. Both collections are internationally world class in themselves. Neither collection could be recreated to any large extent regardless of the budget available. This is because both collections contain many items which are either unique examples or else all other known duplicates are already in public collections and will thus never be available again to purchase. The television sets in both collections have been individually valued, but as a whole both the CQ and the OML pre WWII TV sets are more than the sum of their parts so it is reasonable to employ a multiplier to each to represent their values as individual collections. After much thought I think it is reasonable to double their cumulative values to achieve a realistic price. I have made one exception to this in the CQ collection. It seems to me that the World’s Fair Lucite TRK 12 is such an outstanding artefact of technology with such a solid and historically important provenance that it stands alone. I have therefore valued this separately and applied the multiplier to the rest of the CQ TV sets. As stated above both collections are world class in themselves, but if they were ever to be combined in the future the resulting collection would be quite extraordinary. The CQ and the OML collections compliment each other very precisely and specifically. The duplication in the television sets, libraries and TV artefacts is minimal. This is not surprising since they were both created by the same man, forming the OML collection after the sale of the CQ collection. The core of the CQ collection is the US low definition and US pre war electronic televisions, while the core of the OML television collection is the pre-war British electronic televisions and the library. The two libraries would also combine with minimal duplication. The addition of the mainly US library in the CQ collection makes a substantial contribution to the US section in the OML international TV library whilst the UK, German and French sections are already comprehensive in themselves. Taken together the two collections would create easily the finest and most comprehensive museum of early television receivers and the finest international reference library on early television anywhere in the world bar none. If the OML collection is added to the CQ collection I would value the total museum holdings at CAD$25m (twenty five million dollars). Michael Bennett-Levy March 2015