Robert Carl Sticht

Robert Carl Sticht (8 October 1856 – 30 April 1922) was an American metallurgist and copper mine manager, active in Colorado and Montana, U.S.A. and in Tasmania, Australia.

[3] Sticht's time at Mount Lyell was marked by a disastrous underground fire at the North mine on 12 October 1912, when some 42 miners died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

He died at Launceston, Tasmania, on 30 April 1922 and was succeeded by Russell Mervyn Murray, an employee for whom he had little regard[4] but who managed the mines successfully for a similar length of time.

[6][7] As Heather Lowe wrote in the Art Journal: Sticht’s collecting activities were far broader than has been recognised...: in the first decade of this century he was to gather in his home on the remote west coast of Tasmania important collections not only of oil paintings, works on paper, incunabula and antiquarian books, book bindings, title pages, inscribed fly-leaves, and watermarks, but also of anthropological artefacts and mineral and botanical specimens.

Spencer later described it as "the finest library yet sold in Australia" and noted that "[i]t was rich in general literature as well in Australiana, beginning with manuscripts written before the invention of printing, going on to many items of incunabula, then on to great books through the centuries.

[9] These included a number of early Bibles, Euclid's Elementa (1482) (one of only three complete copies in the world), the 'Hendriks collection' of fly-leaves and title-pages, numbering over 3000 pieces, 137 volumes of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the twenty-two volumes of Georg Kaspar Nagler's Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (1835–1852), Richard Earlom's Liber veritatis, or, A collection of two hundred prints, after the original designs of Claude Le Lorrain (1777), J.H.