Curiosity leads to $10,000 collection

              IT ALL STARTED with a child's natural
curiosity about the contents of a neighbor's house. Now it's one of the largest private War Between the States collections In the state of Louisiana.
In 1942, Edward Boagni, now a physician and then a boy of 12, was visiting "across the street" from his Opelousas home during a neighbor's house-cleaning session. While there, he picked up a discarded book containing a photographic history of the War Between the States. His pictures immediately fired his young imagination. He refought each battle, burned to learn more about the great conflict.
Shortly thereafter, his father bought him G. F. R. Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War," and young Edward even took the volume to Boy Scout camp that summer to read during rest periods.
After that, the War Between the States became his hobby, and he began collecting articles pertaining to that craeial period in American history.
At present, Dr. Boagni's collection includes more than 1500 volumes in addition to prints, maps, sheet music, paper money, stamps and autographs of famous military leaders of the war. He also has a collection of color slides he made during two trips across battlefields of the conflict between North and South.
ALTHOUGH it's difficult to place a monetary  value  on  such  a  collection,   Dr. Boagni   estimates   that   it   would   take "around $10,000 to replace an of it."
The most Interesting of his items are Confederate imprints—-books, magazines, pamphlets printed within Confederate territory between December, 1860, and May, 1863.
His search for anything written or printed during the War Between the States has taken him to almost every bookstore in New Orleans and other Southern cities that witnessed the war.
One of his biggest "finds" the doctor recalls, was an almost complete set of "The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies," published 1880-1901, He was only 14 years old at the time and was vacationing in New Orleans with his parents. There were nearly 100 books and he got them for about 30 cents apiece. He spent the next 10 years searching for the remaining volumes of the 130-volume set.
Dr. Boagni's vacation travels have taken him to battlefields in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
"The 'War Between the States Is an interesting hobby," says he, ''because records of both sides were well kept and written In a common language. Most of us are connected to that war by either family or geography. It is considered by most authorities as the first 'modern war,9 but there still was enough individuality left to make each battle interesting. And it is the great epic of American history."
Dr. Boagni, who now is studying internal medicine in New Orleans, says he has paid up to $100 for a single item of his collection, but that much of it was handed down from generation to generation, in his family. A prized family possession is a marble-top table upon which the surrender of Opelousas was signed.
Although Dr. Boagni collects both Confederate and Union articles he is, nevertheless, a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner.
"And to think," he admits, "my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Vincent Boagni, was a Union sympathizer during the war!"