Collecting Books

Collecting Photography Books

The "golden age of book collecting" took place over a period of several decades roughly a century ago. In those days, even the greatest books from the history of moveable type were still available to private buyers; book collecting was a fashionable and high-status activity, and vying for rare treasures was an accepted sport of the ultra-rich — and sometimes a downright obsession. It was in those days that famous multi-millionaires such as J. P. Morgan, Henry Huntington, and Henry Clay Folger put together the exquisite libraries that bear their names. In certain cases, even bookdealersbecame famous celebrities. In the 1920s, when a Shakespeare first folio sold for a record $50,000, it was front-page news inThe New York Times. The burgeoning collection of one gung-ho young blueblood book collector, Harry Widener, became the core of Harvard's Widener Library (one of the five or six greatest libraries in the world today) after the eponymous H...