Huntington and Folger: Book Collectors With a Purpose

IN THE 1850S, in the state of New York, were born two boys destined to become great captains of industry, men of wealth and power. The second half of the nineteenth century was an era of opportunity for moneymaking; what made these two children different was that they not only became millionaires but they utilized their millions to found two famous libraries devoted to the advancement of learning. They were Henry Edwards Huntington, born at Oneonta, New York, in 1850, and Henry Clay Folger, born in New York City in 1857.

In later life Huntington and Folger came to know each other through the books each was buying. Though they never became fast friends, each developed a healthy respect for the other’s zeal as a bibliophile. Occasionally their interests clashed in the book market, but they engaged in no spectacular battles over books. Folger was too careful and shrewd to tackle a plunger like Huntington head on in the auction room.

In the manner of the rugged individualists of the period, neither Huntington nor Folger revealed their plans to endow research institutions until they were approaching the ends of their lives. It is possible that their silence resulted from indecision. Huntington was the first to formulate and announce his plan for a public institution. The Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California, was established by a deed of trust dated in 1919, and it opened as a public research institution in 1927. The cornerstone of the Folger Library in Washington, 19. C., was laid in 1930, and it opened its doors to students in 1932. Both of these foundations represented something new in library history and something peculiar to the United States — the concept of a library as an active research institution instead of a passive repository of books and manuscripts.

In the early 1900s, when Henry E. Huntington was buying the books which a well-to-do man of that day thought he ought to have in his house — handsomely bound sets of standard authorshe probably never dreamed that book collecting would one day become his preoccupation. In 1903 he began the development of a ranch near Los Angeles, in a suburb named San Marino, after the tiny Italian republic, and there he built his home, and later his library. If Huntington displayed any collecting instincts at this time, they ran to cacti. To this day the cactus garden in San Marino is a significant if bizarre illustration of Huntington’s determination to have the best of whatever he went after. The only books bought in this early period which found an important place in his later library were a few private-press books and a complete set of the publications of the Kelmscott Press.

During the next few years, Huntington was preoccupied with business enterprises, but he did buy a few handsome bindings and a few rarities which excited comment from his friends. In the Henry Poor sales of 1908 and 1909, he grew a little bolder and bought, through agents, more than 1600 lots scattered over a variety of fields. After another sale he found himself the possessor of some French fiction and erotica which so horrified him that he got rid of it. As yet his only philosophy of collecting was negative. He knew some things that he did not want — French fiction and erotica, for example — but he had not decided on any particular objective.

HUNTINGTON’S initiative as a great collector began with his retirement from business in 1910. This second career, in which he put together whole libraries as he had consolidated railways and real estate holdings, is almost incredible, for no previous connoisseur of books had ever brought together a collection of such importance in so short a time. A man of restless energy and great wealth, he simply shifted gears from business to collecting and applied the same methods to his new avocation.

His entry into the book market coincided with the sale of several of the finest collections in the world. Within fifteen years Huntington had an opportunity such as had never occurred before, nor ever would again, to buy great libraries intact and to fuse them into his own collection. His first notable purchase was a magnificent collection of early Americana and Elizabethan literature belonging to E. Dwight Church, which he bought in 1911 for something over a million dollars. That deal whetted his appetite, and from then until his death in 1927 he was a plunger in the book market. Prices soared, dealers grew prosperous, and Huntington paid what it took to obtain the books he wanted. At his death the book market naturally suffered a severe slump.

No one knows with certainty when Huntington first began thinking of devoting his fortune to the founding of a cultural institution, but around 1919 he came under the spell of an imaginative and brilliant scientist, scholar, and humanist, George Ellery Hale, then director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena. Hale convinced him that desultory book collecting would never be significant, that scarcity, beauty, and costliness were not adequate criteria for book buying, that a collection of the rarest and finest books in the world must have a purpose. Furthermore, Hale, himself an ardent admirer of the British tradition, pointed out the importance to Americans of a library where they could study their own distant backgrounds. This idea appealed strongly to Huntington, who began to center his buying on Anglo-American history and literature. Hale succeeded almost too well, for Huntington concentrated so exclusively on books in the English language that he would often sell off books in foreign languages acquired in en bloc purchases, books which he should have retained. For example, in one purchase he obtained a fine lot of plays adapted by David Garrick and others from the French, but the French originals in the same lot he was willing to let go.

Another idea of Hale’s had important repercussions: a static repository of books, he argued, would lapse into a dusty mausoleum, neglected and forgotten, unless provisions were made to keep it alive and used. A detailed plan drafted by Hale to create a faculty of scholars who would form a permanent research staff and presumably have a hand in shaping the future policies of the institution appealed so strongly to Huntington that he provided an endowment sufficient to maintain such a faculty, in addition, of course, to the regular library staff.

In 1927 Max Farrand, previously a professor of history at Yale, accepted the post of director of research and began recruiting a permanent staff of scholars. The library made provision for the appointment of temporary research fellows and visiting scholars; it established a journal of research and adopted a plan for the publication of scholarly books originating in research undertaken at the Huntington Library. Since 1927 hundreds of scholars from all parts of the world have come to San Marino; the library has published scores of significant books and an untold number of learned essays; and the prestige of its research program has caused other bibliophiles and library administrators to follow its example.

But we have outrun our story of Huntington as a collector. Even before his ideas had been centered by Hale in a library dedicated to the interpretation of the Anglo-American background, Huntington was buying libraries which contained significant raw material for his potential research institution. He not only had the immense advantage of the sales of rich American collections like the Church, Hoe, Chew, and Halsey libraries, but he also profited from the disposal of some of the great English libraries when families were forced to sell liquid assets to pay increased death duties during and after World War I.

The most remarkable of the English libraries was that from Bridgewater House, a library begun by Sir Thomas Egerton, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and augmented for three centuries by his descendants, the Earls of Bridgewater, and other Egertons, notably the first Earl of Ellesmere. The earliest portion of this library contained copies of books and manuscripts presented to Sir Thomas Egerton, a generous patron of writers, by hopeful authors of the Elizabethan period, including Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, Captain John Smith, and scores of others. Because the Egertons had for three centuries played an important role in England’s history, their archives held many documents of first importance. Here were reports on the state of the British Navy in the reign of Charles I, papers concerning the formation of the Hudson’s Bay Company, diplomatic correspondence over long periods, and countless letters of importance. I think the most noteworthy single unit in the Egerton papers was the collection made by John Larpent, deputy to the Lord Chamberlain from 1778 to 1824, of all the plays submitted for license during his tenure and for the preceding forty years. These plays, added to more than 7500 plays obtained from the Duke of Devonshire, gave the Huntington Library a text of 90 percent of the drama performed on the English stage from the period of the earliest religious drama to 1824.

Other great English collections included the Americana from Britwell Court; the Battle Abbey manuscripts, an enormous collection of the muniments of the abbey founded by William the Conqueror to commemorate his victory at the Battle of Hastings; the Stowe Manuscripts, containing the papers of the Temple, Grenville, Brydges, and other families, extending over more than two centuries; and the Hastings-Huntingdon Papers, consisting of over 40,000 documents from the muniments of various Earls of Pembroke, Earls of Huntingdon, Earls of Loudon, and others. In 1917 the New York Times estimated that for the previous six years Huntington had been spending a million dollars a year on books. No accurate report has ever been made of the total he expended, but the figure would run into many, many millions of dollars.

Huntington had a sixth sense about the intrinsic worth of books which he might never read himself; and he stuck to his plan of building an AngloAmerican research institution. Buying whole libaries en bloc, he naturally acquired many duplicates, which he sold off to increase his capital for fresh purchases. One series of fifteen auctions, beginning in 1916, netted him more than half a million dollars. A California friend of Huntington’s once observed him in a New York auction room avidly bidding. Since Huntington was known normally to buy through an agent, this friend approached him during an intermission and remarked on the unusual event. “Sh-sh-sh, I’m not buying, I’m selling,” Huntington replied. He was busy running up the price of some of his duplicates.

By quickly translating duplicates into ready cash — sometimes at almost enough to amortize the price he had paid for a library — Huntington managed to have enough ready capital to outbid most of his competitors. So vast were his purchases that when the library published, in 1931, its first Bulletin, the mere enumeration of the principal collections, with a thumbnail description of each, required seventy-one pages.

The pictures which Huntington bought also represented his interest in the British tradition. Although in his late years he was persuaded by Joseph Duveen to buy two million dollars’ worth of miscellaneous art as a memorial to his second wife, Arabella D. Huntington, his own preference was for portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, and Romney, portraits of satin-coated Englishmen and their ladies, who represented to Huntington the stability and sterling virtues of a nation he admired. In his eyes, these poised men and women were the essence of that solid conservatism in which he believed.

In the course of the years the Huntington Library has become a mecca for academic pilgrims. In the midst of a 207-acre ranch, Huntington established a scholar’s paradise, with gardens, lawns, and winding walks under the live-oak trees, a baronial estate which at times has troubled the administrators because of the cost of upkeep. But it has given pleasure to a growing number of readers privileged to study in unaccustomed comfort. The general public, and a multitude of tourists. are admitted to the grounds, the art gallery, and the exhibition rooms of the library proper. But to a few thousand students and scholars throughout the world, this is one of the great research libraries of the world. By Huntington’s will, it was given to the nation, to be governed by a self-perpetuating board of five trustees.

IN CONTRAST to Huntington, Henry Clay Folger was at heart a bookman and scholar whose fate consigned him to business enterprises. His interest in books did not represent an avocation taken up after retirement; it developed early and stayed with him throughout his life. Indeed, his literary taste and his dedication to book collecting are evidence of the influence of the liberal arts education which he received at Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1879. In college he won prizes for essays on Dickens and Tennyson and was profoundly impressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of whose last lectures he heard. He married a Vassar graduate, Emily C. Jordan, who had written her master’s thesis on Shakespeare and who shared his enthusiasm for English literature.

After leaving Amherst, Folger studied law at Columbia University and went to work for the Standard Oil companies, eventually rising to the presidency of the Standard Oil Company of New York. When he went home at night, it was not to think about the organization of oil companies but to pore over book catalogues. Long betore he was financially independent he had become a collector of Shakespeareana, and throughout his life book buying was his one extravagance. Yachts, motorcars, and fine houses had no appeal for him. Not until late in life did he buy a home of his own, and then it was a very modest one.

He and Mrs. Folger read catalogues, ordered books, and recorded them briefly when they arrived. Then they sent the books on to safe-deposit storage because they had no proper place for them. Someday he would build a library for his treasures, but he told nobody of his plans and gained the reputation of being a book miser. Scholars who tried to see his books and were refused because they were “not available” fulminated against Folger as an enemy of the people, never dreaming that he was planning a library for their particular delight. Actually, the books were as inaccessible to their owner as they were to scholars, and it is a tragic irony that Folger, who knew books at firsthand better than any of the other great collectors, never lived to see his library completed and his books in place, for he died two weeks after the laying of the cornerstone of his library building in Washington.

Folger’s primary interest was in Shakespeare, but he bought widely in the history of Shakespeare’s age and in the histories of the preceding and following ages. In fact, he laid the foundation for an effective library in the history of British civilization for the two centuries from 1500 to 1700, and he marked the course of development which the library has followed ever since. But his personal predilection for Shakespeare gave rise to many legends. For years a story circulated that Folger would pay five dollars for any book about Shakespeare. Booksellers throughout the world, knowing that he provided a steady market for Shakespeareana, searched for books he would take. Like many collectors, he was a victim of his own zeal and often bought things merely for their sentimental value: curios made from a mulberry tree alleged to have been planted by Shakespeare, figurines of Shakespearean characters, an attic full of indifferent pictures of Shakespearean actors, a handful of splinters from a broken pew in Trinity Church, Stratford, even a corset of doubtful lineage said to have been Queen Elizabeth’s. One huge canvas depicting a buxom Imogen, known familiarly to the Folger Library staff as “Babe,” Folger bought from a Philadelphia dealer for

$1000. A few years ago the director of the Folger Library asked the same dealer if he would like to have the picture back in exchange for books. “Oh, no,” he hastened to reply, “an opportunity like that comes only once in a lifetime.”

MUCH was said about Folger’s effort to corner the market in Shakespeare’s First Folios. Certainly he tried to buy every First Folio that came on the market, and out of a total of two hundred thirty-eight known copies he acquired seventynine. It was his belief that the collation of a large number of First Folios would show the nature of the corrections made at the press and help to establish the text which Shakespeare’s own colleagues considered correct. Though he might rationalize his acquisition of seventy-nine First Folios in this fashion, only the obsession of a collector’s zeal accounts for his purchase of fifty-eight copies of the Second Folio of 1632, twenty-four of the Third Folio of 1663-1664, and thirty-six of the Fourth Folio of 1685.

Dogged persistence and infinite patience characterized Folger‘s labors as a collector. He stalked First Folios as a deer hunter trails an elusive buck. The First Folio which probably caused him the greatest anxiety, until he finally captured it, was the Vincent-Jaggard copy, a volume presented by its printer, William Jaggard, to Augustine Vincent, an official in the College of Heralds. Folger trailed this copy for four years, until it was finally his. Though he might wait for years, he never gave up his relentless hunt for the books he wanted. When quick action was required, he was on hand with cash. In 1904 a copy of the unique quarto of Titus Andronicus, published in 1594, turned up in the library of a post-office clerk in Sweden. When Folger heard of the discovery, he cabled an agent in London to proceed to Sweden with whatever was required to buy the book. He got it.

Folger had his agents bidding for him at auctions and working quietly for him abroad to procure the items which he prized. He was a careful man with his money, but when he wanted a book, the price did not stand in his way. Occasionally he exhausted his cash, and the treasurer of the Standard Oil Company of New York had to make him an advance. The prices which Folger paid for his seventy-nine First Folios show an enormous range, from $220 for the cheapest to $52,000 for the most expensive. Not long ago an Oxford bookseller told the director of the Folger Library a story about his own purchase of some Shakespearean promptbooks of the late seventeenth century for £7 10s. He offered them to Folger for £1500 and finally accepted a counteroffer of £1250.

Folger wanted his library to be used. Because of the vast collections of the Library of Congress, Washington inevitably would be a research center, and he decided to establish his own institution next door to the national library. The cornerstone was laid in May, 1930. Two weeks later the founder was dead. In a few days the trustees of Amherst College learned from the newspapers that the books, the library building then being erected, and the bulk of Folger‘s fortune had been left in trust to their administration. This was the first intimation they had of Folger’s intentions. As compensation for the trustees’ services, a proportion of the income from the endowment would go to Amherst.

No wiser provision could have been made; the Amherst trustees at once assumed direction and have taken a profound interest in the Folger Library ever since. Under their management the productive endowment has increased. Now the Folger Library has an adequate income for growth and development. In 1938 the trustees authorized the purchase of the greatest collection of English books printed before 1640 still remaining in private hands, the library brought together by Sir Leicester Harmsworth. Harmsworth was a newspaper publisher, and his books illustrated all aspects of sixteenthand seventeenth-century life. His library more than trebled the size of the original collection and transformed the Folger from a library centered upon a single author to a library of broad historical interest, possessing the largest number of English books printed before 1640 in the Western hemisphere — indeed, the largest number in any library except the British Museum.

Since Folger was interested in Shakespeare’s influence, he bought extensively of theatrical materials from later periods. The library has one of the best collections of Restoration and eighteenthcentury drama, and books and documents about the theater, to be found in this country. Recently, the Folger Library has been buying heavily in the later seventeenth century, its goal being to possess in some form every significant book in the Tudor and Stuart periods which any scholar is likely to need. Since 1948 it has added nearly 65,000 titles to its collections. More than half of these titles are rare books printed before 1715. It is the aim of the library to provide the apparatus and materials for the study of any aspect of the history of British civilization in the two critical centuries when the modern world was taking shape. Ease of access to rare books and reference works allows scholars to work with maximum effectiveness and with the least frustration. A scholar from Great Britain observed that he could accomplish as much in three months at the Folger as he could anywhere else in a year.

To promote a better understanding of the civilization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Folger now awards each year from thirty to forty fellowships, to enable scholars from the western hemisphere, Europe, Africa, and Asia to come to Washington. The Folger is a cosmopolitan place where men and women of many different points of view meet informally at luncheon and tea and more formally at regular seminars to exchange ideas. Their projects are varied. In addition to the research materials in his notes, an Indian scholar picked up information that he used in making a blueprint for a new English department in his university in central India. A scholar from Sierra Leone gathered material for a study of African characters in Elizabethan drama, and in his spare time wrote a pageant to celebrate the freedom of his country. A Scottish professor of history came to investigate the way the seventeenth century interpreted traditional law for political purposes. A Polish professor has been making a synthesis of Poland’s contributions to the Renaissance. A Belgian scholar has been studying sixteenth-century printing with special emphasis on Flemish publications. With groups like these, conversation at the Folger can be learned or gay — and multilingual.

In its search for old books and manuscripts that throw light on the Tudor and Stuart periods, the Folger keeps one or more of its staff members in Europe, with headquarters in London. This search is the principal responsibility of Eleanor Pitcher, assistant to the director of the Folger, who is constantly on the prowl through the bookshops of Great Britain and the Continent.

The two great libraries founded by Huntington and Folger, one on the Pacific Coast and the other on the Atlantic, are both developing the dreams of their founders, with perhaps more definiteness than either could have imagined. Huntington found in the elegant figures painted by eighteenth-century artists those qualities of stability which he believed typical of English character. Henry Clay Folger found in Shakespeare, the greatest English writer, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral values which he believed would serve as humanizing influences upon later generations. He was determined that his library would be not a mere monument and memorial but an active academy in the Renaissance sense, a place where learned men and women might come to study and have their minds stretched by contact with a great past. The United States and the world at large are the benefactors of these two book collectors who, in the course of their collecting, acquired a sense of high purpose.