The Huntington Library: Treasures from Ten Centuries - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087328206X ISBN 13: 9780873282062

Publisher: Huntington Library Pr, 1806

Synopsis

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About this title

About the Author

Written by the Director and curatorial staff of the Huntington Library.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Near the end of Henry Huntington's life, someone asked him why he had never authorized a biography. He replied, "The Library will tell the story." What began as personal collecting on a modest scale blossomed into serious collecting in the antiquarian market during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and led to the formation of one of the world's major research centers for the study of Anglo-American culture, western Americana, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. Huntington's path from reader to collector to benefactor is a story of self-education, business success, indefatigable collecting, and ultimately, philanthropic responsibility.

Henry Edwards Huntington was born in Oneonta, New York, in 1850, the son of middle-class, mercantile parents. He was always an avid reader, though he had only a high school education; in later life he was often praised as a collector who knew and read his books. At age twenty, having tried his luck in his parents' hardware and dry goods business, he went to work for his uncle Collis P. Huntington, one of the owners of the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads. Initially, he worked in a succession of mill companies in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania that made railroad ties for the westward-expanding railroads. To advance his fortune at one point, Huntington sold his first personal book collection to raise enough cash to buy out his business partner in one of these ventures. He went on to build a second reading library, composed mostly of sets of the writings of important contemporary authors, such as Dickens and Trollope. Many of these sets remain on display on the bookshelves in the large library room of the Huntington mansion.

Edition details

• Publisher: Huntington Library Pr
• Publication date: 1806
• ISBN 10: 087328206X
• ISBN 13: 9780873282062
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English