William S. Reese | |
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| Born | July 29, 1955 |
| Died | June 4, 2018 (aged 62) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Occupation | Antiquarian bookseller |
William Sherman Reese (July 29, 1955 - June 4, 2018) was an American bookseller and founder of the William Reese Company. [1] Over a 44-year career, he became known as a leading figure in the rare book world, with particular expertise in book history and Americana. [1] [2]
Reese was born to William Blaine Reese and Katherine Reese (née Jackson) on July 29, 1955, in Havre de Grace, Maryland. [1] He had a sister, Barbara. [1] He attended Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was the president of his senior class and from which he graduated in 1973. He then attended Yale.
Reese married Margaret Hurt, who died in 2002. [1] He later married Margaret Hurt's sister, Dorothy Hurt. [1]
Reese died of prostate cancer on June 4, 2018. [1]
Reese's first bibliographic publications and antiquarian sales occurred while he was an undergraduate at Yale in the mid-1970s. [1] At this time, he was a partner in the rare book firm Frontier Americana. [2] He received a B.A. in history from Yale in 1977. [1] His senior thesis was titled Winnowers of the Past: The Americanist Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. [2] After graduation, Reese worked with bookseller Fred White Jr in Texas. [3]
Reese founded the William Reese Company in 1979, in New Haven, Connecticut. [2] Over the next forty years, the company became the leader in the Americana market, with the best items and the best collections passing through Reese's hands. [3] The company issued hundreds of catalogues of American materials. [2] Reese also worked closely with Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library to shape their Americana collections. [4]
In 1998, the William Reese Company began offering Fellowships in the Print Culture of the Americas, to fund research in American book history. [5]
His collection of essays, Collectors, Booksellers, and Libraries: Essays on Americanists and the Rare Book Market. [6] was characterized as an appropriate tribute to his extensive knowledge. [7] Reese was profiled in the 2019 documentary The Booksellers , directed by D.W. Young [8] and memorialized in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. [9]
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is the rare book library and literary archive of the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut. It is one of the largest buildings in the world dedicated to rare books and manuscripts and is one of the largest collections of such texts. Established by a gift of the Beinecke family and given its own financial endowment, the library is financially independent from the university and is co-governed by the University Library and Yale Corporation.
Book collecting is the collecting of books, including seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever books are of interest to a given collector. The love of books is bibliophilia, and someone who loves to read, admire, and a person who collects books is often called a bibliophile but can also be known as an bibliolater, meaning being overly devoted to books, or a bookman which is another term for a person who has a love of books.
Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was an American collector, scholar, and dealer in rare books and manuscripts. In London, where he frequently attended the auctions at Sotheby's, he was known as "The Terror of the Auction Room." In Paris, he was called "Le Napoléon des Livres". Many others referred to him as "Dr. R.", a "Robber Baron" and "the Greatest Bookdealer in the World".
The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is a non-profit umbrella organization of bookseller associations, with its legal location in Geneva, Switzerland. It federates 22 National Associations of Antiquarian Booksellers, representing nearly 2000 dealers in 32 countries. Antiquarian booksellers affiliated to the League adhere to the ILAB Code of Ethics, and the League aims to server as a global network for the rare book trade.
The Rare Book Hub is a website for the buying, selling and collecting of rare and antiquarian books. It was founded in 2002 in San Francisco by rare book collector Bruce McKinney with the aim of offering hard to find information about book collecting to the public. From a start of providing a subscription database of bibliographic records, the company now offers many related services, mostly at no charge. The company at first specialized in the Americana book field, but quickly expanded to all types of antiquarian and rare books, ephemera, manuscripts, prints, photographs, and other works on paper.
Hans Peter Kraus, also known as H. P. Kraus or HPK, was an Austrian-born book dealer described as "without doubt the most successful and dominant rare book dealer in the world in the second half of the 20th century" and in a league with other rare book dealers such as Bernard Quaritch, Guillaume de Bure and A.S.W. Rosenbach. Kraus specialized in medieval illuminated manuscripts, incunables, and rare books of the 16th and 17th centuries, but would purchase and sell almost any book that came his way that was rare, valuable and important. He prided himself in being "the only bookseller in history...to have owned a Gutenberg Bible and the Psalters of 1457 and 1459 simultaneously," stressing that "'own' here is the correct word, as they were bought not for a client's account but for stock."
David Samuel Nutt was an English book publisher and seller. Operating from various locations in London, Nutt specialized in the sale of imported foreign books, catering to prestigious institutions like the British Museum and private collectors. His firm ventured into publishing in the 1830s, with a focus on foreign market publications, religious and educational texts, antiquarian literature, and scholarly works. In 1851, Nutt formed a partnership with Nicholas Trübner, a German-English publisher.
Madeleine Bettina Stern, born in New York, New York, was an independent scholar and rare book dealer. She graduated from Barnard College in 1932 with a B.A. in English literature. She received her M.A. in English literature from Columbia University in 1934. Stern was particularly known for her work on the writer Louisa May Alcott. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943 to write a biography of Alcott, which was eventually published in 1950. In 1945, she and her friend Leona Rostenberg opened Rostenberg & Stern Books. Rostenberg and Stern were active members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, at a time when few women were members. The pair lived and worked in Rostenberg's house in the Bronx. They were known for creating unique rare book catalogs. In 1960, Stern helped found the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.
The Zamorano Eighty is a list of books intended to represent the most significant early volumes published on the history of California. It was compiled in 1945 by members of the Zamorano Club, a Los Angeles–based group of bibliophiles. Collecting first editions of every volume on the list has become the goal of a number of book collectors, though to date only four people have completed the task.
Joseph Sabin was a Braunston, England-born bibliographer and bookseller in Oxford, Philadelphia, and New York City. He compiled the "stupendous" multivolume Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, considered a "bibliophilic monument;" and published the American Bibliopolist, a trade magazine. His sons Robert T. Sabin and William W. Sabin also worked in the bookselling business.
James Tinkham Babb was an American librarian and book collector affiliated with Yale University. He was born in Lewiston, Idaho. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College. He was a member of the Acorn Club and served as University Librarian from 1945 to 1965. He served as president of the Connecticut Library Association and councilor of the Bibliographical Society of America; he was elected to the American Antiquarian Society in 1946.
Toshiyuki Takamiya in Tokyo, Japan is a Japanese academic and author. Emeritus Professor at Keio University since 2009, he is an authority on medieval English literature and medieval English manuscript studies and a collector of antiquarian books.
Oak Knoll is a bookseller and publisher based in New Castle, Delaware, United States. Oak Knoll includes Oak Knoll Books which specializes in the sale of rare and antiquarian books and Oak Knoll Press which is a publisher and distributor of in-print titles. Both divisions specialize in "books about books" on topics such as printing history, bibliography, and book arts. Oak Knoll has also been the sponsor of the book arts festival Oak Knoll Fest.
Henrietta Collins Bartlett was an American bibliographer, Shakespeare scholar, and creator of the first modern census of Shakespeare's published drama. She has been called "one of the foremost bibliographers of her time," despite working in a scholarly field in which "the overwhelming majority has been male."
William Sperry Beinecke was an American philanthropist and businessman.
Henry Raup Wagner was an American book collector, bibliographer, cartographer, historian, and business executive. He was the author of over 170 publications, including books and scholarly essays, mainly about the histories of the American frontier and the Spanish exploration and colonization of Mexico. He also assembled tens of thousands of books and manuscripts and formed several collections from them.
Moses Polock was a Jewish-American publisher and the first bookseller in the United States who dealt exclusively in rare books. At the time of his death, he was the oldest bibliophile in the country.
Jacob Nathaniel Blanck was an American bibliographer, editor, and children's writer. Born in Boston, he attended local schools and briefly ran a bookshop before being hired to assist on a bibliography of American first editions. He wrote for periodicals on the book trade and worked as a bibliographer in libraries including the Library of Congress in the 1940s and 1950s. Blanck also published two children's books. In the early 1940s, he founded a bibliography project that became Bibliography of American Literature, a selective bibliography of American literature. It was completed by 1992, after Blanck's death.
Justin Galland Schiller is an American bookseller specializing in rare and collectible children's books; proprietor during his student days under his own name (1960–69), then Justin G. Schiller, Ltd. (1969–2020). Headquartered in New York City, it was the oldest specialist firm in the United States, focusing on historical and collectible children's books, related original art, and manuscripts. In 1988, he formed a second corporation—Battledore Ltd, with his partner and spouse Dennis M V David, to further specialize in original children's book illustration art and the legacy of Maurice Sendak.
Ernst Philip Goldschmidt (1887–1954) was a Viennese-born antiquarian bookseller, scholar and bibliophile. During his career he issued more than 100 "meticulously researched" and scholarly sales catalogues, which "set high standards" and many of which are now standard reference works in libraries. He also wrote books and articles about early books and manuscripts, including his Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings (1928), which remains "one of the most important works on bookbinding history", and works on the relation of humanism to the spread of printing, which "broke new ground".
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