Henry Edwards Huntington was one of the great book collectors of the early twentieth century. Born February 27, 1850, in Oneonta, upstate New York, Huntington as a young man went to work for his uncle, Collis Huntington, who built the Central Pacific Railroad. After his uncle’s death in 1900, he went on to acquire and manage railroads in southern California, most famously the interurban Pacific Electric Railway, a system that would connect Los Angeles to its surrounding counties. Huntington, who preferred to go by his middle name, Edwards or Ed, had been living in San Francisco since 1892 and made modest purchases toward his own library there, but he moved permanently to southern California in 1914. His estate in an area which became San Marino was appropriate in stature to his great wealth, which he had inherited from his uncle. This California home and its library, which was completed in 1920, were to be his sanctuary until his death in 1927.
Beginning in the early 1900s Huntington began to collect books in earnest.1 His decision in 1911 to buy the Elihu Church library en bloc was the start of an ambitious plan to build one of the greatest private libraries in the world, one that could compete in incunabula, for instance, with the British Museum (now British Library). Numbering some 2,000 titles, the Church collection held some very rare works, including the Latin edition of the Columbus letter (1493) and the Bay Psalm Book (1640). George D. Smith, a renowned book dealer, helped Huntington complete the deal for $750,000. Next in his sights was the Robert Hoe collection, which contained a Gutenberg Bible on vellum. Huntington was determined to make it his, and Smith won the bidding at $50,000, the most ever paid to that point for a single book (the Bible was in two volumes). In all, Huntington spent some $560,000 at the auction of this collection, which included the acquisition of a printed copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1477) and Caxton’s printing of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485). The purchase of the Bridgewater collection in 1916 brought with it a most rare manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, dated to the early fifteenth century, known as the Ellesmere Manuscript.
Doors to His Library
Over the next decade Henry Huntington would go on to spend millions of dollars on his library. His intersection with the library of Buxheim came in the fall of 1924, when a German collector named Otto Vollbehr offered to sell him a large part of his collection, which was particularly strong in incunabula. In November of that year Vollbehr sold Huntington 392 incunabula for $170,000. At this point, Huntington was seriously considering competing with the British Museum in acquiring early printed books. In early 1925 Vollbehr offered him another 3,000 early printed books, but Huntington’s librarian, Leslie Bliss, accepted only 1,740 of them for a price of $770,000. Finally in early 1926, Huntington agreed to buy a third cache, bringing the total purchases from Vollbehr to 2,385 incunabula. As a side note, Vollbehr went on to sell the remainder of his collection, including a Gutenberg Bible, to the Library of Congress in 1930, for which the United States Congress approved an act appropriating $1.5 million for the purchase of 3,000 incunabula and a Gutenberg Bible.
Vollbehr’s incunabula included a good many from the Buxheim library, 54 to be exact. Some other volumes were acquired from A. S. W. Rosenbach and other dealers. There are a total of 81 incunabula from Buxheim at the Huntington Library presently. This now represents the single greatest accumulation of Buxheim incunabula in one library. Many of these volumes came from Jacques Rosenthal’s dealership in Munich, and there is some debate as to whether or not Vollbehr was working for Rosenthal on commission, as the mid-1920s were a particularly difficult time for the Rosenthal family business. The Huntington library’s collection of Buxheim incunabula includes some great rarities, including a Fust and Schöfer Bible from 1462, two Zainer volumes from the 1470s, and four volumes once owned by Hilprand Brandenburg. H. E. Huntington never quite reached his goal of acquiring more incunabula than the British Museum, but he came close,2 and the great collection of Buxheim volumes is a real jewel in the crown that is the Huntington Library today.
- Much of what follows is indebted to Donald C. Dickinson’s Henry E. Huntington’s Library of Libraries, San Marino: Huntington Library, 1995, especially pp. 207-10. ↩︎
- Incunabula at the Huntington Library today number some 5,300 volumes, not including seconds. ↩︎
See also the library’s own website at:
https://huntington.org/library
and a history at:
https://thehuntingtonlibrarystudy.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/henry-edwards-huntington/