Otto H. F. Vollbehr was a German industrialist, inventor, and enigmatic book collector and seller. Born 1869 in Kiel, Germany, he was educated as a chemist in Marburg and studied pharmacology in Berlin. By the beginning of World War I in 1914 he was the CEO of a chemical company that reaped huge profits during the war. Before the war Vollbehr had traveled extensively in the Far East and the western United States. It was reported that he met with Adolph Sutro in 1897 in San Francisco, shortly before his death. Sutro, a great collector himself and the main bidder at the 1883 Buxheim auction, advised him on the benefits and satisfaction of book collecting, something that would later play an outsized role in Vollbehr’s life.
A few years after the war, Vollbehr suffered extensive injuries in a train accident. On his doctor’s advise he gave up his career and concentrated his efforts on building a substantial book collection, especially in the field of incunabula. Given the economic uncertainties of the times, deals were plentiful, although it gives one pause to consider how Vollbehr was able, in just a few years, to amass upwards of 5,000 incunables. There is some justified speculation that many of the works that he “owned” were on commission from European book sellers, among them Jacques Rosenthal in Munich. In fact, the collector Vollbehr very soon became a major seller of rare books. In 1924 he ensconced himself in Los Angeles and by the end of the year had sold several hundred incunabula to H. E. Huntington, who was at that time building out his own collection at his newly installed library in San Marino. The next two years followed with sales to Huntington of another 2,000 early printed books for a total of over a million dollars.1
About 50 of these incunabula were once part of the Buxheim library, and Huntington’s acquisition of them, along with other Buxheim volumes purchased through rare book dealers, gave the Huntington library a substantial stake in reclaiming the once magnificent collection of fifteenth-century printed books at Buxheim. In fact, after the destruction in 1906 of Adolph Sutro’s Buxheim collection of 149 Buxheim incunables, Huntington owned more Buxheim incunabula than anyone else. By the middle of 1926, however, Huntington’s librarian, Herman Mead, had soured on Vollbehr’s methods, calling him nothing more than a “commercial agent,” and refusing to catalog the volumes as part of any Vollbehr “collection.” Huntington also refused the purchase of Vollbehr’s offer of the St. Paul Gutenberg Bible in three volumes, but then again, Huntington already owned a vellum Gutenberg.
Vollbehr next turned his attention to the East, to Chicago, New York, and then Washington, D.C., and ultimately to the Library of Congress. After taking part in various exhibitions, Vollbehr offered the U.S. Government a total of more than 3,000 incunabula, along with the Gutenberg Bible, for $1.5 million. An act of Congress approved the funds, and so in the late summer of 1930, the Library of Congress could consider itself the proud owner of a substantial number of early printed books as well as a Gutenberg Bible. These volumes are still in the collection, of course, 44 of which are formerly from Buxheim. These volumes are mostly in pristine condition, many with early, completely intact bindings. Vollbehr was heavily indebted at the time, and almost all the money from his sale went to paying off these debts.
Only a year later, starting in 1931, Otto Vollbehr became engaged in distributing propaganda for the German National Socialists in the United States. He wrote several “memoranda” that, in his words, were meant to improve the image of Germany and Germans in the U.S.
This activity soon caught the attention of lawmakers, and Vollbehr was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in November of 1934. There he testified that he had used the money from the Library of Congress sale to distribute his writings, and that the German ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, had in fact advised against getting mixed up in American affairs.
Vollbehr returned to Germany before the start of World War II and by the end of the war was living in Baden-Baden. After the war he made himself useful to the American military by helping the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives teams organize and catalog the Rothschild library that had been looted prior to the war. Otto Vollbehr died soon after on the 18th of May, 1946. His legacy is mixed. He played an important role in establishing several libraries in the United States as major repositories of incunabula, but his engagement with and for the Nazis in distributing propaganda greatly harmed his reputation thereafter.
Library of Congress Vollbehr Collection:
- Some of these events are described in Maurice Ettinghausen’s Memoirs (pp. 161-166), but the author’s recollections are at times in conflict with the public record or in accord with his own imagination. Supposedly, Vollbehr was able to buy and then sell a large amount of Americana in post-war Europe, then resell it through a dealer in Leipzig. He was furthermore apparently able to buy thousands of incunabula at much the same time. Again, some of these recollections stretch the reader’s credulity. ↩︎
Otto Vollbehr Bibliography:
Americana Vetustissima: The Important Collection Formed by Dr. Otto H.F. Vollbehr of Washington, D.C. Metchen, NJ: Charles Heartman, 1932.
Ashley, Frederick W. ‘A Look Back’: The Story of the Vollbehr Collection of Incunabula. 2nd edition. American Institute of Graphic Arts 49. Lexington,
VA: Washington and Lee University, 1934. Reprint of: Ashley, Frederick W. The Vollbehr Incunabula and the Book of Books: Address Before the
Eleventh National Conference on Printing Education. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932.
Catalogue of Dr. Otto Vollbehr Americana Vetustissima in the John Nash Library. 1935.
Emerson, Edwin. Incunabulum Incunabulorum: The Gutenberg Bible on Vellum in the Vollbehr Collection. New York: Tudor Press, 1928.
Ettinghausen, Maurice L. Rare Books and Royal Collectors: Memoirs of an Antiquarian Bookseller. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966: 161-166.
Kennerley, Mitchell. Sale 2230: One Hundred Incunabula; Duplicates from the Collection of Dr. Otto H.F. Vollbehr. New York: Anderson Galleries,
1928.
Library of Congress. Loan Exhibition of Incunabula From the Vollbehr Collection. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1928.
The Library of Congress. Exhibit of Books Printed During the XVth Century and Known as Incunabula: Selected from the Vollbehr Collection purchased by Act of Congress 1930. List of Books. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1930.
Reichner, Herbert. Die Gutenberg-Bibel der Sammlung Vollbehr: Schicksale des kostbarsten Buches. Vienna, 1927.
Schulz, Ernst. Collections of Incunabula and Their Value for Scholars with Special Reference to the Vollbehr Collection. Translated by Powell Spring.
Mount Vernon, NY: W.E. Rudge, 1928.
Stone, Edward L. The St. Paul Copy Of The Gutenberg Bible. 1930.
Winship, George Parker. The Vollbehr Incunabula at the National Arts Club of New York, from August 23 to September 30.1926.
Winship, George Parker. The Vollbehr Collections: Introduction to a Collection of Book-Illustrations in the Possession of Otto H.F. Vollbehr. 1928.