Henry E. Huntington's Library of Libraries
by Donald C. Dickinson
CHOICE Academic Book of the Year

Review from The Book Collector
Volume 46, No. 4
Winter 1997

THE TROUBLE WITH reading and commenting on a book in manuscript is that it gives you an altogether illusory belief that you have already reviewed it. It was, thus, with some shame that we realized that no review has ever appeared in these pages of Donald C. Dickinson's admirable history of the foundation of Huntington, Henry E. Huntington's Library of Libraries, published by the Huntington Library. This is, first and foremost, a life of the great man in the context of the formation of the greatest of all his monuments. It is based on, and wisely never strays too far from, the mass of documentation still preserved at the Huntington.

Huntington's aspirations to found a great library in the West, crisply articulated, form the ground-bass of the narrative, but the solo parts of George D. Smith, Sessler, Quaritch, and Dr. Rosenbach, the instruments by which his vision was brought to practical being, make fascinating reading. There was no doubt, for a moment, in their exchanges about who was boss. It was different with the librarians whom he employed or sought advice and help from. George Watson Cole in particular, his first librarian, had ideas of his own, which led to a parting of the ways; Clarence Brigham, though he took advantage of the opportunity that Huntington's needs created, kept a cautious distance at Worcester. By the time that Leslie Bliss and Robert Schad entered the scene, Huntington's vision was settled.

The chief impression that remains after the last page of this fascinating account is closed is one of driving, all-encompassing, speed. Huntington was not young when he started, but it was not the threat of mortality that drove him on: he just liked to get a move on. As money was never a problem, the only limit was that imposed by imagination, and when it came to imagination, as far as Huntington was concerned, the sky was the limit. He was never seduced into buying more than he meant by the booksellers who served him; rather, he was constantly urging them on to higher flights of acquisition. At the same time, he knew exactly what he wanted, and some of the most fascinating letters are the terse rejections of material that they tried, often ingeniously, to get him to buy, only to have his real needs spelt out in singularly unvarnished prose. When all is said and done, and that impressive figure with its magnificent moustache was finally borne in its coffin across the country in one of his own Southern Pacific trains to rest in California, one can only say Si monumentum requiris circumspice.