Today in 1876, book collector and dealer Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was born in Philadelphia.
“By far the most prominent American bookseller of the twentieth century,” is how Nicolas Basbanes defines Rosenbach in Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture:
Rosenbach’s dealings with the great collectors of the period, most notably Henry E. Huntington, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clay Folger, Countess Estelle Doheny, Lessing J. Rosenwald, and John H. Scheide, along with his flamboyant triumphs at auction galleries, brought him a degree of renown that extended far beyond the cozy world of bibliophiles. …
No standard curriculum teaches anyone how to become a bookseller; there are no minimum scores to achieve on a professional proficiency test. A bookseller’s name and reputation stand for a great deal, nd skills, for the most part, are learned in the field…
Librarians everywhere acknowledge the debt they owe to dealers. “There has probably never been a great bookseller who was not also a great book buyer,” Lawrence Clark Powell, the renowned librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles, believed.
In his Books and Bidders: The Adventures of a Bibliophile (1927), Rosenbach recalled how he started collecting books at the age of 11, when he purchased an illustrated edition of Reynard the Fox at an auction house. As a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, Rosenbach bought for $3.60 a first edition of Dr. Johnson’s prologue at the reopening of Drury Lane Theatre in 1747; he later refused $5,000 for it.
Rosenbach donated his collection of children's books to the Free Library of Philadelphia, established the Rosenbach Fellowship in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania and willed his estate to the Rosenbach Foundation, which established the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Rosenbach served as the President of the American Jewish Historical Society from 1921 to 1948, and his donation of books and ephemera relating to American Judaica before 1850 provided the core of its original rare book collection.