First edition. Limited to 140 copies of which this is "140." There was a time when book collecting was big news. In the first half of the twentieth century, some of America's leading financiers, executives, and philanthropists played "this book-collecting game" (as A. Edward Newton called it), and competed with each other for the finest books and manuscripts in the world. Their booksellers were no less newsworthy, and one of the most astute, knowledgeable, and flamboyant of them all was Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia. Dr. R., as the press liked to call him, helped to build some of America's greatest collections, and his own library, assembled from the treasures that he took home for himself rather than put into his stock, still draws vistors and researchers from around the world.

Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly: Book Collecting in a Golden Age is the story of one collector, Josiah Kirby Lilly, Jr., of Indianapolis, and the books and manuscripts that he bought from Dr. Rosenbach. The story is told through the many letters that they exchanged, and through the descriptions and illustrations of the books and manuscripts themselves. Though this book is the story of only one collector and bookseller, it is also a microcosm of a great age of book collecting, in which choices were made by booksellers and collectors alike that shaped the contents of some of the greatest research libraries of our own day.