Seymour
De Ricci’s and Henrietta Bartlett’s The
Book Collector’s Guide: A Practical Handbook of British and American
Bibliography (1921) is much more than a forgotten price guide. The
timing of publication and bibliographic expertise provide an insider’s view of
the Golden Age of American book collecting--then arguably at its peak--when
opportunities were abundant and mighty collectors rose to the occasion. It was a transitory age, too, and reflects in
retrospect the coming shift from old paths to new paths in collecting that
would take hold in the 1930s. The story
of the book’s birth is also quite a tale with the polymath bookman Seymour de
Ricci at the helm and Henrietta Bartlett as his brilliant, but generally unrecognized
co-author.
