Mid-century Opportunism in the Book Market: Newberry librarians in Europe

In 1949 and again in 1951, staff from the privately endowed Newberry Library in Chicago travelled to the UK and Continental Europe on lengthy buying trips that were designed to take advantage of depressed post-war book markets. They hoped thereby to bypass middlemen in the book trade (most of them New York dealers) and to establish long-term relationships with European booksellers that would allow them to build research collections on a large scale. The Newberry shoppers were relatively early in this opportunistic sort of buying, but their project reflects the kind of aggressive acquisitions American libraries would undertake across the next two decades. Along the way, institutional buying transformed the antiquarian trade from an elite, largely bibliophile concern into a massive supply chain for modern historical research. This essay explores the rich sources for the Newberry’s acquisitions in these years by way of exemplifying the broader phenomenon, that Americans were driving an unprecedented boom in the antiquarian book trade.