Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach was called the "Napoleon of Books" by the New Yorker, the "Terror of the Auction Room" by the London tabloids, and "the most scholarly bookseller in [America]" by the writer and collector A. Edward Newton. He bought and sold the Gutenberg Bible five times. He bought and sold the First Folio of Shakespeare, in prime condition, six times, when no other twentieth-century dealer ever had more than one copy in comparable condition. Rosenbach, or "Dr. R," as he was known to collectors and friends, was, in short, the most successful and certainly the most famous bookseller of the twentieth century. He has been described by Edwin Wolf II as "an apple-cheeked, fun-loving, scholarly, bawdy, ungrammatical, tale-spinning, elephant-memoried supersalesman of great books." As a result of his involvement in the book trade, he amassed an important personal collection of books and manuscripts.

Abraham Simon...