Bernard Quaritch was called the "Napoleon of Booksellers" because of his dominance of the field. He attended--or, in his later years, sent a deputy to bid for him at--every important book sale in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and he bought massively at the great library sales that occurred after the Cairns Act of the 1880s removed the barriers that had hindered the sale of family collections. His catalogues became standard reference works for booksellers and bibliographers, and the ambitious and detailed ten-volume General Catalogue of Books Offered to the Public at the Affixed Prices, by Bernard Quaritch (1887-1897) remains a milestone. He is best known for the bookselling business he built up in Britain and the United States, but he also published books, including a series of facsimiles of illustrated manuscripts and Edward FitzGerald's poetic translation of the Rubiyt of Omar Khayym (1859).

Quaritch...