Edward Allen Brotherton, who became Baron Brotherton of Wakefield, stumbled upon the career of book collector after being balked in the acquisition of a manuscript he had agreed to purchase for the city of Wakefield. As a former mayor and current member of Parliament for Wakefield, he was determined that the medieval manuscript known as the Towneley Mysteries, the Wakefield cycle of mystery plays, should remain in the north of England. When the manuscript was auctioned at Sotheby's in February 1922, Brotherton had at least two formidable rivals, the American collectors Carl Pforzheimer and Henry Huntington. When Brotherton's agent was outbid by Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, the famous American book dealer acting on behalf of Huntington, Brotherton instead purchased a first edition of Yorkshire poet Andrew Marvell's Miscellaneous Poems (1681) from Bernard Quaritch, proprietor of the most exclusive antiquarian bookshop in London.

From such inauspicious beginnings-a frustrated act of...