Carl H. Pforzheimer began his career as a four-dollar-a-week runner on Wall Street. He had established his own firm on the New York Stock Exchange by the age of twenty-three and went on to become an internationally known bibliophile. His library of English literature constituted one of the great rare-book and manuscript collections in private hands. The Percy Bysshe Shelley materials he acquired--print and manuscript--were more complete than any other holdings except for those of the British Museum.

Pforzheimer was born in New York on 29 January 1879, the son of Isaac and Mina Heyman Pforzheimer. He attended City College of New York. On Wall Street he became a specialist in trading shares of the Standard Oil Company after the dissolution of the old Standard Oil Trust in 1911. He was a charter member of the Curb Exchange, later to become the American Stock Exchange. He and his wife, the former...