Charles Sessler sold important books and manuscripts to many of the great collectors of the twentieth century, including Henry E. Huntington, Henry Clay Folger, A. Edward Newton, Jerome Kern, Barton Currie, and Lessing J. Rosenwald. Sessler's greatest interest was in Charles Dickens; he was a friend of the Dickens family and bought many rarities from them. He aided John C. Eckel in writing his Dickens bibliography, still a standard in the field, and he helped create important Dickens collections. Sessler's activities were not confined to Dickens; he also did some work as a publisher, but primarily he bought and sold significant books and manuscripts of the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. With his assistant Mabel Zahn, who was to take over the book business of the Sessler firm after its founder's death, Sessler helped usher in an era of book collecting in which those with smaller purses than...