In a paper presented in conjunction with a Grolier Club exhibition of books from the library of George Brinley, Jr., Marcus A. McCorison observed, "Over a period of thirty-five years, Brinley accumulated a private library of Americana that remains to this day unrivalled in its extent and richness within his self-imposed limits." By the time of his death in Hamilton, Bermuda, on 16 May 1875, one day after he turned fifty-eight, he had acquired nearly fifty thousand titles relating to the history and literature of the United States.

Brinley was hardly the first to pursue this interest. Carl L. Cannon's American Book Collectors and Collecting from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1941) gives pride of place to Thomas Prince (1687-1758); the nineteenth-century Harvard librarian Justin Winsor called Prince the "father of American bibliography." At one point he owned five of the eleven surviving copies of the...