Librettist and lyricist Harry Bache Smith was the earliest extensive collector of association copies: books that can be linked to their authors or other notable people through inscriptions, annotations, bookplates, or other identifying marks. His passionate and articulate advocacy of that interest had established association copies as a legitimate and desirable collecting field by the turn of the century, and his catalogue, A Sentimental Library (1914), strongly influenced an entire generation of book collectors.

Smith was born in Buffalo, New York, but grew up and established his first ties with the book-collecting community in Chicago, where his parents, Josiah Bailey Smith and Elizabeth Bach Smith, had moved in 1864. He was called Harry (or sometimes Hank), and although his name generally appears as Harry B. Smith on title pages and as Harry Bache Smith in reference books, he writes in his autobiography, First Nights and First Editions (1931), that his name...