Henry R. Wagner had an incredible memory. Names, dates, and events lodged in his mind to be sorted and used in the scores of books and articles he wrote during the long afternoon of his life. In explaining why he had left an important and well-paying position at the comparatively early age of fifty-five, he wrote in his autobiography Bullion to Books: Fifty Years of Business and Pleasure (1942), "The real reason was I wanted to divorce pleasure from business. I have been combining the two for a good many years and my dislike for business kept growing all the time while my interest in bibliographical and research work kept increasing."

Henry Raup Wagner was born in Philadelphia on 27 September 1862. In 1880 he matriculated at Yale University, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, a founding member of Wolf's Head, and one of the men who incorporated...