This essay discusses Leona Rostenberg and her business partner, Madeleine B. Stern.

The doyennes of the rare-book business in America, most in the field would agree, are Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern. These talented and energetic women have been business partners in New York City since 1945. Their reputation for scholarship and integrity and their love for the books they have bought and sold are known and appreciated among dealers and bibliophiles the world over.

In the "Bookseller's Credo," which serves as the concluding chapter of their book Between Boards: New Thoughts on Old Books (1978), Rostenberg wrote that the most important component of success is "a sound academic education." The daughter of Dr. Adolph Rostenberg and Louisa Dreyfus Rostenberg, she earned her master's degree from Columbia University in New York in 1933 and began work toward her doctorate in history. Rostenberg had proposed a dissertation on the role of...