Nicholas Gouin Dufief, Franco-American bookseller in Philadelphia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, helped increase Franco-American understanding during a critical period of history by teaching French and by selling French books. As a bookseller he numbered among his customers one of the first American collectors of rare books, William Mackenzie, as well as Thomas Jefferson, for whom he supplied many desiderata and with whom he carried on an extensive bibliophilic correspondence. Great books and great libraries passed through his hands, including the remnants of Benjamin Franklin's library and of the Westover (Virginia) library of William Byrd I and William Byrd II . Dufief thus helped alert an American readership to the intellectual value of antiquarian books, especially those in the French language.

Dufief, son of royalists and counterrevolutionaries Nicolas-Henri Dufief and Victoire-Aime-Libault-Gouin Dufief, was born sometime in 1776 in Nantes, France. He inherited his parents' monarchist leanings, and...