A defining moment in the collecting of nineteenth-century American authors came on 28-29 April 1924, when the personal collection of the late Stephen H. Wakeman was auctioned by the American Art Association. Wakeman had spent twenty years focusing his collecting efforts on nine previously neglected American authors: William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and John Greenleaf Whittier. While considered giants of literature and highly collectible today, these authors did not have the same prominence in the early twentieth century. The attention generated by the sale, combined with the record prices received for Poe and Hawthorne items, attracted bibliophiles to this newly charted genre. Wakeman's approach to collecting was also influential, as he sought books in their original bindings in an age when it was customary to have publishers' bindings removed and the...