J. Pierpont Morgan, Rising Bibliophile

By the 1880s—about the time of this portrait—Morgan had assembled a fine home library comprising titles typically found on his peers’ bookshelves. But alongside modern editions of such authors as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton were several items that stood out, among them autographs of the signers of the US Declaration of Independence, a handwritten letter by the poet Robert Burns, and a copy of the so-called Eliot Indian Bible, the first translation of the Old and New Testaments into an Indigenous American language.

By the 1890s Morgan was regularly visiting New York and London bookdealers and seeking out authors’ manuscripts and first editions—and even his first Gutenberg Bible.