East Room of J. Pierpont Morgan's Library [photograph]. New York, between 1923 and ca. 1935
Erica Cialella, 2020–2022 Belle da Costa Greene Fellow: The East Room has served many purposes over the course of its long history. When first built it was the primary home for J.P. Morgan’s collection of books and artwork. It was also the room where he and Belle Greene hosted visitors to see the growing collection. An ornately bound guestbook in the Morgan Archives records the names of many of these early visitors to the library, including Ellen Terry, Henry James, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Teddy and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Before the annex was built in 1928, this room served as a reading room and an exhibition space. Housing around 11,000 volumes, these shelves still hold many of the books Greene first cataloged back in 1905. Subjects range from Bibles and French poetry to gardening and children’s books.
Belle da Costa Greene helped develop the collection started by Pierpont Morgan and his son Jack. Building on the library’s already impressive collection of fifteenth-century books printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, Greene traveled to England in 1908 and secured the acquisition of additional Caxton books from the library of Lord Amherst. The story goes that she negotiated the purchase of the full set the night before they were to be sold at auction, undercutting British curators in the process. A few years later she won at auction the only surviving complete copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, printed by William Caxton, in the process outbidding a rival collector, Henry E. Huntington. This acquisition made front page news across the globe and marked Greene’s entry as a force in the rare book world. As Greene remarked that same year, “J.P. is so well trained now that he rarely ever buys a book or manuscript without consulting me by cable or letter first.”