Author Name:

Author Description Alfred Edward Newton (1864—1940) was an American author, publisher, and avid book collector. He is best known for his book <i>Amenities of Book Collecting</i> (1918), which sold over 25,000 copies. <br /><br />Over a collecting career that covered more than four decades, Newton assembled a library especially rich in British literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With Chauncey Brewster Tinker (Yale) and Robert B. Adam (Buffalo) he fostered an interest in the English neoclassical writers, especially Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, at a time when their works were largely ignored. Newton promoted them by writing about them and by purchasing first editions of their works. His love of books encompassed the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries as well. As a prominent collector widely known for his magazine articles and colorful public persona, he played a central role in the great boom in book collecting, or "this book-collecting game," as he called it, which peaked between about 1910 and 1930.<br /><br />At the time of his death, it was estimated that Newton had approximately 10,000 books in his collection, focusing on English and American literary works, the major part of which were auctioned by Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York in April, May, and October 1941. Highlights of the sale included the autograph manuscripts of Thomas Hardy's novel <i>Far From the Madding Crowd</i> and Charles Lamb's essay Dream Children. However, the fall in rare book prices steadily through the Great Depression meant that many sold lots brought only a fraction of prices they would have realized at the time of the Jerome Kern sale in 1929. The three volume Newton sale catalogue remains a useful reference for literature collectors.

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