CARL H. PFORZHEIMER (1879–1957) was a banker in New York City who made his fortune in oil stock. He spent some of that fortune building a collection of rare books that is now split between the New York Public Library (NYPL) and the Harry Ransom centre (HRC). NYPL holds the Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, composed of books, letters, and manuscripts related to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his contemporaries. The HRC holds Pforzheimer’s earlier books, nearly 2000 printed books and manuscripts from 1475–1700, including a Gutenberg Bible.

Pforzheimer was building his library during a “golden age” of American book collecting during which J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Folger, Henry Huntington, and other collectors whose names now adorn some of the most famous libraries and museums in the country. Pforzheimer is not usually named in scholarship on the early twentieth-century book trade as being one of the major players, but his collection did draw from many of the most notable collections that went up for sale. The way Pforzheimer tells the history, the first generation of American collectors were people like James Lenox, George Brinley, and John Carter Brown who were mentored in their library-formation by Henry Stevens, an American who moved to London in 1843 to work collecting Americana for the British Museum. After the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century, collectors like Robert Hoe, William Loring Andrews, William A White, Marshall C. Lefferts, Henry W. Poor, and Winston H. Hagen were the big names. Most of their collections, however, were “disposed of” prior to World War I and bought by the likes of John Pierpont Morgan, Henry Huntington, and Henry Folger. In the wake of the war, according to Pforzheimer, many of England’s “most important libraries” were sold at public auction, opening up opportunities for American collectors to bring more rare finds across the pond.

In 1940, Pforzheimer published a catalogue of his early books. The catalogue was created by two librarians—work began in 1920 by Emma Virginia Unger, and was completed by William A. Jackson.