Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly

A story of the transactions between an impassioned collector and a renowned antiquarian dealer against the backdrop of modern book collecting.

A review in The Hindu...

It isn't an emotional or subjective account and yet you can feel, thrumming just underneath, the book collector's thrill and the passion of the bookseller. “Book collecting came naturally to Lilly,” writes Silver. “He possessed an eye for quality and detail, and a taste for the extensive minutiae that mark the highest levels of any collecting field”. He always bought cautiously, studying a dealer catalogue for a long time, comparing it with other copies when he could, and then taking the plunge.

But he was yet to deal with America's most famous antiquarian book dealer, the scholarly Dr. Rosenbach, who seemed always to be able to offer the best copies of the rarest books. Lilly had been reading Rosenbach's well written catalogues with great bibliophilic pleasure but as Silver notes, they couldn't take the place of actually meeting Rosenbach, which Lilly did in January 1929 because catalogues “couldn't carry the same combination of charm, knowledge, anecdote, and uniquely expressed confidence in the importance of the books as could Rosenbach's in-person performance.”