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Henry Stevens, Jr.

Barnet, VT, 1819 - 1886, South Hampstead, England

BiographyLC name authority rec. nn50022554
LC Heading: Stevens, Henry, Jr., 1819-1886

found: University of Vermont Libraries Special Collections for the Henry Stevens papers, 1757-1870 (Henry Stevens, Jr.; born 1819; died 1886; London bookseller and collector; instumental in building the libraries of John Carter Brown, James Lenox and Peter Force).

Biography:

Stevens, Henry (Aug. 24, 1819 - Feb. 28, 1886), bookman, was born in Barnet, Vt., third child and second son of Henry and Candace (Salter) Stevens, and brother of Benjamin Franklin Stevens [q.v.]. On the title page of his Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York and the Formation of His Library (1886) he describes himself as "Bibliographer and Lover of Books," member of various historical and scientific societies, "Patriarch of Skull & Bones of Yale . . . as well as Citizen of Noviomagus et cetera." According to his own account he was at Middlebury College, 1839; in Washington as a clerk in the Treasury Department and the Senate, 1840; at Yale College, 1841-43, where he took the degree of B.A.; and at Harvard, 1844, where he studied law, "all the while dabbling in books and manuscripts by way of keeping the pot boiling." During his vacations he hunted through New England and the middle states for "historical nuggets" for Peter Force [q.v.] and his American Archives. "In July 1845," he relates, "I found myself in London, a self-appointed missionary, on an antiquarian and historical book-hunting expedition, at my own expense and on my own responsibility, with a few Yankee notions in head and an ample fortune of nearly forty sovereigns in pocket" (Recollections of Mr. James Lenox, pp. 15-16).

London was his home until his death and the world of books his life. He reached England just as Sir Anthony Panizzi began his development of the book stock of the British Museum, and had much to do with museum purchases of books relating to the New World. In America he helped build up the collections of John Carter Brown of Providence, R. I., James Lenox [qq.v.] of New York City, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress, to mention but a few of his outstanding American customers. He came to hold high rank as an authority in the bibliographical history of the English Bible, and in the geographical and historical literature of the western world. As early as Nov. 14, 1846, in a letter to Lenox, he urged transcription of documents in European archives for the use of American scholars, and he was a pioneer in the use of photography to supplement bibliography (see his Photo-bibliography, 1878). His publications, which were for the most part annotated catalogues of items in his collections or reprints of rare documents, include Historical Nuggets (1862), a catalogue of the rarities in his library; Bibliotheca Historica (1870); and The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition, MDCCCLXXVII (1878). Though he agreed to make a catalogue of the Lenox library, he never fulfilled the promise. His conflicts with such men as Henry Harrisse and Justin Winsor were frequent. Characterized by Richard Garnett (post, pp. 65-69) as genial, expansive, sanguine, and as both crafty and candid, he was called "an enigma" by so restrained and careful a man as George Henry Moore (manuscript letter to John Russell Bartlett, Mar. 20, 1873, in the John Carter Brown Library). On Feb. 25, 1854, he married in London Mary (Newton) Kuczynski, a descendant of Sir Isaac Newton, widow of Vincent Kuczynski of H. M. State Paper Office. The bookselling business he founded was continued in London by his son and his grandson. He was buried in Hampstead Cemetery, London, where a monument, a block of Barre granite, cut at Montpelier, Vt., was erected to his memory by the Society of Noviomagus.

"Henry Stevens." Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. Biography in Context. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.

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Last Updated8/7/24

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