The Historical Auction Series No.2 The H. Bradley Martin Sale 1989-1990

Who was H. Bradley Martin as a collector? For an answer to this question, let’s turn again to Sotheby’s 1988 pre-sale press release:

Commencing his collecting in 1924 at the age of eighteen with the purchase of a first edition of Tom Sawyer at a shop on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, the New York-born H. Bradley Martin began to pursue his book collecting interests with a refinement of taste and a singleness of purpose which would stay with him over the next 63 years. His undergraduate years at Oxford familiarized him with the book dealers of Oxford and London. Hospitalization for a broken leg in 1929 introduced him to the works of W.H. Hudson, through whom Martin became a student of ornithology. Not even wartime service in the O.S.S. interrupted Martin’s collecting: proof sheets for one sale catalogue were sent to him on duty in North Africa. While stationed in London during World War II, he acquired one of his few illuminated manuscripts, a commentary on the Apostle’s Creed with twelve magnificent full-page miniatures by Jean Poyet, the celebrated Renaissance illustrator. After the war he began to purchase at auction, both in New York and London.

And, from another Sotheby’s publication, an introduction to the first of the Martin sale catalogues:

By the 1930s, Mr. Martin was established as a book collector and for the next 50 years, until his death in 1988, he received – and read – virtually every catalogue produced by booksellers and auction houses alike. Throughout the book world, he was known as a discerning and meticulous collector, one with specific, if broad, interests who was unwilling to compromise his standards…[Subsequent to the war] he became a major buyer at auction, participating in the great sales of the 1940s onward – Sadleir, Wilkinson, Swann, Litchfield, Bute, to mention only a few….He and Mrs. Martin made frequent buying trips to London and Paris, staying in the Ritz or the other and combing bookshops in both cities….”Mr. Martin approached each field in a different way, and there can be few private libraries which illustrate so well the varieties of collecting,” Stephen Weissman has observed. [From the Introduction to Sale 5870/The Martin Library, Part I: Audubon/The Library of H. Bradley Martin/John James Audubon/Magnificent Books and Manuscripts (Tuesday, August 6, 1989)]

There is another, quite significant, point to be made about the way in which H. Bradley Martin went about collecting: Yes, he had the financial ability and the disposition needed to acquire a really great library. But Martin had another crucial quality as well: he had the educational background necessary to make decisions and he had the backbone, both financial and mercurial, to make the majority of his purchases without relying on the assistance of a curator or an advisor. As Katherine Leab, editor of American Book Prices Current, put it in an article in The Washington Post in June 1989, “…He also had all the brains. He did it all himself. But then again, he didn’t have to work for a living, did he?” [“The Imperfect Binding of H. Bradley Martin’s Rare Book Collection” by David Streitfeld, The Washington Post, June 6 1989.]