Random Things That Interest Me: The Thomas W. Streeter Collection of Americana

Thomas Winthrop Streeter was born in 1883 in Concord, New Hampshire. He received a B.L. degree from Dartmouth College in 1904 and an LL.B. degree from Harvard Law School in 1907. He practiced law until 1917 when he moved to New York and began a career in business and finance. He retired in 1939. Although successful as a businessman, his claim to fame was in a different field altogether; something most people consider a hobby.

Thomas Streeter began collecting books on American history at an early age. He attended his first auction in 1920 and at that time became determined to collect books on "beginnings", books relating to first explorations of states and areas, first settlements, and cultural foundations in the form of significant issues in individual colonies and states. While serving as chairman of the board of a Texas based petroleum company from 1923-30, he began to acquire books, pamphlets, broadsides and maps relating to Texas history during the period of 1795-1845. This particular subset of his collection eventually became the largest private Texana collection ever compiled. His interest in Texana led him to compile and publish the authoritative three-part (five-volume) Bibliography of Texas, 1795-1845 in the years 1955-1960. After the work was published, he sold his Texana collection of nearly 2000 publications to Yale University where it became part of their Western Americana Collection.

But, like I said, Texana was only a subset of his collection. Streeter's personal library of Americana eventually surpassed all other American private libraries. Upon his death in 1965 the library consisted of some 5,000 volumes ranging from discovery and exploration to first books in each of the American states. One of the earliest items in his collection was Cosmographi Geographia, a geographical study printed in Venice in 1482 which contained a rare map and greatly stimulated exploration. Early maps and atlases were an important part of the collection. There were also broadsides, pamphlets, treaties...anything that would shed light on the discovery, exploration and settlement of North America.

The Streeter Collection was not a collection of "high spots" of history, nor was it a collection of books that were bought on impulse. Streeter was very selective in the items he bought and each item in the collection had a definite purpose. He was well known to booksellers of important works across the country as well as libraries great and small. He made pilgrimages to libraries from coast to coast carefully jotting down titles that were new to him and combing over case after case of special collections. Decisions on what to add to his collection were not made hastily.

In accordance with his wishes, after his death, the collection was sold off in a series of seven auctions at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York City from 1966 through 1969. The catalog for this auction was printed in a set of eight volumes including an index and has become an important bibliography and reference source in its own right. Over the course of three decades, Streeter had painstakingly cataloged his collection, making notes of provenance and significance and the descriptions of the auction items were prepared using a carbon copy of his catalog which was contained in eighty-seven loose-leaf notebooks. The total selling price for the 4,421 lots was $3,104,982.

In the introduction to volume I of the auction catalog, Lawrence C. Wroth wrote, "These books and broadsides, maps and pamphlets show us the whole panorama of a great nation in birth and growth, tell us the wonderful story of its birth through colonialism and of its own colonialism rampant across a continent, of good deeds and bad, of courage, of frustration. Here in these materials is the stuff not of a single epic but of a hundred epics." Thanks to men like Thomas Winthrop Streeter, our past has been preserved for future generations to study.