Sure Way to Immortality

An April shower broke one day in Manhattan, falling impartially on thousands, including Henry Edwards Huntington. To keep his white mustachios dry, portly "H.E." ducked into an art gallery. Before he ducked out again, he had been sold a Raeburn portrait. Thus impulsively, in 1908, began one of the world's great collecting careers.

Multimillionaire Huntington had inherited one fortune from his railroading Uncle Collis of the Southern Pacific, made a second (in rails, real estate and electric power), and married a third. At 58, he was still working 18 hours a day. Then, retiring from business, he set about spending his money as vigorously and systematically as he had earned it.

In the first six years after acquiring the Raeburn, Huntington spent $6,000,000. By his death in 1927, he had assembled the finest collection of 18th Century British portraits in the U.S. (among them: Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy). And his purchases of 100,000 rare books and 1,000,000 precious manuscripts made him, in Bibliophile A.S.W. Rosenbach's judgment, "without doubt the greatest collector of books the world has ever known." In the judgment of Englishmen who hated to see their treasures taken off, he was one of history's colossal despoilers.

On a 550-acre estate in San Marino, Calif., in sight of the Sierra Madres, Huntington built two immense homes for his treasures. There, in a hall lined with million-dollar Boucher tapestries, he held many a midnight session with Rosenbach and Sir Joseph Duveen, planning collecting coups. Then, in 1919, Huntington deeded the whole kit & caboodle to the public. "The ownership of a fine library," he observed, "is the swiftest and surest way to immortality."

Research in an Orange Grove. Last week the Huntington Library and Art Gallery published a report summing up its first 20 years, and the Huntington was getting set to welcome a new director: Canadian-born John Ewart Wallace Sterling, 41, ex-football player, CalTech historian and part-time Los Angeles radio news commentator.

Since the first visitor crossed its threshold, more than 2,500,000 have wandered along the Huntington's magnificent cactus beds, orange groves and flower gardens, stopped to peer at the library's $50,000 Gutenberg Bible, and climbed the art gallery's marble stairs to take whispered popularity polls among the portraits. To San Marino each year come scholars to dig through treasures that range from the Ellesmere Chaucer manuscript (best text of the Canterbury Tales) to the manuscript of Stevenson's Kidnapped.

Hamlet & Hancock. Among the prize English items: William Caxton's printing of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1475), first book printed in English; one of the two known copies of the 1603 edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Top American purchases include: the only specimen of Columbus' handwriting in the New World; John Hancock's letter naming Washington commander in chief; the neatly penned Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

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