Correspondence

Cockerell, Sir Sydney Carlyle & Harold Peirce

Correspondence

1897–1931

This collection of over 500 letters between manuscript expert and antiquarian book agent Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (1867–1962) and American collector Harold Peirce (1856–1932) perfectly illustrates the interplay of passion, scholarship, and business savvy in the building of a great library. After winding up the affairs of the Kelmscott Press after William Morris’s death in 1896, Cockerell became Peirce’s London agent in the purchase of books and other items relating to Morris; Peirce, an outstanding collector of the first decades of the twentieth century, was also interested in Americana, and first editions of nineteenth-century English writers. The letters on display tell of Cockerell’s 1908 appointment as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, which prevented him from acting any longer as Peirce’s agent; but for nearly thirty years afterwards the two continued to correspond about subjects of mutual interest in the book world.

Purchased in 1998