Pforzheimer, Carl Howard (1879-01-29 - 1957-04-04)

Carl H. Pforzheimer was born in New York, the son of Isaac and Mina Heyman Pforzheimer, on 29 January 1879. By the age of twenty-three, he had his own firm on the New York Stock Exchange. He rapidly gained a reputation as a private book collector, competing at auctions with Henry C. Folger, Henry E. Huntington, and John Pierpont Morgan. He was especially interested in the works of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and their contemporaries. However, he also acquired early editions of Tudor and Elizabethan literature and incunables. Pforzheimer died on 4 April 1957. The Shelley collection was donated to the New York Public Library in 1986, while much of the books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were acquired at auction by the Harry Ransom Center.