Notable Bookseller Catalogue: The Rosenbach Company. THE SEA (1938)

 

Harrison Horblit's Annotated Copy

The Rosenbach Company. THE SEA: BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS ON THE ART OF NAVIGATION, GEOGRAPHY, NAVAL HISTORY, SHIPBUILDING, VOYAGES, SHIPWRECKS, MATHEMATICS, INCLUDING ATLASES, MAPS AND CHARTS. Philadelphia: The Rosenbach Company, 1938. xi 224 p. 837 items offered. Large 8vo. Blue printed wrappers.

Ownership signature of Harrison D. Horblit (1912-1988) with his annotations and notes throughout.

One of the finest subject catalogues issued by the Rosenbach Company. Some of Horblit’s earliest important acquisitions were from this catalogue (see below).

The anonymous foreword states, “The present catalogue is of a collection of manuscripts and books relating to the Sea, showing the development of geography and the science of navigation from the classical works of Pomponius Mela, Solinus and Ptolemy and the hazardous astronomical guides of ancient times down to the highly practical works of our own day.” The foreword goes on to detail many outstanding items from the collection and concludes, “This catalogue is a milestone in the history of book-selling, containing much unpublished material and the most important collection of books relating to the sea and the history of navigation ever offered for sale.”

The catalogue was ahead of its time in terms of subject and immediate orders, but this benefited the ground-breaking collector Horblit, who would become a steady, important customer of Rosenbach. Wolf & Fleming record in Rosenbach (1960), “There was a new wave of young collectors, attracted by the moderate prices asked for books of which they had special knowledge. Harrison Horblit, a textile manufacturer and yachtsman with a real flair for significant books in the field of navigation and the tangential sciences, began to be a regular visitor, sweeping up in a few months late in 1945 most of the early English scientific books still unsold from the seven-year-old Sea Catalogue.”

Horblit’s biographical entry in The Grolier 2000 explains, “Horblit’s love of books grew out of his love of boats. Imrie de Vegh in his 1947 letter proposing Horblit for membership in the Grolier Club called him ‘one of our leading collectors of books on the science of navigation.’” His obituary in AB Bookman, May 30, 1988, adds “An avid yachtsman, Horblit owned the auxiliary yawl ‘Suluan’ and participated in the North American Yacht Racing Union and Yacht Racing Association of Long Island.”

Horblit would form an exceptional collection on Early Science, Navigation & Travel, some items sold at auction in 1974 by Sotheby’s, others sold by H.P. Kraus in a series of catalogues, and many gifted to Harvard. He also gathered an unparalleled collection about the English bibliophile Sir Thomas Phillipps gifted to the Grolier Club, and he assembled a collection about the early history of photography now at Harvard. Horblit authored the influential One Hundred Books Famous in Science (Grolier Club: 1964) and curated the Grolier Club exhibition of the same held in 1958. 

Thomas Tanselle called Horblit “one of the great book collectors of the twentieth century” in a lengthy biographical essay for the Grolier Club Gazette (no. 48) which featured Horblit’s Sir Thomas Phillipps Collection.

 

The Sea. Rear cover annotated by Horblit