The Morgan Library. From the outside, it looks restrained. Polite, even. An Italian Renaissance palazzo on Madison Avenue. Cream-colored stone, tasteful proportions. The kind of building that whispers.
Do not be fooled by the whispering. Inside this building, J.P. Morgan kept three Gutenberg Bibles. Three. The Morgan Library is the only institution on earth that owns three copies of the first major book printed with movable type. Most institutions would sell their parking lot for one. Morgan had three, and he kept them in a steel-lined vault behind a door manufactured by the Herring-Hall-Marvin Safe Company of Hamilton, Ohio. The vault door alone weighed over a thousand pounds.
Morgan bought books the way other men bought stocks. The Wall Street Journal wrote in nineteen eleven — and this is a direct quote — Mister Morgan buys books as some financiers buy a thousand shares of stock. In some years, he spent half his income on his collection. Half. When he died in nineteen thirteen, mo
re than half his estate — valued at a hundred and twenty-eight million dollars, which today is about three billion — was art and rare books. The man was worth three billion dollars and most of it was paper.
But the real story of this building isn't Morgan. It's the woman he hired to run it.
Belle da Costa Greene was twenty-six years old when Morgan hired her as his personal librarian in nineteen
