author
Alfred Henry Huth
1850–1910
A passionate English bibliophile, he turned a family love of rare books into a life’s work. He is remembered for building on the famous Huth Library and for writing about the history of books, travel, and collecting.
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About the author
Born in London in 1850, Alfred Henry Huth came from a banking family but became best known for books rather than finance. He inherited his father Henry Huth’s enthusiasm for rare volumes and manuscripts, and he went on to expand the celebrated Huth Library, one of the notable private collections of its time.
Huth was more than a collector. He helped found the Bibliographical Society in London and wrote and edited works connected with bibliography, travel, and historical texts. Sources also note that, as a boy, he traveled in the East under the care of the historian Henry Thomas Buckle, an experience that seems to have matched his lifelong curiosity about books and the wider world.
He died in 1910 at Fosbury House in Wiltshire. By his will, the British Museum was allowed to choose fifty items from his collection, helping preserve part of his legacy in a public institution.