, Autograph Letter Signed, New York, October 9, 1839, to Louis (Ludwig) Tieck, The Post, Dresden, Germany

Quarto,1 page, in very good, clean and legible condition.

1839 How the Astor-New York Public Library was Born.

"In recommending my young Brother in Law, Mr. Astor to your kind notice I neglected to include his travelling friend and Counsellor Mr. Cogswell because I thought you knew him already. Mr. Cogswell brings his own recommendation - a natural philosopher and gentleman he has enjoyed the friendship of many of your contemporaries - among them Goethe and Sir Walter Scott. He is now the Editor of our principal Quarterly Review and no American private life enjoys the confidence and affection of a larger circle of Friends."

When he wrote this letter, 25-year-old Samuel Cutler Ward IV was a banker in his father's respected Wall Street firm – newly wed to the grand-daughter of the first American multi-millionaire, fur trade magnate, John Jacob Astor. When Ward's father died a month after he wrote this letter, the son became executor of his own multi-million dollar estate. Like his sister, Julia Ward Howe, would have a colorful career ahead – as a bankrupt Wall Street speculator, an adventurous California Forty-Niner, and, eventually, "King of the Lobby", the premier Washington lobbyist after the Civil War.

But in 1839 he was just a very rich young literary-minded banker who was not entirely happy with that profession. He had earlier spent four years in Europe, enjoying high society and earning a doctoral degree in Germany, where he met poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who became his lifelong friend. There he also met Ludwig Tieck, his correspondent, German poet, novelist, a founder of the European Romantic movement – and a collector of Spanish books, which had excited the interest of former Harvard Professor George Ticknor, another expatriate who would soon become the leading scholar of Spanish literature in America.

Both Ticknor and Ward were close friends of educator and journalist George Cogswell, yet another American expatriate. Through Ward, Cogswell became the friend and counsellor of patriarch John Jacob Astor. Cogswell convinced Astor to fund a great public research library in New York City. The project took many years of planning, under Cogswell's guidance. The European trip Ward describes in this letter – Cogswell travelling with Ward's brother-in-law, John Jacob's grandson was apparently to make initial plans for assembling the collection. The Astor Library did not open to the public until 1854. Forty years after that, it become the foundation of the New York Public Library of today.