Henry Stevens (bibliographer)

Henry Stevens (bibliographer)

Henry Stevens (August 24, 1819–February 28, 1886), American bibliographer, was born in Barnet, Vermont.

He studied at Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1838–1839, graduated at Yale in 1843, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, and studied at Harvard Law School in 1843–1844. In 1845 he went to London, where he was employed during most of the remainder of his life as a collector of Americana for the British Museum and for various public and private American libraries.

He was engaged by Sir Anthony Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum, to collect historical books, documents, journals, etc., concerning North and South America; and he was purchasing agent for the Smithsonian Institution and for the Library of Congress, as well as for James Lenox, of New York, for whom he secured much of the valuable Americana in the Lenox library in that city, and for the John Carter Brown library, at Providence, Rhode Island. He became a member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1852, and in 1877 was a member of the committee which organized the Caxton Exhibition, for which he catalogued the collection of Bibles. He died at South Hampstead, England, on the 28th of February 1886. His brother, Benjamin Franklin Stevens, also a bibliographer.

His principal compilations and publications were:

• an Analytical Index to the Colonial Documents of New Jersey in the State Paper Office in England (1858), constituting vol. v. of the New Jersey Historical Society's Collections
• Collection of Historical Papers relating to Rhode Island ... 1640–1775 (6 vols), for the John Carter Brown Library
• historical indexes of the colonial documents relating to Maryland (10 vols), now in the library of the Maryland Historical Society
• a collection of papers relating to Virginia for the period 1585–1775, incomplete, deposited in the Virginia state library in 1858
• a valuable Catalogue of American Maps in the Library of the British Museum (1856)
• catalogues of American, of Mexican and other Spanish-American and of Canadian and other British North American books in the library of the British Museum
• Historical and Geographical Notes on the Earliest Discoveries in America, 1153–1530, with Comments on the Earliest Maps and Charts, etc. (1869)
• Sebastian Cabot/John Cabot (1870)
• The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition, 1877 (1878)
• Recollections of Mr James Lenox, of New York, and the Formation of his Library (1886).
• The unpublished papers of Henry Stevens, bookdealer, (2½ linear feet) are deposited in the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Some additional papers are deposited in the Yale University Library., and the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles.