As a fourteen-year-old student at Boston’s English High School, the future bibliophile composed this essay on the value of reading. In impeccable cursive, young Morgan (known as Pierpont to family and friends) pronounced most novels “useless trash” but allowed that “well written and true stories” can teach us “how to treat other persons with proper reverence and respect.” He concluded, “How necessary, yes, how important it is that all should read for their well-being and happiness.”

Fourteen-year-old Morgan received this pocket diary as a Christmas gift from his father. In it, the young Morgan faithfully recorded his daily activities, including his early efforts to build an autograph collection. On 3 October 1851, he noted that he had “received some letters from distinguished men.” The next day, he secured the autographs of two of his grandfather’s acquaintances: Jared Sparks, president of Harvard College, and Edward Everett, a prominent educator and politician.

During the 1880s, the Manhattan home of J. Pierpont Morgan and his second wife, Frances (Fanny), was featured in a lavish volume depicting the domestic interiors of wealthy Americans. This photograph shows their home library, which was luxuriously outfitted by decorator Christian Herter and illuminated with Thomas Edison’s new electric lighting. But the library is curiously short on books. Only a sliver of low shelving is visible to the right of the windows. In the freestanding library Morgan would commission two decades later, fine volumes would be very much in evidence.

The house pictured here, later demolished, was located at the corner of 36th Street and Madison Avenue, on the site of the building you are in now.

Head of a successful London-based merchant-banking firm, Junius Spencer Morgan (1813–1890) took a strong hand in directing his son Pierpont’s early career on Wall Street. Junius was also an avid collector of books and manuscripts. When Junius died of injuries sustained in a carriage accident in 1890, Pierpont inherited $15 million (equivalent to about $463 million today) and found himself well positioned to build his business, as well as to devote increasingly large sums to the acquisition of rare books and artworks.

By the 1880s—about the time of this portrait—Morgan had assembled a fine home library comprising titles typically found on his peers’ bookshelves. But alongside modern editions of such authors as Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton were several items that stood out, among them autographs of the signers of the US Declaration of Independence, a handwritten letter by the poet Robert Burns, and a copy of the so-called Eliot Indian Bible, the first translation of the Old and New Testaments into an Indigenous American language.

By the 1890s Morgan was regularly visiting New York and London bookdealers and seeking out authors’ manuscripts and first editions—and even his first Gutenberg Bible.

Junius Spencer Morgan II (1867–1932), son of J. Pierpont Morgan’s sister Sarah, began collecting rare books while he was in his teens and eventually built a fine collection of the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s works. An indifferent financier and ardent bibliophile, Junius became his uncle’s adviser and de facto librarian, exerting an outsize influence on the nature and scale of Pierpont’s acquisitions. It was Junius who guided Pierpont in his en bloc purchases of other collections, conferred with architect Charles Follen McKim during the Library’s design and construction, and—importantly—introduced Pierpont to Belle da Costa Greene, the librarian who would ultimately displace Junius as manager of all matters related to Pierpont’s books and manuscripts.