Stephan Loewentheil
Over a career spanning four decades, Loewentheil "has excelled … in unearthing obscure bibliographic details leading to the acquisition of under-appreciated rarities, seminal documents and early historic photographic images.
[1] During the 1980s, Loewentheil began selling books to the White House, through a relationship with Joseph Verner Reed Jr., Chief of Protocol to President George H.W.
[18] In 2015, Loewentheil purchased the eight-page Book of Esther from the Gutenberg Bible for $970,000 at Sotheby's in New York City, with the goal of preserving it as a whole rather than selling individual pages.
[10] He also purchased, on behalf of a client,[6] a complete set of the Daniel Bomberg Babylonian Talmud for $9.3 million in 2015,[11] the highest price ever paid for an item of Judaica at auction.
[20] Loewentheil's photography collection is rooted in early photographic methods of the 19th century – daguerreotypes, cartes de visite, albumen prints, tintypes, and cyanotypes.
[2] Brady's whole-plate daguerrotype portrait of American politician and states-rights advocate John C. Calhoun, one of Loewentheil's most notable acquisitions, set a new record for the photographer upon its sale for $338,500 in a Sotheby's auction on April 6, 2011.
[27] One highlight of the building of the collection over three decades[28] was the acquisition of an album of 56 albumen prints by Felice Beato, which included some of the earliest photographic images of China, at an auction in Pennsylvania in 2014.
[32][33] The Collection's extensive holdings of early Peking photographs by Thomas Child were exhibited in November 2015 at the China Exchange in London,[32] and in 2016 at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York.
[34] A selection of 30 photographs from the Historical Photography of China Collection, including Felice Beato's rare portrait of the Old Summer Palace, taken just before its destruction in 1860,[35] was displayed as part of Asia Week New York in March 2017.
"[33] In an interview with CNN about the exhibition, Loewentheil expressed a similar sentiment: "photography is the greatest preserver of history ... because it was simultaneous with the technological revolutions that were to change everything.
[43] After researching their provenance, he discovered that they were the property of the University of Pennsylvania, and contacted the FBI, leading to the thief's arrest and the return of the books to the Van Pelt Library.
[46] Years before the theft was discovered, Loewentheil unwittingly acquired two of the National Library of Sweden's stolen volumes – a 19th-century illustrated text of the Mississippi River and a 17th-century French book on the Louisiana territory by Louis Hennepin,[47] – in an auction at Ketterer Kunst in Germany before selling them to a client in 1998.
[47] Some of the returns of stolen books and artifacts Mr. Loewentheil has negotiated have gone unacknowledged, since the victimized institutions declined to report the theft publicly.
[48] Loewentheil has been active in condemning theft and fraud in the rare book industry, and has been a featured speaker in conferences (including "The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril" at the British Library in 2015[49]) and articles[48][10] on the subject.
[50] The farm was borne out of Loewentheil's desire to serve food to his family and friends that he was "personally responsible for"[51] and to carry on the increasingly threatened traditions of shechita.
[54] Photographs from the Collection have been featured in the Cornell University exhibitions Dawn's Early Light: The First 50 Years of American Photography and The Lincoln Presidency: The Last Full Measure of Devotion.
[53] The collection – which focuses on images of everyday African-American life and includes cartes de visite, stereoviews, hand-painted tintypes, cyanotypes, and daguerreotypes[22] – was fully digitized in February 2017 and is available to view in its entirety on the library's website.
[57][58] Since its inception in 2001, the award, given each spring to an author under the age of 35 of a novel or collection of short stories, has honored such luminary young writers as Molly Antopol, Karen Russell, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Uzodinma Iweala.
