Walter Newton Henry Harding (1883-1973) was a ragtime pianist, collector of rare books, primarily relating to music, and major donor to the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.
The family emigrated to the United States when Harding was four years old, where they settled in Chicago.
After leaving school aged seventeen, Harding began a professional career as a pianist.
[1] He reported visiting the Chicago Public Library, where he looked at a collection of seventeenth-century broadside ballads.
[3] According to Harding's account, he began buying English and French seventeenth and eighteenth-century songbooks at a time when there was little interest in this material.