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Over a collecting career that covered more than four decades, Alfred Edward Newton assembled a library especially rich in British literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale and Robert B. Adam of Buffalo he fostered an interest in the English neoclassical writers, especially Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, at a time when their works were largely ignored. Newton promoted them by writing about them and by purchasing first editions of their works. His love of books encompassed the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries as well. As a prominent collector widely known for his magazine articles and colorful public persona, he played a central role in the great boom in book collecting, or "this book-collecting game," as he called it, which peaked between about 1910 and 1930. When his own collection was sold at auction in 1941, the book world looked on eagerly. Moreover, Newton's nine volumes of essays, published between 1918 and 1937, brought him international fame as a writer of witty and stylish prose, even as they helped strengthen, or revive, the fame of his favorite authors and encourage his thousands of readers to collect their works.
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