Alumnus donates US$300 million rare library to Princeton

Musician, musicologist, bibliophile and philanthropist William H Scheide, a 1936 Princeton University alumnus who died in November at age 100, has left his extraordinary collection of some 2,500 rare printed books and manuscripts to Princeton University. With an expected appraised value of nearly US$300 million, it is the largest gift in the university's history, reports News at Princeton.

The Scheide Library has been housed in Princeton’s Firestone Library since 1959, when Scheide moved the collection from his hometown of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Although privately owned, the collection has been accessible to patrons of the university's library through Firestone's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

It holds the first six printed editions of the Bible; the original printing of the Declaration of Independence; Beethoven’s autograph (in his own handwriting) music sketchbook for 1815-16; Shakespeare's first, second, third and fourth folios; significant autograph music manuscripts of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner; a lengthy autograph speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1856 on the problems of slavery; and General Ulysses S Grant's original letter and telegram copy books from the last weeks of the Civil War.
Full report on the Princeton site