Valentine Edouard Blacque (1851-1915)

He was born and brought up in Paris before graduating from Columbia University in New York. He remained in America and was a stockbroker on Wall Street for all his professional life before retiring to Paris. He was described as, "a well-known member of the Knickerbocker Club... quite a picturesque-looking personage on Fifth Avenue. He is very tall, and usually dresses in gray, and has the cast of countenance of the operatic Mephisto. But Mr. Blacque is one of the most genial of men. He is a collector of books and has one of the best selected libraries in town, and is an excellent musician and composer.” He was also an amateur artist and the founder of the Book Fellows' Club in New York, and both he and his wife (Kate Read) were said to possess, "a wonderful gift as raconteurs.” In Paris, he made a success "with the binding of books".

His private library in his home in New York was described in florid terms by Henri Pene du Bois in 1892: “A room the ceiling of which, in red Morocco of the Levant, reproduces exactly the color, harmonious lines, and lyrical flight into azure of a wing of a book bound for Grolier. Tapestry of Beauvais; etchings of Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Visscher, Fortuny, and Lalanne; original drawings by Leloir, Du Maurier, Kate Greenaway, Blum, Chase, and Taylor; bookcases the crystal panes in the dark oak doors of which are lozenged... At the table, carved in massive oak, on a Persian carpet of silk, in a casket of lapiz-lazuli, pell-mell with the rubies, diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds, the treasure of the reliquary, a book of poems not to be described, illuminated by cherished artists with fugitive rays of sunlight, flame of eyes, and blushing pink of lips... For there are no books in the cases not ardently loved; none prized because scarce although ugly; none admitted because necessary to a set or indispensable to a system. They are beautiful, and they have not a double elsewhere. All converge to the blue diamond book of poems of the reliquary in beauty and art. It is not an accomplishment that may be lightly given as an example to others. It is like drawing the bow of Ulysses, a feat of Ulysses impossible to our frail arms.”