Walter Romeyn Benjamin (1854-1943)

He was born at Guildford, Connecticut, and graduated from Union College in 1874. Having edited a small newspaper in Perth Amboy, N.J., he worked for eleven years under Charles A. Dana (and with Arthur Brisbane) at the New York Sun. In 1887 - in partnership with his brother, William - he became a well-known figure in New York in the world of European and American collecting, opening the first firm in America limited to the handling of old manuscripts. He edited the magazine The Collector and his particular speciality was autographs. Among his most prized finds/sales was the only known existing letter signed by Thomas Lynch, owned by Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet. On another occasion, he paid $1 at an auction for the papers of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under President Lincoln. When he eventually found the time to examine the bundle, he found Welles's diary, part of which recalled Lincoln's last cabinet meeting, of which he told of having had a dream the night before presaging an ominous event. He sold the diary to a private collector for $1,000, and it sold again for $1,500. He married twice and had five children. His daughter, Mary, continued his business, and the "Walter R. Benjamin Autograph Collection" is now preserved at The Huntington in California.