Bill Reese on book selling and book collecting,

This from the Yale University Library website: "William Reese '77 is an antiquarian bookseller living in New Haven, CT. His firm, William Reese Company, founded in 1975 when he was a sophomore, is one of the leading rare book dealers in the world, specializing in Americana, travels and voyages, and literature.  He has been active with the Yale Library for many years, funding a number of fellowships in the Beinecke Library. Bill served on the committee to raise funds for the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library and contributed, with his family, the Jackson Family Rare Book Room there, named in honor of his grandfather, John Day Jackson, Class of 1890, who gave Yale its first music library.

Bill has also given Yale major collections of 20th-century writers such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as books and manuscripts ranging from 18th-century Louisiana to the diary of an interned Japanese-American in World War II.  He has also curated four major exhibitions in the Beinecke Library, including their Columbian Quincentenary exhibition in 1992, and the show honoring Paul Mellon's bequest to the Beinecke Library in 2002, both commemorated with published catalogs. He has also funded Beinecke publications such as the recently published Alfred Stieglitz–Georgia O’Keefe correspondence, funded cataloguing initiatives in the Map Collection, and underwritten Yale staff members attending the Rare Book School.  Bill has also served on the committee to award the undergraduate book- collecting prize for thirty years.  Bill has worked with many book libraries throughout the country on issues of collection development, security, and fund-raising.  He serves on the Council of the American Antiquarian Society and the board of the Library of America."