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YOU WON'T FIND IT on display in the current "Masterpieces of the Morgan Library" show, but somewhere in the recesses of the library's enormous collections is an 1851 autograph of President Millard Fillmore.
So what, you say? So, while scarcely a "masterpiece," it was this autograph of our 13th president, acquired by J. Pierpont Morgan when he was a lad of 14, that started the future financier on his remarkable collecting career. And thereby hangs a tale that has led to the library's recent expansion and renovation, a $30-million project being unveiled to the public today.
The project virtually doubles the size of the Morgan Library, whose collections have built upon the startlingly omnivorous tastes of its namesake. In his middle-age adulthood, Morgan collected on the grand scale befitting his robber baron status, with the aim of rivaling the great libraries of Europe. His son, J.P. Morgan, Jr., turned the Morgan Library into a public institution in 1924.
Housed in a fine Renaissance-style building on Madison Avenue and 36th Street, the library is a repository for the written word and artworks on paper - of illuminated medieval manuscripts, Gutenberg Bibles (three of them, no less), jeweled and gilded bindings of the Gospels, Old Masters drawings and prints, original manuscripts of celebrated books, letters by artists and scientists, even a collection of engraved seals and cuneiform tablets dating to the fifth millenium B.C.
Yet much of this eclectic assemblage has been generally out of sight, because of limited exhibition space; a single large gallery,...