“We are especially pleased to honor our friend Walter Pforzheimer in this tercentennial year,” says Vincent Giroud, curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke. “Few collectors have contributed so richly to so many different areas of the library’s holdings. The Pforzheimer Molière collection bids fair to be the finest in private hands and now makes Yale the best Molière library outside France.”

The Beinecke Library was recently the recipient of an extraordinary gift of more than 15,000 books and some 46 linear feet of manuscript material from an alumnus whose support of the Yale Library spans nearly seven decades. Walter L. Pforzheimer, Class of 1935, began collecting in earnest during his student years, when he was taught by Yale’s legendary Chauncey Brewster Tinker, mentor to such great collectors as Paul Mellon and Donald Gallup, to writers like Thornton Wilder, and to illustrious scholars such as William K. Wimsatt. Walter Pforzheimer was the first undergraduate member of the then newly formed Yale Library Associates. Elected to the governing board of that organization after his graduation from Yale, he is its longest-serving trustee.

Mr. Pforzheimer comes from a family of bookmen. His uncle Carl Pforzheimer collected Shelley and his circle (a collection now at the New York Public Library), while his father, Walter, amassed two extraordinary groups of books: a virtually complete collection of Molière covering the 300-year publication history of the great French playwright, and a collection of French armorial bindings, books specially bound for the private libraries of kings, nobles, and churchmen, each volume an exquisite artifact that brings text, provenance, and craftsmanship into a unique historical relationship. The collection’s finest treasure is one of the bindings from the library of the renowned sixteenth-century bibliophile Jean Grolier.

Walter Pforzheimer the son inherited his father’s library, conserved and augmented it, and added to it two outstanding collections of his own. While still in secondary school, he began collecting the Philadelphia-born novelist, short-story writer, and humorist Frank Stockton (1834-1902). He pursued this interest at Yale and over the years developed an exhaustive gathering of materials that cover Stockton’s work as an illustrator, author, and editor.

Soon after his graduation from Yale Law School, Walter Pforzheimer helped organize various OSS operations, which led to work in Air Force Intelligence, and then to a distinguished career with the CIA. The collector kept pace: from the beginning Walter Pforzheimer began to form his great collection on intelligence service. This definitive assemblage of materials contains not only manuscripts, official documents, and historical materials, but also fiction and biography relating to intelligence and espionage, ranging chronologically from the American Revolution to the Cold War. Included are a letter by George Washington citing the need for intelligence, documents relating to the British spy Major John André, and materials concerning the Dreyfus Affair. Walter Pforzheimer is the author of Bibliography of Intelligence Literature.