Erwin Rosenthal (1889–1981), bookseller and art historian

Born at Munich on 9 April 1889, Erwin Rosenthal made a remarkable career in the book-trade and was also a renowned art historian in his own right. Unlike his father Jacques and his uncle Ludwig who trained as apprentice booksellers, he became an expert of rare books and manuscripts during his PhD at the University of Halle, on the use of woodcuts in early printed books produced at Ulm.

After his studies, Erwin joined in 1912 his father’s business, which he greatly modernized. Under his management, catalogue indexes were improved and books described more accurately. In 1913, he launched Beiträge zur Forschung, a journal offering scholarly essays on the items coming up for sale, and invited specialists to produce introductions to catalogues – he himself wrote that to catalogue 76, containing medieval miniatures and modern drawings. In the 1920s, he expanded the firm’s activities and opened an art gallery at Berlin, as well as the bookshop called L’Art Ancien at Lugano, transferred in 1929 to Zurich. Besides his bookseller’s duties, Erwin, known by his employees as ‘Herr Doktor’, published scholarly accounts on Giotto, Durer, Carolingian illumination, and the ‘Vergilius Romanus’, a fifth-century manuscript of Virgil.

Erwin’s private life was also deeply connected with the antiquarian book market in Europe and America. In 1908, he met Margherita Olschki, the youngest daughter of the Italian dealer Leo S. Olschki; they married four years later. In the early 1930, when the situation for Jews worsened in Germany, Erwin sent his five children abroad, while he remained at Munich until 1936 to sell his father’s business. After that, he and Margherita migrated to Switzerland and arrived in the US in 1941. There, Erwin continued to work in the book-trade and to conduct research in art history.