Stevens, Henry, Jr., 1819-1886

Henry Stevens (August 24, 1819 – February 28, 1886) was a renowned American bibliographer. Stevens was born in Barnet, Vermont. He studied at Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1838–1839, graduated at Yale in 1843, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, and studied at Harvard Law School in 1843–1844. In 1845 he went to London, where he was employed during most of the remainder of his life as a collector of Americana for the British Museum and for various public and private American libraries. He was engaged by Sir Anthony Panizzi, librarian of the British Museum, to collect historical books, documents, journals, etc., concerning North and South America; and he was purchasing agent for the Smithsonian Institution and for the Library of Congress, as well as for James Lenox, of New York, for whom he secured much of the valuable Americana in the Lenox library in that city, and for the John Carter Brown library, at Providence, Rhode Island. He became a member of the Society of Antiquaries in 1852, and in 1877 was a member of the committee which organized the Caxton Exhibition, for which he catalogued the collection of Bibles. In that same year, using the pseudonym "Mr. Secretary Outis," Stevens founded the literary group "The Hercules Club." Stevens was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1854. He died at South Hampstead, England, on February 28, 1886. His brother, Benjamin Franklin Stevens, was also a bibliographer.