Laurence Claiborne Witten II

Who was Laurence Claiborne Witten II?

Laurence C. Witten II, was an American rare book dealer and collector of antiquities.

Laurence Witten was born into a wealthy Virginia family with interests in the tobacco and furniture manufacturing businesses, but was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of life insurance agent Laurence Claiborne Witten I & Julia, Laurence studied music after the Second World War. He graduated from Williams College in 1948 and went on to gain a Bachelor of Music degree at Yale. He then opened Laurence Witten Rare Books close to Yale's Sterling Library in New Haven, Connecticut, taking advantage of the dollar's strength to buy large quantities of early books and manuscripts in Europe. He married Cora Williams, a Yale student from Georgia, in 1954, the year she gained her BMus, and the first of their three daughters was born in 1955.

In many cases, European dealers were unable to give him much information about the items Laurence was buying, but he took pride in the historical research necessary to overcome these problems, as can be seen in the twenty catalogues he produced between the 1950s and the 1980s.