300 Million USD Private Library Donated to Princeton. The Scheide Family Collection previously a cherished guest at Princeton, now owned by Princeton.

This is the dream come true, a multi-generational private library, valued at 300 Million USD is donated to Princeton University.  When I dream about my library, I dream that someday, the collection will have value to someone or some institute.  Everyone should dream big!

Scheide donates rare books library to Princeton; collection is largest gift in University's history
Posted February 16, 2015; 12:00 p.m.by Development Communications

Musician, musicologist, bibliophile and philanthropist William H. Scheide, a 1936 Princeton University alumnus who died in November at age 100, has left his extraordinary collection of some 2,500 rare printed books and manuscripts to Princeton University. With an expected appraised value of nearly $300 million, it is the largest gift in the University's history.

The Scheide Library has been housed in Princeton's Firestone Library since 1959, when Scheide moved the collection from his hometown of Titusville, Pennsylvania. It holds the first six printed editions of the Bible, starting with the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, the earliest substantial European printed book; the original printing of the Declaration of Independence; Beethoven's autograph (in his own handwriting) music sketchbook for 1815-16, the only outside Europe; Shakespeare's first, second, third and fourth folios; significant autograph music manuscripts of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner; a lengthy autograph speech by Abraham Lincoln from 1856 on the problems of slavery; and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's original letter and telegram copy books from the last weeks of the Civil War.