William S. Reese

Reese was born to William Blaine Reese and Katherine Reese (née Jackson) on July 29, 1955, in Havre de Grace, Maryland.[1] He had a sister, Barbara.[1] He attended Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was the president of his senior class and from which he graduated in 1973.

Reese married Margaret Hurt, who died in 2002.[1] He later married Margaret Hurt's sister, Dorothy Hurt.[1]

Reese died on June 4, 2018.[1]

Reese's first bibliographic publications and antiquarian sales occurred while he was an undergraduate at Yale in the mid-1970s.[1] At this time, he was a partner in the rare book firm Frontier Americana.[2] He received a B.A. in history from Yale in 1977.[1] His senior thesis was titled Winnowers of the Past: The Americanist Tradition in the Nineteenth Century.[2] After graduation, Reese worked with bookseller Fred White Jr in Texas.[3]

Reese founded the William Reese Company in 1979, in New Haven, Connecticut.[2] Over the next forty years, the company became the leader in the Americana market, with the best items and the best collections passing through Reese's hands.[3] The company issued hundreds of catalogues of American materials.[2] Reese also worked closely with Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library to shape their Americana collections.[4]

In 1998, the William Reese Company began offering Fellowships in the Print Culture of the Americas, to fund research in American book history.[5]

Reese was profiled in the 2019 documentary The Booksellers, directed by D.W. Young.[6]