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A Buffalo lawyer and businessman, Thomas B. Lockwood was one of many successful and wealthy men who built magnificent private libraries. Acquiring his books at auctions, including the famous ones of Robert Hoe and Beverly Chew, and through dealers like George D. Smith and Mitchell Kennerley, Lockwood assembled his library of some 3,000 volumes between 1910 and 1930. This was a very active time for book collectors in America. During the period Henry Folger, Henry E. Huntington, and John Pierpont Morgan made massive purchases of printed books and manuscripts, which became the foundations of the research centers they later endowed. In Buffalo, there were also other collectors of importance, such as John L. Clawson and Robert B. Adams, both of whom were friends and neighbors of Lockwood.

The library of Thomas B. Lockwood has a very carefully designed breadth but no extreme depth in a single area. He often followed the Grolier Club's list of One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature. There are in this collection examples of the great works of literature in their most prized editions: Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene of 1590 and 1595, the four seventeenth century folios of Shakespeare, the two volumes of the collected works of Ben Jonson (1616, 1640), the folio edition of The Comedies and Tragedies (1647) of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, as well as first editions of John Milton's Paradise Lost (in ten books) (1667), Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798), Percy B. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820), and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, including the multiple volume publications of Kenilworth (1821) and Redgauntlet (1824). There is a very large collection of first editions and association items of Robert Louis Stevenson, including books from Stevenson's library, as well as a substantial number of the first editions of Charles Lever, among them Jack Hilton (1843) and Tom Burke (1844) in their serial parts. Among the American first editions are Melville's Moby Dick (1851), a signed copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). Large collections of first editions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Dean Howells, and John Greenleaf Whittier are also present.

Some of the finest books in Lockwood's collection were produced by private presses. There are examples of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill Press--Lord Charles Whitworth's An Account of Russia As It Was in the Year 1710 (1758), to cite but one--as well as almost complete runs of the publications of William Morris' Kelmscott Press and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson's Doves Press. Many of the titles are printed on vellum as well as on paper. The Kelmscott Chaucer, with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones, designed and printed by William Morris, represents the apex of nineteenth-century book design and printing. The collection contains one of the thirteen copies on vellum, as well as a copy printed on paper. The Doves Press Bible, printed on both vellum and paper, is itself another monument in the history of printing. Lockwood's copy on vellum is known as the "Retree copy," since it was made up from extra sheets from the production of the two other known copies on vellum. The most respected productions of John Hornby's Ashendene Press, including The Faerie Queene, The Noble and Joyous Book Entytled Le. Morte D'Arthur and The XI. Bookes of the Golden Asse, are matched by The Prayer Book of Edward VII, one of ten copies printed on vellum, by the Essex House, another distinguished private press.

In addition to the books from the private presses, Lockwood collected that publications of the literary societies, like the Grolier Club, the Bibliophile Society, and the Rowfant Club. He was also very interested in fine bindings. Some, like those for William Caxton's The History of Reynard the Foxe, printed on vellum by the Kelmscott Press, and for William Morris' The Life and Death of Jason, also from the Kelmscott Press, are exhibition bindings of exquisite design and elegant presentation, highly decorated with inlays of various colors and tooled in gold. Others are excellent examples of the bookbinder's artistry: for example, one for a later edition of Isaak Walton and Charles Cotton's The Complete Angler features three carved, tooled, and painted figures of fish on the front and rear covers There are also many elaborate but tasteful bindings performed by French binders. Other binders of importance represented are Bedford, the Club Binder, John Grabau, Sangorski and Sutcliffe, and J. Wright. But overall, the collection of bindings is based on the more traditional polished calf bindings, like those encasing the six volumes of the first edition of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749).

Thomas B. Lockwood was a reader as well as a collector. Many volumes of biographies of great men and women, as well as copies of such major works as William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), William Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776), John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sea (1864), and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) are part of his collection. Lockwood owned books illustrated by George Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, and Howard Pyle. He also owned a large selection of books about the history of printing and the history of the book.

In addition, Lockwood collected the signatures of both the Presidents of the United States and the Governors of New York, as well as some from other state officials. Complementing these are a group of Presidential medals issued by the United States Mint from Washington to Harding, a set of 150 bronze medals of Napoleon struck from 1796 to 1816, and thirty-four silver medals of the Kings of England from William I to George II, made by Jean Dassicr. He also acquired a selection of silver Greek coins covering the period 600-100 B.C., gold Roman coins of the Emperors, a variety of British gold coins from the period 200 B.C. to 1911, and a small number of Japanese gold coins from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To these objects can be added two colored drawings by William E)lake and bronze statues of Nathan Hale and Red Jacket.

When Lockwood donated his collection and the other associated items to the University of Buffalo in 1935, he established an endowment to perpetuate his record of collecting and to enrich his library as a resource for serious scholarship. Both intentions have been satisfied. Today it serves the needs of scholars with a wide variety of interests. The collection is accessible through Robert J. Bertholf's The Private Library of Thomas B. Lockwood: A Descriptive Catalog (1983).