William Sherman Reese died early in the morning of June 4, 2018, at his family’s farm, Seven Springs Farm, in Havre de Grace, Md., after a long illness.
William Sherman Reese, of New Haven, was born on July 29, 1955, in Havre de Grace. He was the son of William Blain Reese and Katherine (Jackson) Reese, and He is survived by his wife, Dorothy Hurt, his sister, Barbara Reese, and his nieces, Sarah Dyer and Tessa Currie, and nephew, Andrew Currie.
William attended Gilman School in Baltimore and graduated from Yale, summa cum laude, in 1977. In 1979, he founded the William Reese Company, located in New Haven and one of the leading firms in the world dealing in rare books and manuscripts. William Reese Company will continue under the ownership and management of William’s wife, Dorothy Hurt.
William was a member of the Century Association, the Grolier Club, the Club of Odd Volumes, the Old Book Table, the Yale Club, the Walpole Society, and the American Antiquarian Booksellers Association. He was on the boards or councils of the Friends of American Arts at Yale, the Yale Library Associates, the Yale Library Development Council, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Library of America, and was a fellow of Silliman College.
In addition, he was an active supporter of several community organizations, including Common Ground, New Haven Reads and the Community Soup Kitchen. He was the author of many articles and a number of books in the fields of American historical bibliography and book collecting, and a frequent speaker on those and allied subjects.
Donations may be made in William Reese’s memory to the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Mass.
