Wroth, Lawrence C.

Lawrence Counselman Wroth (1884-1970), librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, was born in Baltimore on January 14, 1884. He graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1905. Aspiring to a career as a writer, he wrote for Country Life in America the first of his over 500 publications, entitled “Sanitation in the Country House.” The son of an Episcopal clergyman, he served as librarian of the Maryland Diocesan Library from 1905 to 1912. He was assistant librarian of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore from 1912 to 1923, with a two-year absence with the 110th and 111th Field Artillery in France from 1917 to 1919. Wroth’s first book, published in 1911, was a biography of Parson Weems, George Washington’s biographer, who gave us the story of the cherry tree. In 1922 his A History of Printing in Colonial America brought him recognition by bibliographical scholars, among them the former librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, George Parker Winship, who wrote in his review, “American bibliography has reached a new level.” In the spring of 1923 he came to Brown as librarian of the John Carter Brown Library. He retired from that position in 1957, retaining his 1932 appointment as Research Professor of American History until 1965. In his 35 years as librarian he not only added books to its collection, but enhanced its reputation through his writings. He published The Colonial Printer in 1931, The Way of a Ship, an Essay on the Literature of Navigation in 1936, and The Early Cartography of the Pacific in 1944. His final book, The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazanno 1524-1528, was published only a few months before his death on December 25, 1970.