Robert Hoe III

Robert Hoe had lived for seventy years in this, the city of his birth and education. For thirty-three of these he was a member of this association. Third of his name, he inherited a supreme power in the mechanical processes of printing. During his reign in the kingdom of the printing press, the miraculous improvement already made by his forebears was eclipsed, because in the capacity to wield the new forces, in the invention and adaptation of new forms, and in procedure, he stood alone among men so far engaged in his art. His works and factories were models of organization, and from boyhood onward his employees were educated, protected, encouraged and disciplined. Accessory to his prime concern were the studies of all its ancillary arts, and within that field he was an author of distinction. Likewise in the evolution of his talent he began the collection of books, and this developed into a passion. The judgment, the suspicion, the daring and the caution, the seeking and selection of the connoisseur, all these powers he had or had acquired. Thus his private library for extent and quality is nowhere surpassed, if indeed it be equalled. It is his renown to have been first as printer, first as collector of the printer’s trophies.

William Milligan Sloane
1910 Century Association Yearbook