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The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City has long been known as one of the world's most important privately endowed libraries open to the public. Music, however, had not been one of its major interests, although scholars were aware of a handful of precious musical items. These included the unique and complete copy of Antico's Motetti e Canzoni of 1521, acquired as early as 1899. Another early acquisition was the result of a fortuitous (?) meeting in 1906, when Pierpont Morgan was a dinner guest at the villa of Leo S. Olschki in Florence. The afterdinner music happened to consist of the Beethoven Violin Sonata, opus 96. Mr. Morgan liked the music, and since his host happened to have the autograph conveniently at hand, Mr. Morgan took it back home with him. Other choice items include a thirteenth-century Provensal chansonnier and a fifteenth-century manuscript of Guillaume de Machaut, autograph compositions by Handel, Haydn, Cherubini, Rossini, and Gounod, and letters of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Wagner. With dramatic suddenness, the Library was immeasurably enriched, in September of 1968, when the trustees of the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust presented it with the remarkable collection assembled by the late Mrs. Cary. Announcement of the gift was made in the fall of 1970 and an exhibition of the most important items was held at the Morgan Library from November, 1970 through January, 1971. A handsomely produced catalog of the Cary Collection* was published for the opening of the exhibition, and from this it was at once apparent that the Morgan Library must now be reckoned as rating second only to the Library of Congress in the importance of its musical source material. The catalog was prepared by the present writer in association with Mr. Herbert Cahoon and Mr. Douglas C. Ewing, of the Library's staff. It contains forty-nine plates, facsimiles of some of the most important items in the collection. Mrs. Cary had carefully assembled her collection over a long period of years, but since she studiously avoided publicity, -the existence of the collection was barely known to musicologists or librarians. Performing