No one liked to tangle with Robert S Pirie. Part of a celebrated generation of dealmakers - at Skadden Arps, the New York law firm, then at the Rothschilds' US investment bank - he was known for a quick wit, a fierce intelligence and an ability to function on very little sleep.
"You've got to be leveraged to the point where someone can't leverage off you," Pirie told the Wall Street Journal in 1985 after he had helped Sir James Goldsmith, the Anglo-French financier, win a long campaign for Crown Zellerbach, a Nevada paper giant. Marty Lipton, a rival Wall Street lawyer, remembers an "absolutely formidable" opponent.
Outside the boardroom, too, Pirie was acquisitive. Dinner parties would end with a tour of his collections of silver, porcelain and engravings, much of it inherited from his family, which made its fortune running department stores in Chicago. But his main interest was the vast library he himself built, stuffed with pre-1700 English literature.
The rows of books that spilled over two storeys of his Manhattan townhouse were more than a display of wealth. Pirie considered the post-Shakespeare world of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and John Dryden the richest in all literature. John Donne held a special fascination, for his imagery and his shift "from the licentious man about town to the devout dean of St Paul's", as Pirie told James Stourton, who included the "energetic lawyer turned banker" in his 2007 book, Great Collectors of Our Time .
Until his death in New York aged 80, Pirie was still making twice yearly trips across the Atlantic to join gatherings of the Roxburghe, a club of mostly English bibliophiles with inherited libraries. He earned his spot among the aristocrats by building a collection few could match, says Jonathan Alexander of New York University, a fellow member. "You have to enjoy the hunt," he says.
Membership of the Roxburghe is capped at 40 and every member has to present a self-produced book, often based on items from their own library. Pirie's contribution, in 2002, was a twin-volume guide to Fragmenta Regalia, Sir Robert Naunton's account of the main figures in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Pirie had got his hands on the top copy, which included annotations prepared for Charles I, her successor but one.
"Bob had a deep intellectual interest in his subject," says Charles Sebag-Montefiore, a banker turned historian who played host to fellow Roxburghe members on Pirie's final visit to London, last June. "Through the cut and thrust of investment banking there was a scholar inside that bore fruit in his library."
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>Born on May 8 1934, Pirie found his love for books nurtured at Harvard's Houghton library - the main repository for rare books and manuscripts - whose librarian Bill Jackson said he should become his successor, on the grounds that "you are the only person I know who is as greedy as I am". Instead he married and bought a farm, while gaining a legal reputation that caught the eye of Skadden's Joe Flom, who recruited him to open a Boston office. Pirie "could lead the charge for a client and provide the necessary dedication and aggressiveness in a field that hadn't yet been invented", says Peter Atkins, a senior Skadden partner.
At Rothschild Inc, which Pirie joined in 1982 - pulling off an "overnight transition" from what Mr Lipton describes as a "hard-driving practising lawyer to an English merchant banker" - he was at the heart of a boom, persuading a succession of foreign moguls that undervalued American companies were ripe for takeover. James Hanson, Conrad Black, Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell, for whom he captured Macmillan, the New York publishing house, were among his clients and dinner guests.
On the day in November 1991 that Maxwell's body was found floating in the sea off Gran Canaria, Pirie told the Financial Times simply: "Bob used to go swimming all the time without telling anybody. It used to scare the hell out of his crew." The tycoon's legacy of deception had yet to emerge.
Pirie's marriage to Deirdre Howard ended in 2000. He was predeceased by a daughter but is survived by her two siblings and a sister, along with a black cat named Madame X, after the portrait by John Singer Sargent.
A nephew of Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' nominee for president in 1952, his involvements extended from the cultural and financial to the political, serving on the campaign finance teams of Eugene McCarthy and Harold Hughes. That was enough to earn him a mention on the list of enemies kept by Richard Nixon, which Pirie rated as the greatest achievement of his career.
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