Willis Van Devanter (born December 27, 1930) is one of the world's top manuscript appraisers. He has appraised and helped place the papers of many notable Americans, ranging from W. Averell Harriman to Irving Berlin and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Life Born in Washington D.C., he attended St Albans, Hotchkiss, and Yale University, where he majored in American Studies, Class of 1952. He then entered Harvard Law School at the urging of his father, who hoped he would reestablish the link to the lawyers in their family. His grandfather and namesake, Willis Van Devanter, had served 26 years as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, from 1911 to 1937. Van Devanter knew that it would displease his father when he told him he wanted to drop out of Harvard Law to pursue his real love. Over breakfast one morning he reluctantly broke the news. “I’m dropping out of law school,” he said. “I want to go to Columbia and get a master’s degree in library science.“ As Van Devanter recalled years later, his banker father looked at him with stunned disbelief and said, “You want to be a librarian? That’s one of the three jobs open to women—nurses, secretaries, librarians. A librarian is nothing but a file clerk!” Deeply wounded by his father's response, he sought a meeting with the Librarian of Congress to get his advice. After he recounted what his father had told him, the Librarian laughed and said, “In essence, your father is right. We are all file clerks. But what a file it is! It contains the world’s body of knowledge.” Encouraged by the Librarian, he entered Columbia University the following fall. While at Columbia he began to attend the auctions held by Parker-Bernet (now Sotheby's) and Christie's in New York. “I would go to the previews that the auction houses held before a sale and buy their catalogs,” Van Devanter said. “I brought the catalogs back to my apartment and studied the material intensely. Then I assigned a price to the works on sale as though I was the art appraiser for the auction. As time went on, the price I assigned to the art work often came closer to the final sale price than the price set by Sotheby’s or Christie’s.” After receiving a master's degree from Columbia University, he served as a public information officer with the U.S. Military Command in Wiesbaden,