ONE of the world’s most dedicated bibliophiles is planning to give away a multi-million-dollar collection of 20th-century literary treasures, many of which have never been displayed in public.

Richard Prince, the American contemporary artist best known for his controversial plagiarism of magazine advertisements – notably his Marlboro cigarette cowboy series – has been assembling what New York book dealers describe as one of the most valuable and distinctive modern libraries in private hands.

“Basically, my collection is about sex, drugs, Beat [poets], hippies, punks – and great reads,” said Prince, who keeps his most valuable manuscripts, letters and autographed literary memorabilia in a fireproof, waterproof, room-size vault near his studio in northern New York state.

Not content with run-of-the-mill first editions, Prince, 59, has spent the past 25 years seeking out the rarest – and often most expensive – examples of some of the best-known books, magazines and other publishing ephemera of the past century.

To literary jewels such as a signed first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Vladimir Nabokov’s personal, annotated copy of Lolita, he has added a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before the American poet killed herself; the original manuscript of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, complete with a letter from an editor suggesting Puzo change its original title, The Mafia; and the legendary, unpublishable, handwritten Cock Book, a one-off portfolio of erotica produced by one of Andy Warhol’s acolytes and depicting the genitalia of various celebrities of the 1970s and 1980s.

Prince revealed last week that he has begun negotiating with the Morgan library in New York, with a view to donating his collection in return for a long-term exhibition. The artist is also working on a catalogue of his 3,000-item collection, which includes a hand-painted psychedelic motorbike crash helmet signed by Ken Kesey, writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

“Sometimes it seems like this collection is too good to be in private hands,” Prince said. “Collecting like this is a full-time hobby, and I have other things I want to do.”

It was in 1977 that Prince first sprang his “rephotography” techniques on a stunned New York art world. Formerly employed in the cuttings department of Time-Life magazines, Prince kept many of the advertisements he cut out, then photographed parts of them for his own artworks.

He promptly sparked an enduring debate about authorship, copyright and the relationship between art and advertising. In 2005, one of his “rephotographs” of a Marlboro cowboy became the first photo ever to sell for more than $1m at auction, despite critics arguing that it technically violated copyright laws.

Fame and a sizeable fortune followed. In 2007 another Marlboro image sold for $3.4m, and a Prince painting, Millionaire Nurse, based on a pulp fiction paperback cover, sold last year for $4.7m.

With money seemingly no object, Prince became every rare-book dealer’s favourite customer. He paid $175,000 for the Cock Book in 2005; spent another $175,000 on the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key with its original dust cover; and added the first issue of Zap Comix, a 1960s underground comic, for $15,000. His copy of Ulysses is estimated to be worth more than $400,000.

Prince’s collection is mostly limited to works published between 1949 – the year he was born – and 1984, the year that acted as the title of George Orwell’s masterpiece (“I’ve got a great copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” he said). If the negotiations with the Morgan go well, it will become the only library in the world where visitors can inspect a copy of Plath’s first published book of poems, The Colossus, dedicated to her husband, Ted Hughes, the English poet.

Another signed, first edition of The Colossus, dedicated by Plath to the US poet Theodore Roethke, is now on sale at a New York dealer for $65,000. But Prince’s copy, like so much else in his collection, bears an irresistible flourish: Plath drew a little heart next to Hughes’s name.

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