Likely most familiar as a plot device in a murder mystery, the Tontine, a kind of financial product akin to life insurance,  has a place in the history of modern capitalism well beyond its popular understanding. Tontines traditionally offer subscribers the chance to pay in to a pool and receive payouts for the remainder of their lives, as subscribers die, the payouts become larger and larger to those left in the pool. This summer, the Kislak Center acquired the lifelong tontine collection of Kent McKeever , a scholar and librarian at Columbia University. McKeever had built the collection of 18^th and 19^th century English, American, and European financial documents, correspondence, prints, and books with an eye towards his own research interests. This pursuit led him to accumulate a highly focused collection which is unlike any other in the country. It is our hope here at the Kislak Center that making his collection more widely available will enable new avenues of research on financial history, the importance of risk-sharing instruments in economic growth, and better social histories of the people and organizations which engaged in this type of investing. This talk will introduce McKeever collection and the concept of the tontine to a wide audience.