PASSINGS : John F. Fleming; Book Collector and Dealer

John F. Fleming, 77, among the best known of this country’s collectors and dealers of old books. For six decades he presided over the sale and/or acquisition of antiquarian manuscripts for the Doheny Collection and the Silver Collection of the Newberry Library and many more. He began when he was a teen-ager and working for A. S. W. Rosenbach, the Philadelphia dealer who became Fleming’s mentor and who died in 1952. In Larchmont, N.Y., on Sunday of a heart attack.