Albi Rosenthal was born on 5 Oct 1914 in Munich into a family of much-respected antiquarian booksellers, (paternal grandfather) Jacques and (father) Erwin Rosenthal and (maternal grandfather) Leo S. Olschki. In 1947 he married Maud Levy (1909-2007), daughter of Oscar Levy, a physician and scholarly editor of the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche. After moving to Oxford, Albi became actively involved in the life of the city and the university. He was a violinist and president of the Oxford University Orchestra, a member of the Council of the Friends of Bodleian Library and founder of the Boars Hill Association. He also served as a trustee of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Beethoven-Haus in Bonn and the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria. Albi Rosenthal was awarded an honorary MA by the University of Oxford in 1979.

A. Rosenthal Ltd. is an antiquarian bookshop founded in 1936 in London. After the premises in Curzon Street were bombed in 1940, Rosenthal moved his business to Oxford, first to the Turl and then to Broad Street. The A. Rosenthal firm specialises in books and manuscripts in a wide range of subjects, of which music, Spanish and Portuguese, Judaica and Hebraica form significant focal points of interest and activity.

In 1955 Albi and Maud Rosenthal acquired the Otto Haas music antiquarian business which evolved from Liepmannssohn & Dufour (1866-1872) and Leo Liepmannssohn, Berlin (1874-1935). The couple ran this and the Oxford antiquarian house until Albi's death in 2004. Since then, the Otto Haas firm continued under the direction of Maud and Julia Rosenthal in association with Ulrich Drüner. After Maud's death in 2007, Julia Rosenthal became the firm's sole proprietor with Colin Coleman and Ulrich Drüner its associates.

A detailed history of the firms can be found on the Otto Haas website. It was first published in the Otto Haas catalogue no. 40 in 2005 under the authorship of Oliver Neighbour.