“What about a telephone?
“What about marketing?
“What about neighbors?”
And the final challenge: “What about garbage disposal?” To all this I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s all so beautiful. Who cares?”
We cared a little more when we reached Riverbank. All three of us—Mady, my darling wirehair Chimpie, and I—were driven to the cottage by my parents’ houseman, Warren, who, once we were unloaded, immediately drove back home. “I wouldn’t stay a night in this dump” was his parting shot.
His description was fairly accurate. Riverbank looked less like a house than a five-doored pagoda on Tobacco Road. The rooms were stuffed with broken-down furniture; the kitchen boasted an iron sink and a wood-burning stove. There was no bathroom. Instead, there was a cold-water shower outside and, on the porch, a flush toilet with a swing door. But it was true that we did have a grove of Scotch pines, a tidal river, and an ocean.
It rained for the next three weeks. The roof leaked, the two “pioneers” subsisted on a spartan diet, and the garbage piled up. We had neither a car nor a telephone. Our only means of transport was the little dory. We did have ample time for our work, and I revised sections of my dissertation while Mady vibrated between writing melancholy verse and reading secondary sources on Margaret Fuller. We soon discovered that burning garbage, especially orange peels, was all but impossible and, once the sun re-emerged, we let it be known in the village that we needed domestic help.
As a result, at eight o’clock one night, Chimpie’s shrill bark responded to a knock on one of our five doors. Mary Buono was about to enter our lives. She was a huge woman with a bandana on her head and a child in each hand. “Youse the gals that need help?” she asked. And the culinary interview began. Mady queried ingratiatingly, “Tell me, Mrs. Buono, do you know how to prepare Campbell’s tomato soup?” There was a loud guffaw. “Even my Lilly—and she’s only five years old—can make Campbell’s soup.” Mady posed a more sophisticated question. “Tell me, Mary, do you know how to prepare breaded veal chops?” to which the response was, “Jeez, lady, I’m a cook. You’re so funny, you should write a joke book.” For three dollars a week Mary Buono became an indispensable part of our Maine summers, and for an extra two dollars a month she even removed the garbage.
In her catechism, one of Mrs. Stern’s questions had been “What about marketing?” This we accomplished by river navigation aboard our little dory. With Chimpie at the helm, we rowed to the village at high tide. There, we lingered at the butcher’s and the grocer’s and the baker’s, always ending with a prolonged fudge sundae at the confectioner’s. Finally, armed with our purchases, we trundled back to the river, only to find a mud flat in which our little dory was tightly embedded. Our only alternative was a long hot trek along U.S. 1, carrying our bundles and desperately holding on to Chimpie’s leash. Chimpie was a very perverse terrier who invariably chose to walk backward at the same time as he chewed on his leash.
Before we chewed the victuals we had purchased, we tested them. Confirmed hypochondriacs, we sniffed most of our food before we cautiously tasted it. But now that Mary Buono was our “cook,” all such problems would be behind us.
“Mary, what do you think of the cream?”
“It’s beginning to turn, girls. I wouldn’t use it. But I’ll take it home and make a sour cream pie.”
“This meat tastes funny, Mary. What do you think?”
“It’s too fresh, girls—should have hung longer. You better not eat it.”
“These cornflakes look green, Mary.”
“Mold, girls. Don’t eat no mold.”
After two weeks had passed, Mary arrived, not with her children, but with their cart, later departing with most of our larder piled neatly on it. We often had an egg for dinner while the over-fresh steak and the turning cream disappeared from view. What strangely reappeared in view, however, were our chicken bones. They arrived in the form of a contribution from Chimpie. He had discovered Mary’s garbage dump—right in back of the house.
Our Maine days were fragmented between bouts of work and plunges into the icy ocean waters. They were punctuated too by the arrival of friends and family, some of whom did not tarry too long on Tobacco Road. We frequently invited them to the spécialité de la maison—a steak cookout prepared not by Mary but by us. Lacking a sophisticated modern barbecue, we simply dug a hole in the ground, filled it with coals, and then poured a can of kerosene before we lit a match. Over this conflagration we placed a grill, and over the grill our beautiful steak. The result was known as steak à la petrol. Most of our guests departed early the next morning.
During our first Maine summer in Riverbank, when my parents visited, we borrowed Warren and the car to drive to Concord, Massachusetts. Mady, now more and more intrigued by Margaret Fuller, had begun to seek the roots of American Transcendentalism, to trace Fuller’s relationship with Emerson, and to follow the dramatis personae of The Flowering of New England. Before her Life of Margaret Fuller was finished, there would be several other visits to Concord, but this was the first and perhaps the most seminal, for in its course we wandered not only through Emerson’s house, but through the Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott. During the years that followed, Alcott would preoccupy both of us far more than Margaret Fuller.
Meanwhile, summer over and back home, I strove to tie up the loose ends of my dissertation as Mady was taking up the challenge of her Fuller biography. I was encouraged by a visit with the eminent Victor Hugo Paltsits, President of the Bibliographical Society of America and Keeper of Manuscripts at the New York Public Library. I had consulted with him from time to time, but he had never been more enthusiastic than now, when he emphasized his belief that I was on the right track—that it was time to assert the role of the early printer; that the size of editions and the prices of books all implied something of significance; that the practical side of publishing in the early 1500s had had a definite bearing upon the dissemination of learning and reform. If only Mr. Thorndike would agree.
In December, I presented my completed dissertation to Lynn Thorndike. And a few weeks later, during Mady’s Christmas vacation, we left for Fuller researches in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Through our rose-colored glasses, Cambridge seemed to combine the charm of Oxford with the grace of Concord. We pursued Margaret Fuller there. From our attic room in the Brattle Inn on Tory Row, we walked to Harvard’s Widener Library, where we read the written records that reanimated her clothes and her diet, her friends, the concerts and cotillions she attended, the books she read, the life of her mind, her effect upon her world. From the Craigie Mansion to Mount Auburn Cemetery, where we drove over snow-covered roads in a hearse, we traced Margaret in the attempt to restore her and her world to life. We traced her in West Roxbury and Brook Farm; we traced, or tried to trace, her in Boston. But in Boston, West Street, where she had given her famous Conversations, was now the home of Thompson’s Spa, and other Margaret associations on Bedford Street and State Street had become the locations of Jordan Marsh and a bank building.
We searched out, too, all of Margaret’s living relatives we could unearth. The results were not always fruitful. Mrs. Roger Warner of Chestnut Street on Beacon Hill regretted her inability to find the manuscripts we knew she had. Margaret’s nephew Freddie, who lived with his daughter Mabel in East Milton, was now age eighty-eight, “slightly rusty and detached.” Mady’s excited questions evoked but few answers except from Mabel, who finally exploded, “Why should anyone want to dig up that old stuff!”
We celebrated my thirtieth birthday on December 28 with a visit to the theater—the incomparable Bea Lillie in Noel Coward’s Set to Music. Mady gave me two most appropriate gifts, more appropriate indeed than she realized—a pen and a Caxton Club reprint of Estienne’s great work on The Frankfurt Book Fair. That very copy would be listed in a Rostenberg catalogue—our very first—to be issued in 1946.
Our notebooks filled, we returned home after what Mady called the �
�efflorescence of New England.” I expressed it a little differently in my journal: “Now home to await the awful news—what I ever am going to do, not only about accepting the verdict but with life is a conundrum.”
By mid-January of 1939 the verdict had been rendered, the conundrum posed. In a short note Mr. Thorndike stated that he could not accept my dissertation. As he had originally believed, the subject had no validity. The printers were mere hacks and had no point of view. If I wished, I might discuss the matter with him in his office.
Despite my premonitions, the verdict—in black and white—numbed me. Had my six years at Columbia been for naught? Nonetheless, I also felt aggressively on the defensive and eager to justify myself. I knew there was little point in questioning Lynn Thorndike, but I needed to question him, and so I took him up on his invitation. He simply reiterated his opinion, mildly suggesting that I do another dissertation on the Arabic astrologers. I walked down the six flights of stairs in Fayerweather Hall, my eyes blinded with tears.
Yet I could not dismiss my years of work. I would appeal if appeal were possible. Had not six Columbia professors judged my ability at my orals? How could one man have the power to decide the fate of my dissertation? The Dean of the Faculty of Political Science was then Dr. George B. Pegram, and I resolved to present my case to him. I might have given this a second thought had I known that Dr. Pegram was a physicist, former Acting Dean of the Faculty of the School of Mines, and author of Electrolysis of Thorium Solution. Dr. Pegram was quite pleasant, listened attentively, and, smiling, said in his Scottish burr, “Oh, write another dissertation.”
Time works its little miracles, and in time my degree would be awarded. But more than thirty years would pass, and even if I had known about it then, it would have been cold comfort. As it was, I now had a life to reconstruct.
Having found no support at Columbia, I once again visited Dr. Paltsits at the New York Public Library. He was quite shocked at Thorndike’s decision, saying, “I took a course in paleography at Morningside Heights some thirty years ago. They were a tough bunch even then. Unfortunately, I have no influence at Columbia. I wish I had, because I believe in your thesis.” He shuffled some papers, looked thoughtful, and then said with a smile, “By the way, young lady, do you like to travel? There’s going to be a meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America in Washington this December. I would like you to present part of your dissertation there.”
I was overcome, but not too overcome to be silent. “I would love to.”
“And, by the way,” he continued, “there’s an Austrian chap—one of those refugees from Vienna—who’s planning to open a rare book business here in the fall. He needs someone who knows early printed books and the English language, and that sounds like you. Would you be interested? His name is Herbert Reichner.”
DUAL
APPRENTICESHIP
Leona AT 34 EAST Sixty-second Street I had expected to find a window luminous in its display of gleaming calf bindings, beautiful woodcuts, and handsome title pages. Instead, I confronted a scabrous brownstone, its steps leading up to a small sign: H. REICHNER ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS. I was greeted by a short pudgy man with black lank hair and thick lips. He introduced himself, opened the door of his second-floor apartment, and ushered me into a large front room filled with books and periodicals, catalogues, cartons and crates. Against the walls stood heavy mahogany bookcases partially filled. Two battered oak desks, two typewriters, and a stepladder surmounted by a can of Leather Vita completed the scene.
Mr. Reichner offered me a chair, and in an attempt at nonchalance I pulled out a cigarette. “Nein, nein, Miss. Do not smoke with the books.” I had made a bum beginning. As he attempted to interview me in his halting English, I interrupted with “I do speak German.” He relaxed and introduced me to his wife and child. They had all fled Vienna at the time of the Nazi invasion of Austria. There, he had issued a journal for collectors, the Philobiblon, and had formed connections with leading antiquarian dealers in London and on the continent. Through them, and on his recent trip to France, he had obtained many fine early printed books on consignment.
“Did you get to Strasbourg?” I asked.
He looked at me sharply. “Ach, Strasbourg—ja—Dr. Paltsits told me you studied there. I am well acquainted with Herr Heitz and Herr Ritter. I am surprised that American women are interested in such things.”
I dared not take umbrage at his remark. I desperately wanted the job. As it happened, he desperately needed an assistant. “I shall want you to help me with cataloguing; my descriptions must be in good English. Also, you must make some order here,” he added, his thick stubby arm swinging out violently toward the disorder in the room. “Naturally, I cannot pay you very much. It is very expensive to live in New York. Besides, I shall require you only from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon—six days a week of course.”
The next two weeks, I spent the hours from 9 A.M. to 2 P.M. (no lunch intermission) in helping Reichner arrange the room, lug books around, and shelve them carefully. This last was of supreme importance. Herbert Reichner was a man of pathologic neatness. His desk never bore any trace of disorder. His mail was stacked in two neat piles. He filled his fat European fountain pen daily in a precise ritual, never letting a drop of ink fall. This, a stack of multicolored pencils, and a heavy ruler were aligned in battle array on his desk. Those multicolored pencils were used to underline his recommendations to his customers. Heavy double underlinings stressed a book’s condition; heavy triple underlinings emphasized a book’s importance.
Herbert Reichner did indeed have many books of importance. His first catalogue, much of which I helped prepare, included books I had never seen before as well as titles that would one day appear in my own catalogues. In Reichner’s front parlor, while he fumed about a misfiled order or ranted about a collector’s ignorance, I studied and fondled the treasures of his Catalogue One: an incunable edition (1497) of an illustrated work on famous women beginning with Eve; a rare French edition of the Ship of Fools; Castiglione’s Courtier in the first edition of 1528, published by the Aldine Press of Venice. With mounting excitement I turned the leaves of Fournier’s Manuel Typographique, the great landmark in typography, and of Hepplewhite’s monumental Cabinet-Maker. Holbein’s Dance of Death in the rare first edition of 1538, Repton’s Landscape Gardening, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations—all passed through my eager and trembling hands.
My horizons were expanding with every book I handled, and as I became familiar with his stock I gradually learned to dismiss the uncontrolled ravings of my frenetic employer. It was not always easy. During a snowstorm he would greet me with the statement: “What happened? You are late—it is nine-seven A.M.” After I typed a card for cataloguing purposes, he would cross it out and pencil in the word REDO, underscored in two wavy lines with his purple pencil. Author, title, and imprint had not been aligned evenly enough. When shipments were delayed because of the stringencies of the European war, the Customs Service was added to the United States Postal System for his excoriation. And soon I was delegated to serve as his representative at the Customs House.
Completely ignorant of the technicalities involved in “clearing through Customs,” I presented a Notice of Arrival to a small harassed man behind the counter of the large circular room of the old Customs Building at Bowling Green.
“Fill it in, lady.”
“Fill in what?”
“The forms,” he wearily replied. “Here’s the forms—fill ’em in: the ship, the date of arrival, the numbers, the charges, don’tcha know.”
I meekly returned some inked-in spaces.
“Hey, lady, what about the convoision? Don’tcha know the convoision rates?”
At the wicket in the back the forms were usually returned to me marked “Unacceptable.” The “convoision” from dollars into francs or sterling—pounds, shillings, and pence—was always incorrect. Forlornly, I handed my sheaf of rejected papers to the little man up front, who eyed me with so
me small sympathy.
“Hey, why don’t your boss get a Customs broker? A cheapskate, huh? Gimme the papers, lady, or you and me’ll be here all day.”
The new stock that finally arrived after my visits to Customs was combined with Reichner’s other holdings, and many of the items appeared in his first catalogue. At my manual typewriter I banged out three thousand address labels.
“When you paste the labels, Fräulein, be extremely careful. Be sure to center them on the envelope. There is not enough glue on the labels made here by these Idioten. You must mix the glue with your fingers and spread it on evenly. Schön, ja?”
While I stuck to desk and typewriter as well as to the envelopes, Herr Reichner corrected proof. His admonitions, underlined in red, were now addressed to the typesetters—the American typesetters “who are the most stupid ignorant Idioten. Schweinhunde! They have no feel, no understanding, for books.” It was true that my own understanding of books was increasing even though he did not hesitate to address me as “Fräulein Dummkopf.”
“He is probably insane,” I told Madeleine as we had a late Saturday lunch at Schrafft’s on Fifty-ninth Street and Madison. Over an egg salad sandwich on toasted cheese bread, I confided my feelings to her. “That man is really mad. I don’t know how much longer I can take it.” Yet I heeded the advice of my friend and my parents to ignore his tantrums and to learn, and the years I would spend with Herbert Reichner—“My Five Years in Siberia”—were shaping my future.
The first year with my erratic employer was particularly difficult. The spoiled darling of overindulgent parents, now at her first job, had never been subject to the moods of such an individual. When I was not coping with Herbert’s mercurial nature, or studying a particularly interesting volume, I was reacting to the progress of the war. My diary recorded the climate of my times:
“Saw a marvelous art exhibit at the Met. Delightful especially the Peales and portraits of 18th & 19th century Bostonians. All the complacency of another age in contrast to the present. The bombs fall in Europe and once again the lights go out. How insane it all is. Russia now allies with Germany. The Russians are coming to the defense of the poor, oppressed White Russians in Poland—ha, ha ha. Reichner is as mad as ever.”
Old Books, Rare Friends Page 11
