The fair opened at 5 P.M. on April 4, 1960, with a preview, and lasted for five more long days, running from 10 A.M. to 10 P.M. Twenty-two dealers occupying twenty booths displayed a variety of rare books from incunables to twentieth-century first editions and enjoyed the long week of togetherness so much that they sorely missed their colleagues after the week was over. Before the fair opened, a few minutes before 5 P.M., Leona wondered out loud what we had all wondered silently: would our fair attract any visitors at all? Then, before I realized it, she had ducked outside to see whether anyone had come. When she returned, her face reflected radiance and disbelief. “They’re standing on line to get in! There are crowds outside!” Despite rain and storm, the jams of people on opening night filled us with incredulity and exuberance.
Our visitors were enthusiastic. They did not seem to notice that we had tossed all our empty cartons behind a curtain on the dais of the concert hall. They noticed only our wares, from a fifteenth-century confessional to a first of Ulysses, from a book printed on vellum to a Poe illustrated by Manet. Besides noticing, they bought. Although one genuine prima donna swooped into the concert hall and in dismay demanded, “What have they done to Steinway Hall?,” Arthur Rubinstein not only made his entry but bought two music manuscripts. And during the lulls of the long days, we all bought from one another. It is true that I also developed a case of giant hives while the fair was in progress, but success crowned our efforts, and dealers’ reactions were more than gratifying. Polled when the fair was at long last over, we all agreed we would “definitely participate next year,” and Elisabeth Woodburn, who dealt in gardening books, voiced the opinion of all when she exclaimed: “A real wahoo occasion! Haven’t had such fun in years! Sold plenty, will sell more. When is next fair?”
There was the next, and the next, and the next—every year—and though the setting would change to New York hotels, the Plaza among them, and to the Seventh Regiment Armory, and the duration would be shortened, most of the modus operandi initiated at our debut would continue.
In 1969, our fair became an international one, and Rostenberg and Stern issued a catalogue and announced that they would be at Booth 33 of
NEW YORK’S RAZZLE DAZZLE BOOK FAIR
Both Ladies Will Dispense Humanities,
Literature, Art, Judaica, Philosophy,
Science, Turcica and
PLEASING CONVERSATION.
In 1971 we dispensed, inter many alia, a single book that was purchased for the University of Rochester by its chief of rare books, Robert L. Volz. After he had acquired our copy of poems by Pope Urban VIII, issued in 1634, with an engraved title page and a portrait by Peter Paul Rubens, in a binding made for a famous French collector, François Auguste de Thou, he wrote to us: “My thanks to you and to Madeleine Stern for the time and interest you gave to me in New York last Friday. I enclose our purchase order … for the finest book, or at least the most exciting book, at the fair.”
Book fairs proliferated all across the country, and in 1964 we set up our booths with our colleagues in San Francisco and in 1967 in Los Angeles. The twenty-two dealers who had launched America’s first Antiquarian Book Fair would increase as the decades passed to over two hundred twenty. But it is questionable whether the later, more professional versions engendered as much excitement as that first fair of 1960.
It was only a few years after the Steinway Hall fair that another milestone in bookseller association was reached. The antiquarian book fairs served as a kind of cooperative bookstore for three or four days. Visitors could sample the stocks of participating dealers and become acquainted with books on a variety of subjects published over five centuries. But the booths were vacated when the fair was over; the book fair was by nature a transitory event. Why not, it was asked, extend it? Why not attempt a lasting cooperative bookstore? Such a store, if centrally located, could be a meeting place for book collectors where they could not only buy books but talk books; for dealers it would offer a cornucopia of opportunities, for in such a bookstore participants would not only sell but buy books and do additional selling and buying by means of referrals. Such a bookstore could become a microcosm of the American rare book trade.
Through the concerted efforts of an MAC committee, the Antiquarian Booksellers Center, located at 630 Fifth Avenue, in the Concourse of the International Building of Rockefeller Center, was opened on October 14, 1963. Outside the entrance stood the huge statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders. Just so, the center held, in the thousand square feet it occupied, the infinite riches of the world of antiquarian books. The committee had not only found the shop, but had enlisted some fifty participants; in addition, it had arranged the shelving, scheduled exhibits, hired a secretary, and even sewn the backdrop for the enormous show windows.
On opening day the plaster, paint, and stain were still wet, and shelves had not yet been placed in the bookcases. But soon after, all was in readiness. Notices of this unique bookstore appeared in the media, from the Saturday Review to Cue, from the German Börsenblatt to Publishers Weekly, from the Christian Science Monitor to the New York Times. I served as first chair of the center and watched with joy as it became a revolving exhibition hall. It would last for a quarter century, most of the time under the devoted and enthusiastic guidance of its secretary, the late Edith M. Wells. It would attract visitors from all over the world, this truly cooperative bookstore in the heart of Manhattan.
Our first exhibition at the center took place early—the week of November 18, 1963. We prepared for it by displaying in the center’s four enormous windows books that would, we hoped, appeal to the masses of people who passed by. Situated as they were in the Concourse, or basement, of the International Building, the center’s windows faced corridors teeming with people—people on their way to a café or a subway, business people, pleasure seekers, tourists. In the gigantic windows of the shop we placed our early printed books, highlighting several by and about women. Our pioneer feminist display included an eighteenth-century French comedy, intriguingly entitled La Femme Fille et Veuve (Wife, Daughter, and Widow); a sixteenth-century Italian translation of Boccaccio’s fascinating work on famous women; Madame Pompadour’s Letters; and an illustrated Utopian romance of 1739, set in America, by Rustaing de Saint-Jory, Les Femmes Militaires, which proclaimed the absolute parity of men and women in work, government service, war, and life. Opened to a plate depicting women in military costume, this could not fail to attract the attention of the passersby. And attract it did; even while we were placing our books in the windows, people stopped in their tracks to gape.
Occasionally they also came in, and when they did, they also occasionally bought. As the New York Daily News would report: “Book collecting … mirrors the occupations, moods and concerns of bygone eras. The Antiquarian Booksellers Center is a fascinating place.” That week in November, the center became our bookstore, exhibiting the results of what the News called our “global treasure-troving.”
Our dear friend, the book collector Miriam Holden, sent a large basket of flowers to congratulate us. Petite, chubby, berouged, her hair always encased in a Venida hairnet, Mrs. Holden looked far more feminine than feminist. But she was a staunch feminist, not only in her political affiliations but in her book collecting, and it was to her that many of our feminist treasures passed in the 1960s. But the week of November 18, which had begun so gloriously, ended, alas, with tragedy. On the twenty-second, when we returned from lunch, our secretary had received the appalling news by telephone. The news was confirmed on a small portable radio. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The thirty-fifth President of the United States was dead. We placed Miriam’s basket of flowers in the center of a gleaming window, closed the doors, and left. The bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral had begun their unforgettable tolling. We walked blindly toward the subway, meeting the hordes of bewildered, outraged, and mourning people who had all lost the grace of one brief period of our nation’s history.
Our life in books, punct
uated occasionally by great events, flowed for the most part peacefully on. Much of the excitement we experienced continued to stem from our bookish detection. And the results of our detection found their way to the windows of the Antiquarian Booksellers Center and to our catalogues, to our booths at fairs and to our shelves in the Bronx.
In a way, the area on the Paris quais where bookstalls clustered had something in common with our fairs and our center. What more appropriate for us to discover one day as we leafed through a thirty-two-page French political pamphlet of 1622 than a reference to a “bouticque mobile … d’vn marchand Libraire en liures du temps passé”—a “movable boutique of a bookseller merchant dealing in books of a time gone by.” Surely we were such bookseller merchants, and here—doubtless unknown to most of the world—was probably the earliest mention of the Paris bookstalls. We had found the pamphlet in a collection of four hundred tracts in the Paris emporium of Monsieur Michel Bernstein and paid, prorated, three dollars for it. The Povrmenade Dv Pré Avx Clercs, unbound, stitched, just as it had come from the press in 1622, described the promenade of a seventeenth-century collector on the recently constructed Pont Neuf of Paris, where he finds the “bouticque mobile,” browses through the titles on display, and selects a book to read if not to purchase. On the sunlit quais of the City of Light, our collective lives had been foreshadowed.
Another French pamphlet bought from a Paris dealer brought us not only to our bookselling roots but to our home port. Diverses Pieces Servans de Reponse Avx Discovrs Pvbliez Par Les Hollandois made no reference in its title to either America or New Amsterdam, but they were assuredly in residence. The date of the pamphlet started the Finger-Spitzengefühl vibrating: 1665. Had not the Dutch been ousted from New Netherlands in August 1664 and New Amsterdam metamorphosed into New York? By any chance was there any mention of that earthshaking event in these Diverse Pieces Serving as Reply to Public Discourses by the Dutch? Indeed there was—no need to read between the lines. The lines were clear: New Netherlands was discussed, along with the relations of Dutch residents with the English and the role of the West India Company. “Rare and remarkable,” we called this tract, as well as “apparently little known” and “yet another source for New Netherlands.” The pamphlet went precisely where it should have gone—to the library of the New-York Historical Society.
Yet one of our most memorable discoveries took place in a small London bookshop on Grape Street, off Shaftesbury Avenue. We arrived at that most halcyon of moments, just when the dealer had finished preparing his new catalogue but before he had sent it off to the printer. “I have a catalogue in preparation. Perhaps you would like to glance at the advance slips,” is probably the most titillating invitation a bookseller on the hunt can hear. We two sat hunched at the dealer’s desk, examining his precious slips. We went through the As quickly. It happened when we came to the Bs—more specifically to BEAUMONT, WILLIAM, whose Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion had been printed in Plattsburgh, New York, in 1833. The book had pioneered medical history, for in it the author-surgeon Dr. Beaumont had for the first time described the physiology of digestion in a living man. We had heard the extraordinary story about a Canadian halfbreed who had been wounded by a musketshot in 1822 and left with a small hole in his side. Through that hole Dr. Beaumont had studied the workings of the stomach, later writing his observations in his Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice. We seized the slip, looked at each other in a state of glory, and asked our dealer for the Beaumont. In a few minutes it was in our hands—an unimposing octavo, poorly printed in upstate New York, but an incomparable treasure, worth today about $2500, priced at the equivalent of $19.
We have told the story of our Beaumont find whenever we had the chance. The last time we told it was when we gave the keynote speech at a Colorado seminar on rare books. After the speech was printed we had a charming letter from a woman bookseller in Plattsburgh, who wrote:
It was thrilling to read about Dr. Beaumont’s book … My store is 1 block from the location of Dr. Beaumont’s office. We once acquired a copy of the 1st Ed. back in our early bookselling days. We bought it for $400.00 & sold it for $800.00 to a local history professor who then spent $1200.00 to have it restored at a Vt. Monastery. He then donated it to Plattsburgh State Univ. where it is in the library on display in a glass case.
Another book suitable for display in a glass case was one we found on the grimy, dusty shelf of Francis Norman’s bookshop.
When he moved from his Gower Street cellar to Hampstead Heath, he had moved not only his books but all the dust and grime and debris, among which we made an astounding discovery. Robert Boyle the great English chemist died in 1691, and the following year his library was sold by what was called “private agreement.” In the centuries that have passed since then not a single volume surfaced that could be identified as having belonged to Robert Boyle. Now, in the shambles of Norman’s shop on Hampstead Heath, we found the first. The book, a French attack on the Jesuits published in 1688, bore a Latin inscription on the flyleaf stating that the work had come from the library of “the most illustrious and renowned Robert Boyle.” The distinguished author of The Sceptical Chemist had also had a deep interest in theological matters, and this attack on the Jesuits would have been precisely his cup of tea. Once our little book had had a place in Boyle’s library in Pall Mall. After Boyle’s death it had passed to the writer of the Latin inscription. And a couple of centuries later it had somehow been picked up by the war-ravaged bookseller Francis Norman. Now it was ours, and we would pass it on to Dr. John F. Fulton, of Yale University Medical Library, where it would doubtless repose in a glass showcase—perhaps next to a copy of the Experiments of Dr. William Beaumont.
We showcased our finds, along with bread-and-butter books, in our catalogues. Most of our catalogues—Century of Conflict, Persons & Places, Fare for the Fair—consisted of a few hundred items on specialized subjects and were aimed at the nation’s libraries. Still hungry for books, such institutions as Folger and Newberry, Yale and Princeton, Michigan, Texas, and Stanford were acquiring early printed materials with gusto, and we were happy to supply them.
Now, in the 1960s, it occurred to us that we should aim, not at selling three or four, or six or eight items to a library, but an entire catalogue—a whole glorious collection of related material that we could assemble and then pass on at a lot price, as a unit, or, in booksellers’ parlance, en bloc. And what could be more appropriate for such a purpose than our sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French pamphlets that unrolled a panorama of France’s dramatic history?
There was plenty of space in the Bronx house to store books and pamphlets and keep them on ice until we were ready to research them. The enormous room on the third floor had once been Adolph Jr.’s, and in his day it had held a Ping Pong table, along with all the other paraphernalia assembled by a young man who enjoyed six or seven hobbies. Now we would store our collections there, catalogue them, and sell them en bloc.
Our Catalogue XXXIV was entitled One Hundred Years of France 1547–1652: A Documentary History. It comprised 755 pamphlets that reported events in France during the century that began with the accession of Henry II and his notorious spouse, Catherine de Medici, and ended with the malevolent deeds of Mazarin. In between our tracts portrayed the Valois-Guise-Bourbon rivalry, the Huguenot struggle, the triumph of the great Bourbon monarch Henry IV and his assassination, the emergence of Richelieu—a whole century reflected by reformer and critic, soldier and merchant, with a cast of characters that included Coligny and Condé, Sully and Richelieu. In these 755 ephemera the opinions of churchman and dissenter, courtier and peasant, scholar and diplomat were enunciated, and the pattern of a hundred turbulent years was traced. The preface to our catalogue stressed the immediacy of the ephemeral pamphlet: “An accumulation of pamphlets reflects the multi-faceted history of a particular age.” The en bloc purchase of the collection was recommended as “a precious nucleu
s for the study of the political, religious, social and economic history of the period.” Some of the royal coats of arms and woodcut portraits that appeared in the pamphlets were reproduced. And our preface ended with the words “Vive la France!”
Our joy in the preparation of Catalogue XXXIV was climaxed only by our joy in its en bloc sale. We had three orders for the collection, the first from the University of Buffalo, where an ardent history professor was avid to acquire it, the second from Yale, and the third from Michigan. The contents of Catalogue XXXIV were sold to the University of Buffalo, and our remaining copies of the catalogue were rubber-stamped with the proud statement: “Catalogue XXXIV—One Hundred Years of France/Has Been Sold En Bloc/It Is Being Circulated as a Courtesy.”
It did not take long for us to consider that if the pamphlet could so graphically mirror the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in France, it could even more graphically present that turmoil of the late eighteenth century known as the French Revolution. Thousands upon thousands of pamphlets had been printed during those eventful years, and it seemed to us that revolutionaries were spouting tracts even as they stood in the tumbrels en route to the guillotine.
Old Books, Rare Friends Page 21
