Old Books, Rare Friends

by Madeline B. Stern

  Catalogue XXXVII—The French Revolution—was bound in bloody scarlet covers. It contained over 1650 pamphlets that documented revolutionary France and its major periods: the precursors of revolution; the 1789 meeting of the States-General; the abolition of feudalism; the new leaders; the destruction of the monarchy; the spread of terror; the Thermidorian Reaction; and the dictatorship of Bonaparte. In these on-the-spot reports were traced the rights of man and the new social platforms, and here were heard the comments of Danton and Robespierre, Mirabeau and Marat, of Girondist and Jacobin. Our foreword to our French Revolution catalogue invited “inquiries” regarding an en bloc purchase and ended with the words “Vive la Liberté, l’Egalité, la Fraternité.”

  The first “inquiry” came by telephone from the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library, near Wilmington, Delaware. That library, recently founded by the Du Ponts—had we not represented Pierre Samuel at auction?—concentrated upon the period 1750 to 1820 in France, when the family was rising to prominence there. The French Revolution was important for Eleutherian Mills. An agreement was reached, and in early November 1966 we drove to Greenville, near Wilmington, to deliver the 1659 pamphlets we had catalogued. Our trade journal, the Antiquarian Bookman, reported: “This is [the] second time in 2 years that Rostenberg has sold a complete catalog en bloc! She and her associate, Madeleine B. Stern, specialize in forming collections on single subjects.” And Miss Grace Ottey, librarian of Eleutherian, wrote to us, “To me, the collection is the outstanding imprint acquisition in our 10 years of existence.”

  Our third en bloc catalogue, The Aldine Press, was actually a far more outstanding “imprint acquisition.” For some years now we had been placing on the shelves of the big third-floor room the vellum- and morocco- and calfbound volumes that had been published by the great Aldine Press of Venice between 1495 and 1595. In 1967, when the 258 items in our Catalogue XXXIX had been described, we believed that Aldus Manutius, founder of the press, and his family were the greatest publishers of all time. We still believe so.

  It was with increasing admiration and delight that we examined each of the Aldines we had collected and, seated at two bridge tables in the big room, catalogued them: the great 1496 Thesaurus Cornucopiae, edited by Aldus himself; the 1501 Horace, first of the pocket classics, to be stowed in the saddlebag of a wandering scholar; Artemidorus on dreams and Castiglione on the courtier in first edition; the first edition of Plato’s complete works; the 1502 Dante Divine Comedy, the Terze Rime, the first in portable format, executed from a manuscript sent to the publisher by his friend the humanist Pietro Bembo; and Bembo’s own History of Venice, in which the author inserted an unexpected account of America and of Columbus, whom he described as “a man of sharp intellect, who traversed many immense regions and much of the ocean.” The House of Aldus also traversed “many immense regions,” from the realms of ancient scholarship to those of the sixteenth-century avantgarde.

  In the preface of his Thesaurus Cornucopiae Aldus Manutius expressed his joy at rescuing such writings from the “buriers of books” and his desire to give them “freely to the world.” Our Catalogue XXXIX was a tribute to Aldus and his heirs. Its white covers bore in black the Aldine colophon of Anchor and Dolphin—Anchor for firmness and deliberation, Dolphin for speed of production. And it was with considerable speed after considerable deliberation that our Aldine collection was transported to the steadily expanding Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. In 1982 the assistant to the director of that center was preparing a book, Great Catalogues by Master Booksellers, including our most accomplished catalogue, XXXIX.

  It was item 113 in that catalogue, the first edition of Lorenzo de Medici’s Poesie uolgari, that soon led us from the House of Aldus to the House of Medici. By the end of the 1960s we had assembled our fourth grand collection. Its setting was a city we had grown to love—Florence, Firenze—a cornucopia out of which flowed the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had stood before the Medici tombs designed by Michelangelo; we had wandered through the Ricardi Palace and seen Gozzoli’s fresco of Lorenzo on a white charger; we had often walked past the Baptistery with Ghiberti’s golden doors; near one of our Florentine booksellers we had gazed again and again at Michelangelo’s David. In the Palazzo Vecchio on the Piazza della Signoria we had seen the studiola of Francesco de Medici. The fortress of the Strozzi Palace had brought the Medicis home to us. Wandering through the narrow streets of Florence, with its dull yellow houses, its ancient faded frescoes, its glimpses of the Arno, we had felt the presence of the Medicis. Their shadow was all over—in the Santa Croce and the Duomo, in Giotto’s Campanile, in all the shrines and niches, the courtyards and cells, the chapels and palaces of this unbelievable Tuscan city. In Florence, on the Via Vente Settembre, dear delightful Signor Cesare Olschki plied his trade in rare books. From his establishment, so freely thrown open to us, we had selected many of the books that restored the Medicis to life.

  Now, in the late 1960s, we brought them all together—more than three hundred in total. The younger Aldus Manutius had written a life of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I de Medici, and we thought it appropriate to highlight our presentation with that work, the first book printed by the Aldine Press at its Bologna branch. There were orations by friends and sycophants on Medici births and Medici deaths, from Vasari’s account of the festivities honoring the baptism of Francesco de Medici’s daughter, in 1567, to funeral orations on the death of Cosimo I de Medici, in 1574. There were sixteenth-century histories of the Medici family and of their city-state; there was a great eighteenth-century portrait book presenting full-page engravings of 104 Medici illustrissimi. The Bulls issued by Pope Leo X found a place in our collection, for Leo X was a Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The account of a carnival pageant held in the Medici court in Florence on Shrove Tuesday of 1565 was part of our collection, and, though we seldom dealt in autographed materials, we included a letter signed by Catherine de Medici in her role as Queen Mother of France. We even added an illustrated two-volume set of George Eliot’s Romola, bound in white vellum cloth with red and gold stamping. The historical novel had been written after the author’s stay in Florence in 1860; it had been reprinted in Boston in 1890 as a de luxe gift book; and in 1902 it had been presented to my mother as a wedding present. We thought it would end up appropriately as part of our Medici holdings.

  The collection was illuminated by many great names—writers who had enshrined the Medicis or their domain in their books: Boccaccio, whose Decameron consisted of tales supposedly narrated at the time of the Florentine plague of 1348, a work edited at the order of the Grand Duke of Tuscany; Aretino, whose History of Florence traced the rise and influence of the Medicis; Michelangelo the Younger, nephew of the great artist, who had delivered a eulogy of Cosimo II de Medici at Santa Croce in 1621. We included Cellini’s autobiography with our Medici books, for the Medicis had been his patrons. Along with Cellini’s Vita we included his two treatises on art theory and the masterpieces he had created for the Medicis. Vasari, who had been Cosimo’s “right-hand man in all matters relating to art,” was represented with the first illustrated edition of his Lives of the Artists, fittingly dedicated to the great art patron Cosimo. The Florentine poets were there with the Medicis in all their grandeur: Dante in a 1515 Aldine edition, cased in a gilt-stamped Grolieresque calf binding; Petrarch, trailing clouds of glory all over Tuscany, in a charming 1539 edition with his laureled portrait on the title page. Machiavelli was present with his Prince, justifying the wily Medici rule, and Savonarola was present too, the friar-preacher who had foretold ruin in the midst of the prosperity of Lorenzo de Medici, with an edition of his commentaries on the Psalms.

  Toward the end of 1969 our Medicis followed our Aldines to Texas. We had now sold four en bloc collections. We had many copies of our catalogues left, so we distributed them to our collectors and libraries accompanied by a card imprinted as follows: “These catalogues have been sold en bloc. They are being
distributed as a courtesy only. Please do not order from them.” From the four sales we had grossed approximately $125,000. Although a goodly portion went to the tax collector, a goodly portion remained with us. It was time for the two book ladies of the Bronx to change their address and their domicile.

  A move had been impending for some time. The lovely house was vulnerable to the neighborhood’s increasing violence. A commodious front porch tempted access from the street, and the french windows of the dining room made entry all too inviting. The garden in the back and the hedges in the front regularly suffered the onslaught of boys bent on destruction. The house was especially vulnerable to the aging process: it was hard to keep up with broken leaders, peeling paint, cracked window frames, a leaking roof. Although, with our car ever ready in the alleyway next to the house, we felt extremely mobile, the comments of friends and customers added to our problems. We were so far “up,” they complained—so hard to reach.

  On and off over a period of three years we made half-hearted attempts to become more reachable. But every time an agent showed us an apartment or a townhouse in Manhattan, we returned to the rambling Bronx house with relief. Where else could we revel in so much space—space for our books and for ourselves? Where else could we find such comfort? Where else would we find another beloved housekeeper? Babette, we knew, would return to Germany as soon as we moved. Her heart, like ours, was in the house. Now, it would be sold, and most likely torn down, the appurtenances of the past, except those in the heart, obliterated.

  Finally, in 1969, we moved to Manhattan. A caring and persistent agent had found a handsome co-op for us in the Carnegie Hill section, between Madison and Park Avenues. At the same time we took a small office on East Eighty-sixth Street. After the move was accomplished a friend asked if Leona missed the Bronx house, now that she had such a beautiful downtown apartment. “Of course I do.” “But what can you miss?” “I miss the beautiful staircase,” she said. “I miss my home.”

  Actually, beyond the roots of childhood, there was nothing left to miss. The Bronx had changed, and no longer were we a true part of the community. Once we were settled, on December 4, 1969, we circulated an announcement to inform our customers that the book ladies of the Bronx had relocated. But, fearful that the tenant-owners would object to our business operation, we couched the terminology on our change of residence cards cagily, not even mentioning the word books, and we concluded with the following: “By Appointment Only.” It was that little appendage at the bottom of the card that raised a few eyebrows. Our innocent card somehow found its way to the nonbookish population, and late one evening one such recipient telephoned to us. His accent was foreign, his voice determined. “I get your card in the Boston airport,” he stated. “I want to make appointment.” Delighted to learn that our reputation extended to out-of-town airports, we were still a bit puzzled and asked, “What is your particular specialty?” “My specialty?” “Yes,” we persisted. “What do you collect?” Now he was puzzled, and before he hung up, he asked with some exasperation, “Tell me, ladies—vat you do?”

  Vat we did after the move to Manhattan was what we had been doing right along in the Bronx: detecting and buying abroad, sleuthing and researching, writing and cataloguing, building collections and selling. The thrills that had come with our discoveries brought us both inner gratification. In a very few short years those thrills would intensify and we would assume a more public image.

  In April 1972 the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America elected a new president, named Leona Rostenberg.

  OUR DOUBLE

  LIVES

  Leona I WAS WELL aware that this was only the second time in twenty-three years that a woman had been given the high post of president. I wanted to make sure that the membership was also aware of it, and in my inaugural address I gave a cursory sketch of the role played by women in the five hundred years of the antiquarian book trade. Had not, I gently reminded my constituents, a woman been responsible for the invention of printing by movable type? Had not old Johann Gutenberg borrowed the gulden from his mother to launch his great experiment? And, as the centuries rolled by, had not women been active in the printing, publishing, and bookselling fields, frequently as helpmates or heirs to their husbands and sometimes in their own right? My own compendium on publishing, printing, and bookselling in seventeenth-century England had found space for the productive career of the late seventeenth-century English woman publisher Anne Baldwin, and my partner had devoted an entire book to the fascinations of the nineteenth-century American publisher Mrs. Frank Leslie. Now, in the twentieth century, we were presumably on equal terms—the men and women of the book trade. Were we not? Of course there were exceptions. Most irksome was that the prestigious association of book collectors, the Grolier Club, did not yet admit women. Nonetheless, where there were liberty and fraternity, there must eventually be equality. This would be one of my goals for a trade devoted to the acquisition and dispersal of books for the joy and betterment of man—and woman.

  The feminist intentions expressed in my inaugural were carried out subtly and more or less by implication. The fact that I was a woman was not underlined, for I was seeking not mere acceptance but complete parity. And the technique seems to have worked. My domestic reign was for the most part a smooth one.

  The climax of my tenure was reached in a remote city halfway across the globe—Tokyo. It was there that the biennial congress of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, hosted by the Japanese Association, was held in the autumn of 1973. When I was informed of this, my reaction was a mixture of excitement, anxiety, and eagerness. Knowing that each national president was expected to deliver a thank-you address at the farewell banquet, I casually remarked to Madeleine, “I wish I could deliver mine in Japanese.”

  I should have known better. The gal who had had Rostenberg’s firm stationery imprinted in 1943 presented me with another surprise gift in 1973: four long-playing high-fidelity records offering forty lessons complete in living Japanese. I couldn’t waste the stationery. Now, I couldn’t waste the records. During our summer in East Hampton I sat on the terrace listening to the dóozos and arigatoos and konnichi was, and although I never did attain the promised fluency within six weeks, I was able to write a brief speech in Japanese, or in what I believed was Japanese. Mady was not so sure. At her suggestion I tried out my presentation before the two amiable proprietors of an Oriental notions shop on Fifty-seventh Street. They were politely enthusiastic, although they did remark that the speech seemed to have been written in nineteenth-century Japanese. Mady was worried. After we embarked on our long journey, she decided to have my composition auditioned again. In Tokyo, a San Francisco dealer in Orientalia listened to my rendition, deleted the remaining “thees” and “thous,” improved the phrasing, and gave me an encouraging imprimatur.

  The gala farewell banquet had been preceded not only by congressional meetings but by excursions to the shrines of Nikko and Nara, the palaces of Kyoto, the great library of Tenri. We had dined and drunk hot sake at the beautiful Hannya Yen Restaurant, enjoyed tea and kimono ceremonies, and browsed along Tokyo’s book row, the Kanda. Now came the crowning point of the congress, the farewell banquet at the elegant Imperial Hotel. The banquet room was ablaze with the Japanese women’s gorgeous kimonos and obis. For the first time the Oriental dealers’ wives had been permitted to join in such a mixed assemblage, and their shyness was as notable as their sartorial magnificence. At the tables visitors from all over the world were seated with the Japanese. I was on the dais, along with all the foreign presidents, while Mady, I saw, had been placed at a table graced mainly by Japanese. The custom in Japan was to present the speeches before the banquet was served, rather than after. Perhaps they believed that empty stomachs encouraged better listening than surfeited ones. One after another, in alphabetical order of country, the presidents—all male—arose and, each in his own tongue, delivered a boring speech. Belgium followed Austria; Germany and Great Britain follo
wed France and were followed by Italy, the Netherlands and Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. In French and German, English and Italian, Swedish and Schweizer-Deutsch, the clichés of gratitude succeeded one another. The Japanese at Mady’s table and across the huge room were obviously wilting with boredom, unable to comprehend a single word. Stomachs rumbled. Finally, I heard the summons: The United States of America. I was last to speak. But not least.

  As soon as I opened my mouth, the entire banquet room awoke. Mady’s table—the Japanese all practically asleep—started to applaud, and then their attention was riveted. I addressed the audience as gracefully as I could—charmingly, succinctly, and in Japanese. When I concluded my remarks on the hospitality of East to West, the gala farewell came to life. The applause was thunderous. The Emperor’s brother, the Prince, rose and bowed low before me. Here, I had delivered a speech in Japanese, the American president and specialist in European books, epitomizing the meaning of internationalism. It was an added fillip that the speaker just happened to be a woman.

  For this particular American president 1973 was an annus mirabilis. In that same year, I finally received the degree of doctor of philosophy that had so long been denied me. As the AB Bookman’s Weekly put it, “Dr. Leona Rostenberg: Columbia U Reverses Itself.” And as one letter of congratulation put it, “In point of fact, I really think the congratulations should go to Columbia University for demonstrating a rare good sense.”

  The reversal began with the June 1972 issue of Columbia Reports. Under the heading “Forthcoming Intermediate Degree to Be Retroactive,” there was an article by Dean Richard C. Robey that began: “A new degree soon will be offered at Columbia to students who have completed all work for the Ph.D. except the dissertation.” The article also indicated that “in lieu of a dissertation, a body of original, scholarly published work” might be presented. Mady got more and more excited. I myself was unimpressed. So many years had passed since the rejection of my dissertation that I had lost interest in pursuing the whole business. Besides, what if I did get the degree? The only people in the world who would have cared—my parents—were not here to rejoice. And who wanted an “intermediate degree”? I was entitled to a full-fledged one. “Yes!” Mady shouted. “And you still are entitled to that degree. It’s a simple matter of justice and you MUST pursue it. Let right be done.”