In his annotated edition of A Glance at Private Libraries, Roger E. Stoddard reports that twenty-five of the libraries identified by Farnham and containing about 71,200 volumes have since been placed with institutions. Forty more, representing 158,225 volumes, were sold. The fate of the seventeen others, some 69,200 volumes, remains unknown.
Farnham acknowledged that the United States “has produced a few authors worthy of the name” during its short history, but he quickly pointed out how the “paucity” of available source material forced America’s historians to choose between conducting research “in the vast libraries of Europe” or importing books “at a very heavy expense” from abroad. Those unable to conduct research in Europe learned to rely on the expertise and enterprise of a few book hunters who recognized the need for their services. The most resourceful nineteenth-century scout of all was a Massachusetts expatriate named Obadiah Rich.
Born on Outer Cape Cod, Obadiah Rich (1783–1850) was elected to the Massachusetts Historical Society at the age of twenty-two, an honor generally bestowed on older people of proven accomplishment. The following year he helped establish the Anthology Society, which in 1807 became the Boston Athenæum. He was appointed by President James Madison to the post of American consul in Valencia in 1816, which coincided with a time of war and domestic chaos in Spain that led to the looting of many old libraries. A perceptive intellectual, Rich was quick to grasp the opportunities and snapped up old books and manuscripts that were being sold in black-market street stalls and marts, including much material relating to the Spanish colonial period in the Americas. The bibliographer Nicholas Trübner credited Rich with making Americana, publications and documents relating to the Americas, a recognized field of scholarship. In his Bibliographical Guide to American Literature, Trübner wrote, “[H]ad there been no buyer for them on the spot, at the moment of the dispersion of many old libraries, both ecclesiastical and civil” when Rich arrived on the scene, “it is probable that many volumes of great rarity and interest would have perished altogether as waste-paper.”
By the time he took another consular position in Madrid in 1823, Rich had amassed an impressive personal collection. Three years later he was introduced to Washington Irving, who was visiting Spain to translate into English some documents relating to the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Irving stayed at Rich’s home and examined his collection of Spanish manuscript material. In the preface to his A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828, Irving explained how the biography came to be written:
I was encouraged to undertake such a work by the great facilities which I found within my reach in Madrid. I was resident under the roof of the American Consul, O. Rich, Esq, one of the most indefatigable bibliographers in Europe, and who for several years had made particular researches after every document relative to the early history of America. In his extensive and curious library I found one of the best collections extant of Spanish colonial history, containing many documents for which I might search elsewhere in vain. This he put at my absolute command, with a frankness and unreserve seldom to be met with among the possessors of such rare and valuable works; and his library has been my main resource throughout the whole course of my labours.
In 1829, the Library of Congress decided against buying a collection of 93 manuscripts and 383 books of primary material offered to the nation by Rich. “I fear the Congress will not have the liberal spirit enough to purchase your American Library,” the historian of Latin America, William H. Prescott, wrote when he heard the disappointing news from friends in Washington. “Our legislators love money more than books.” Rich’s reputation did not suffer by the rejection, and by 1830 he was working in the book trade in London full time, supplying American institutions, scholars, and private collectors with the materials they needed. He developed fruitful relationships with the Massachusetts orator and statesman Edward Everett (1794–1865), the librarian and bibliographer Joseph Green Cogswell (1786–1871), the noted historian George Bancroft (1800–1891), and the author and teacher George Ticknor (1791–1871).
In 1829 Prescott recommended Rich’s services to his colleagues in an item he wrote for the North American Review: “He has uniformly executed his orders with promptness, sagacity, and great economy. His accurate bibliographical knowledge and his extensive correspondence through all the principal cities of the continent, afford such facilities for the literary acquisitions, as we hope will be improved by public institutions and private individuals.” However vital Rich’s contributions were— and the two men did business for twenty years without ever once meeting in person—Prescott still had occasion to protest the “extravagant, artificial prices” his European agent sometimes charged.
As indispensable as Obadiah Rich was to American scholarship, he was no match for Henry Stevens when it came to sizing up the players, securing inventory, and controlling the flow. When Stevens moved to England in 1845, he arrived with the want-lists of two American millionaires who were about to become major influences on the international book market. A well-educated man who held a bachelor of arts degree from Yale and studied law at Harvard, Stevens became enchanted with book hunting while working in Washington, D.C., and helping the printer, newspaperman, and politician Peter Force (1790– 1868) collect books, pamphlets, and manuscripts for his ambitious project, American Archives (nine volumes published 1837–1853). The connections Stevens established later helped him secure commissions from the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. When he arrived in London, he carried with him introductions from Francis Parkman and the historian and editor Jared Sparks. Armed with “a general commission to forage” for John Carter Brown, he promptly paid Obadiah Rich £1,000 for books from the distinguished library of M. Ternaux-Compans, author of Bibliothèque Americaine, published in Paris in 1837. On March 3, 1846, he shipped five hundred of the most important titles to Providence.
Shortly after setting up shop, Stevens received his first commission from James Lenox of New York City, setting in motion a period when “all Europe was ransacked” for bibliographical rarities. “Those were happy days, when on a July morning one might run down a hundred brace of rare old books on America in London at as many shillings a volume as must now be paid in pounds.” His gatherings “were scrambled for in Boston and New York like hot buck-wheat cakes at a College breakfast. It was hardly possible to sweep them together fast enough.”
Stevens described Lenox, a lifelong bachelor, as “a man of few words and few intimate friends, but of varied information, much studious reading, extensive correspondence and many books.” Like James Logan more than a century earlier, Lenox considered his library a sacred place where it was possible to commune with thinkers of earlier generations. Stevens described the reserved New Yorker as a citizen who “paid his taxes liberally, bore his share of the public burdens, pastured figuratively the widow’s cow, helped the needy, but avoided all public offices and politics.” Though Lenox allowed scholars access to his treasures, he did not let outsiders inside his library, not even the estimable William Prescott. His procedure was to place requested items at the Astor Library “or some similar place of safety,” where they could be consulted and returned.
James Lenox (1800–1880) and John Carter Brown (1797–1874) marked the emergence of a new kind of American collector. Both men inherited huge fortunes in the same year, 1840, both began acquiring books in middle age, and both were motivated by the pure pleasure of ownership. They were willing, moreover, to contest the English bibliographic establishment on its own turf and by its own rules, setting a precedent that would be continued in the next generation.
“The truth was that from about 1845 to 1869 Mr. Lenox was actively collecting his library so rapidly, and doing all the work himself, that he had no time to catalogue or arrange his accessions,” Stevens wrote. “The great bulk of his book collections was piled away in the numerous spare rooms of his large house, till they were filled to the ceiling from the further end back t
o the door, which was then locked and the room for the present done with.” As heir to an estate that included three hundred acres of prime real estate in midtown Manhattan, Lenox certainly could afford a librarian, but he preferred to unpack and shelve the books himself. “He gave me his money and his friendship, and I sought the world over to supply him with books and manuscripts,” Stevens said. “He had a mind of his own, and a fortune to back it.”
Stevens readily allowed that having both Lenox and Brown as “chief correspondents” was lucrative, though occasionally he “found it very difficult to prevent their colliding,” especially since both were “exceedingly sweet on everything relating to Columbus.” An embarrassing conflict developed when Stevens accepted commissions from both men to bid at the first Libri sale in 1847 for the only known copy of an illustrated edition of the Columbus Letter, printed at Basel in 1493. This copy of the “letter” (Columbus actually wrote the document as a general announcement of his first Atlantic crossing) is especially significant because it contains the first known attempt to depict the landing and the first map of the West Indies.
Brown set a limit of twenty-five guineas, Lenox authorized a lower figure of £25. Stevens bought the item for £16.10, and since John Carter Brown had tendered the higher bid, the prize went to Providence. Lenox insisted that since the item came in under his limit, it belonged to him. Further unpleasantness was averted only when Brown agreed to let Lenox have the book, though he minced no words about his displeasure. “I am still of the opinion that this Book of Right belongs to me,” he wrote Stevens, but added, “surely I would not have any Controversy with Mr. L., an entire stranger to me. Let me tell you frankly that you [were] the proper person to have decided to whom the Book belonged,” and that just because Lenox threatened to “withdraw his business” it should have had no bearing on the proper resolution.
“I make no such threat and rather you should suffer in your pecuniary Interest, by the withdrawal of a good Customer.” Two months later, Lenox and Brown were introduced by a mutual friend, and they began a lasting friendship. Brown later gave Lenox a copy of the first Spanish edition of Cortez’s fourth letter, enabling him to complete a set.
That same year, on behalf of Lenox, Stevens outdueled Sir Thomas Phillipps for a Gutenberg Bible, though the £500 he paid was called a “mad” price in the United States. Lenox was so furious at the amount that he at first refused to pay customs duties when the book arrived in New York. It was the first Gutenberg Bible to enter the United States, and it resides today in the New York Public Library with the rest of Lenox’s books. Stevens said that on most other occasions Lenox was willing to pay “unprecedentedly” high prices “for a prime rarity.” Lenox once told Stevens that he could “find the five pound notes more easily than such books, but you must not tell anybody how much I have paid.” Stevens found Shakespeare folios and quartos, rare Bibles, scarce editions of John Milton and Bunyan for Lenox and also sold him a Bay Psalm Book.
Lenox was the wealthier of the two collectors, and he expected first refusal on everything of importance. Brown, on the other hand, found competition distasteful, and even considered for a while giving the exercise up entirely and selling his library. But the Rhode Islander maintained his composure, and in 1873 he exacted a little revenge by securing the only known first printing of the writings of Amerigo Vespucci to appear in Dutch, a book known as the “Dutch Vespucius” and printed at Antwerp in 1506–1507. Two hours after an Amsterdam bookseller received Brown’s purchase order by cable, a letter from Lenox arrived in the day’s mail requesting the same item.
John Carter Brown put together the premier collection of books and manuscripts relating to the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the New World. When he died in 1874, his wife added more material before turning the library over to her son, John Nicholas Brown, who in turn augmented the holdings with great care. “Don’t buy too many common books,” he instructed George Parker Winship, his young librarian, in 1897. “I don’t want to fill up the library with ordinary things.” A year before his death, in 1900, John Nicholas Brown committed $150,000 for a building to house the collection, and another $500,000 to administer it. By operating with its own funds and staff ever since, the John Carter Brown Library maintains the identity of the man whose name it bears. Over the front door, chiseled in stone, is a single word: Americana.
Though Lenox and Brown were the most notable American bibliophiles of the mid-nineteenth century, they were by no means alone in their enthusiasm for Americana. Their most persistent competitor was George Brinley (1817–1875) of Hartford, Connecticut, a collector who in time would buy a Gutenberg Bible and a Bay Psalm Book from Henry Stevens, but who actually was attracted to the drab kind of ephemeral items more likely to end up in a dump or pulping plant than in a library or museum.
The son of a Massachusetts merchant, Brinley inherited an estate during the 1850s that was sufficient to support a growing family and satisfy his appetite for collecting. Shortly after moving to Connecticut in 1845, he bought the entire library of books devoted to the history of American Indians gathered by the Boston antiquarian Samuel Gardner Drake eight days before it was to go on the auction block. The next year he bought at a sale of books gathered by Gabriel Furman, a one-time state senator, municipal court judge, and amateur historian, picking up material about the West Indies and the Pacific Northwest with the same gusto that he gathered New England imprints. “Brinley strove to rescue, to identify, to preserve and to evaluate those books which constitute our earliest, and in many cases, our ultimate sources of information about America,” Randolph G. Adams wrote. “In this he seemed clearly to understand that a book printed in California in 1850 may be as important as a book printed in Massachusetts in 1650.”
During the Civil War, high prices paid for scrap paper lured many dusty bundles out of old attics and cellars; Brinley worked out an arrangement with nearby Connecticut mills that enabled him to go through the discarded piles before they went off to the pulping mills. Excited by the variety of material he found—he saved an Eliot Indian Bible in this fashion—Brinley was emboldened to go directly to the sources. Filling a buggy with pots and pans, he went from door to door throughout New England, offering housewives new utensils in exchange for pamphlets and almanacs. “By pursuing this method he rescued many works, which, except for his foresight, would have certainly disappeared from the face of the earth,” George Watson Cole pointed out. “This accounts for the great number of duplicates that were sold in his library and for the many items which have not reappeared in any subsequent sale.” In an unpublished memoir, Charles Brinley recalled how his father once found an old Psalm Book in the home of a woman who “resisted all his blandishments” to buy it. “My father did not despair; he wrote every now and then to the old lady and sent her presents. She remained obdurate until, one cold winter, he had made for her a particularly handsome flannel petticoat. He received the Psalm Book with a letter of thanks.”
Years later, Brinley agreed to pay Henry Stevens $1,000 for a first-issue Bay Psalm Book, “upon condition that the transaction is strictly private. I do not want my next friend to know that I possess it because the next step among Yankees is ‘what did you pay for it.’ ” Stevens recalled another occasion when he was describing for his “old friend” a group of “nuggets” that had been rejected by both James Lenox and John Carter Brown, including a seven-page document titled A Declaration of Former Passages and Proceedings betwixt the English and the Narrowgansetts, known as the Narrowgansett Declaration. Brinley was astonished: “What, do you mean to say that you have a little book such as you describe, signed by John Winthrop and printed at Cambridge by Stephen Daye in 1645, that has been declined at ten guineas by both of those gentlemen after having been sent to them on inspection?”
Assured that that indeed was the case, Brinley immediately proposed buying the book at the same price offered to his competitors, but he did not want to betray his interest to Brown. Since the book was still in R
hode Island with the other items, the deal could be difficult to pull off. “If it is inquired for separately, especially for me, and they see it again, they will be sure to keep it,” Brinley reasoned. So after some thought, he proposed sending a messenger to get the “big box with its entire contents” and, “without naming the destination,” have the whole lot shipped by overland express at his expense to Hartford. Eight years later, Lenox paid $215 to get the book at Brinley’s sale, five times the price he had passed on earlier. In 1911, Henry Huntington paid $10,000 for Robert Hoe’s copy; a few years after that, the John Carter Brown Library paid Charles Goodspeed of Boston $15,000 for the last Narrowgansett Declaration to come on the market. “That goose is now a swan,” Stevens gloated.
Brinley was able to bring many other “nuggets” into his collection after Lenox and Brown turned them down. In 1873 Stevens advised Brinley that the “greatest bibliographical rarity that ever crossed the Atlantic” was being shown to Lenox, “but as he is only a millionaire and has stopped buying, he may not keep it at any price,” in which case Brinley would have the next look. “I trust your chances are small,” Stevens warned nevertheless. “I had the order from Mr. Lenox twenty years ago, and am only now able to execute it; but I am more than rewarded for waiting, though the price of the book has gone up, while money has gone down.” The book in question was believed by some to be the dedication copy of Captain John Smith’s History of Virginia “in the finest possible condition, bound at the time, 1624, in rich morocco tooled all over,” the “most sumptuous binding, early English, I ever saw.” Lenox was busy organizing the library that, he had declared three years earlier, would become a public trust and replied that he did not want any more books, so the treasure went to Brinley.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 21
