In 1874, a year before he died at the age of fifty-seven, Brinley wrote Stevens commenting on the state of the rare-book market: “I am glad to see high prices ruling. Crazy people like to see others crazier than they are.” This conviction—along with the certain knowledge that his judgment had been sound and his purchases shrewd—may be why Brinley made clear that all his books should be sold. Mindful, too, that some books belonged in institutions, he made another stipulation. Five institutions— Yale, the American Antiquarian Society, the Watkinson Library of Hartford, the New-York Historical Society, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania—were to be given a total of $24,500 in allowances to be applied toward purchases at the auction.
Held in five sales between 1879 and 1893, it was “the greatest library of Americana ever sold,” Clarence S. Brigham wrote in the introduction to a landmark survey of American book auctions published in 1937. Using the credits they had received, these institutions were major buyers at the sale, with Yale alone securing more than one thousand lots. Cornelius Vanderbilt bought the Bay Psalm Book, which has since made its way to Yale. But the most active buyer of all at the first session was seventy-nine-year-old James Lenox, who spent close to $10,000 for items that he had failed to secure when they had been offered to him years earlier by Henry Stevens on a “first refusal” basis.
Brinley’s memorial is the catalogue of his sale, a rarity today in its own right. In the preface to the final volume issued in 1893, Brinley’s good friend J. Hammond Trumbull stressed how inadequate his words were to measure “the service rendered to the public and the cause of American history by one who, like Mr. Brinley, rescues from destruction and oblivion the literary monuments and the ‘unconsidered trifles’ of the infancy of our nation, and puts them in the way of preservation and usefulness to all coming time.” Charles A. Brinley offered this succinct description in his unpublished memoir: “My father was a man of strong prejudices, marked characteristics and definite tastes. He was a bibliophile, and a bibliomaniac as to one class of books.”
James Lenox, John Carter Brown, and George Brinley, all contemporaries, lived within 150 miles of each other—Lenox in New York, Brown in Providence, Brinley in Hartford. While they were the most prominent collectors of their generation, others were building notable libraries throughout the country. As the nation expanded, the demand for books expanded with it. Thirty-eight years after it was established as a city in 1833, Chicago suffered a fire that destroyed thousands of buildings and most of the books that had been brought by some settlers from the East. Fine libraries gathered by Ezra C. McCagg, Jonathan Young Scammon, Perry H. Smith, Mark Skinner, and Henry T. Monroe went up in flames. McCagg’s losses included the first 1623 Shakespeare folio to enter Chicago, as well as rare copies of Theodor de Bry’s Great Voyages and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, some three thousand volumes in all. Scammon’s superb collection of material on the Swedish mystic and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg and his teachings had been kept in a room “big and high, filled with books in every possible corner,” and had been destroyed.
The richness of these collections “suggest that books quickly assumed a place in the lives and the homes of Chicago’s upper crust, once wealth and position were secure,” Robert Rosenthal, a former librarian of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, wrote in a 1983 essay. As soon as reliable communications with the East Coast and Europe were established, “books moved to Chicago in surprising volume and sophistication.” Even though Chicago lacked an antiquarian book trade, “its pioneer collectors quickly assumed places at the forefront of American collecting.”
Only three collections—those assembled by John A. Rice, Edward G. Asay, and Ebenezer Lane—are known to have escaped the Great Fire of 1871 intact. Rice, Rosenthal noted, “acquired books with such rapidity and flair that for a few short years his name was linked with the great collectors of the East.” A native of Northborough, Massachusetts, he moved to Chicago in 1861 and became the owner of a hotel; in 1866 he paid $14,000 for the Americana library of John F. McCoy. Two years before the fire, Rice sold his hotel for $150,000 and promptly went broke trying to corner the grain market. Pressed for funds, he offered his books to the Chicago Historical Society for $30,000. Unable to get that price, Rice put the books up for auction in New York; the $42,252.69 that was realized set a new American record.
Edward G. Asay, a native of Philadelphia, built a successful law practice and became the quintessential Chicago collector of the nineteenth century. The considerable value of his library, in fact, is what saved it from destruction: Asay was planning a trip to Europe with his family in the spring of 1871, and he shipped the books to Joseph Sabin in Brooklyn, New York, for safekeeping. When Asay learned about the Chicago disaster, he instructed Sabin to sell his books at auction. The following year he picked up where he left off and built another excellent library. A number of his rarities were sold to Theodore Irwin of Oswego, New York, in 1881, who sold his library to J. Pierpont Morgan in 1900.
The only library to survive the fire in the city limits belonged to Ebenezer Lane, who had moved to Chicago in 1856 at the age of sixty-two after a distinguished career as chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. He became a lawyer and the resident director of the Illinois Central Railroad, and moved into a house on South Michigan Avenue, a fashionable section of the city that was spared by the catastrophe. Lane bought wisely in American history, and his autograph collection was regarded as “the very finest in the West.” At his death in 1866, the collection passed on to his son, also named Ebenezer Lane, who continued adding to it. By the time of the son’s death in 1892, the Lane Library of 10,500 volumes was considered the largest in the city. In 1911 the books were acquired by the University of Chicago. “It was thus that the Lane Library became the only collection which not only survived the great fire,” Rosenthal concluded, “but continues to be preserved under one roof.”
When the real estate entrepreneur Walter Loomis Newberry died at sea in 1868 while traveling to meet his family in Paris, the Chicago Fire was still three years away, and so much of the property that had earned him a fortune was still producing income. Beginning in the 1830s he had bought land in Chicago “by the acre and sold it by the front foot.” Though Newberry was not a bibliophile, he made a curious stipulation in his will that led to the creation of an exceptional research library. He directed that in the event each of his daughters should die without issue, his estate should be used for the construction of a “free public library” in Chicago. When his wife died in Italy seventeen years later, this unlikely provision went into effect, because by that time Mary and Julia Newberry, the couple’s unmarried daughters, had predeceased their mother, leaving no direct heirs to the family fortune.
A new public library had already been built by then in the city, so instead the Newberry trustees created a private research library based on the Astor Library in New York, established by William B. Astor (1792–1875), and empowered it to acquire important private collections. “Certain it is that Chicago now has the prospect of being the seat of the ideal library of the continent, and it ought to make Chicago a great library center,” the newspaper Chicago Inter-Ocean declared, and predicted that the city would become “a veritable Athens in intellectual attainments.” The Newberry Library opened its doors in 1893 and promptly committed its huge endowment to purchase a wide variety of research materials. So diverse are its holdings that in 1965 the trustees adopted as its motto, “An Uncommon Collection of Uncommon Collections.”
That same year, another legacy led to the creation of a second great research library in Chicago. John Crerar, a bachelor millionaire, did not say precisely what kinds of books should be collected with his money, he just had a few choice words about what should be avoided: “I desire the books and periodicals selected with a view to create and sustain a healthy moral and Christian sentiment in the community, and that all nastiness and immorality be excluded. I do not mean by this that there shall not be anything b
ut hymn books and sermons, but I mean that dirty French novels and all skeptical trash and works of questionable moral tone shall never be found in this Library.” To make sure there were no problems, organizers of the John Crerar Library, which is now maintained and operated by the University of Chicago, opted to focus on the history of science.
“In the unfoldings of my fate,” Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918) wrote in an entertaining memoir titled Literary Industries, “I found myself in the year 1856 in the newly Americanized and gold-burnished country of California, in the city of San Francisco, which stands on a narrow Peninsula, about midway between either extreme of the mighty stretch of the western seaboard, beside a bay unequaled as a harbor by any along the whole seven thousand miles of shore line, and unsurpassed by any in the world.”
There, in a frontier town at the limit of continental expansion alive with swaggering goldminers and jaunty clipper-ship sailors, a twenty-four-year-old clerk opened a publishing business that struggled at first but prospered along with the boom. By 1870, Bancroft needed a five-story building to house his printing presses, binding equipment, and sales force. And while he contended that he never knew himself to be obsessed by books, he began collecting Western Americana with a fury. “Bibliomaniac I was not,” Bancroft maintained.
Duplicates, fine bindings, and rare editions seemed to me of less importance than the subject-matter of the work. To collect books in an objectless, desultory manner is not profitable to either mind or purse. Book collecting without a purpose may be to some a fascinating pastime, but give it an object and you endow it with dignity. Not half the books printed are ever read; not half the books sold are bought to be read. Least of all in the rabid bibliomaniac need we look for the well-read man.
Bancroft insisted that he began collecting books by happenstance. “Accident first drew me into it, and I continued the pastime with vague interest,” but soon there was a focus. “I had a certain vague purpose at the beginning,” he allowed, and it was California, the land of promise and fortune. Good businessman that he was, Bancroft knew he was not being irresponsible because “certain books I knew to be intrinsically valuable; old, rare, and valuable books would increase rather than diminish in value, and as I came upon them from time to time I thought it best to secure all there were relating to this coast.” During an extended trip to England and France, he “rummaged the enormous stocks of secondhand books in the hundreds of stores,” and “my eyes began to open.”
When the collection reached a thousand volumes, “I fancied I had them all; when it had grown to five thousand I saw it was but begun.” He traveled all over Europe, and he kept buying books.
So far I had searched little for Mexican literature. Books on Lower California and northern Mexico I had bought, but Mexican history and archaeology proper had been passed over. Now the question arose, Where shall I draw the dividing line? The history of California dates back to the days of Cortes; or more properly, it begins with the expeditions directed northward by Nuno de Guzman, in 1530, and the gradual occupation, during two and a quarter centuries, of Nueva Galicia, Nueva Vizcaya, and the Californias.
Veteran bibliophiles can see where the man’s logic was taking him; he had to have it all. Bancroft reasoned that if he was going to “gather all the material requisite for a complete narrative of events bearing on California, it would be necessary to include a large part of the early history of Mexico, since the two were so blended as to make it impossible to separate them.” He spent three months in London going through booksellers’ catalogues, searching for anything that related to the Pacific Coast. He hired an assistant to prepare a bibliography. “From London I went to Paris, and searched the stalls, antiquarian warehouses, and catalogues, in the same careful manner.” He repeated the procedure in Madrid, and kept on going.
To Saragossa, Barcelona, Marseilles, Nice, Genoa, Bologna, Florence, and Rome; then to Naples, back to Venice, and through Switzerland to Paris. After resting a while I went to Holland, then up the Rhine and through Germany to Vienna; then through Germany and Switzerland again, Paris and London, and finally back to New York and Buffalo. Everywhere I found something, and seized upon it, however insignificant, for I had long since ceased to resist the malady.
At ten thousand volumes Bancroft finally thought he was done. “I have rifled America of its treasures; Europe I have ransacked.” But soon he felt a pull, a persistent tugging from somewhere inside: “What is this inch-thick pamphlet that comes to me by mail from my agent in London?” And then, in one bulk purchase, seven thousand books arrived in his warehouse from Mexico, and suddenly a “new light broke in upon me” about what remained to be done. “I had never considered that Mexico had been printing books for three and a quarter centuries—one hundred years longer than Massachusetts—and that the earlier works were seldom floating about book-stalls and auction rooms. One would think, perhaps, that in Mexico there might be a rich harvest.”
At the 1868 auction of a six thousand-volume collection in Mexico City, Bancroft bought up fully half of the lots. Eight years later he acquired heavily at the E. George Squier sale of newspapers, books, pamphlets, and manuscripts on the history of Central America. And in 1880, Henry Stevens handled his bids at the London sale of material gathered by the late Don José Fernando Ramírez, a native of Durango who at one time was head of the National Museum of Mexico. The Ramírez collection included not only works in various Indian languages and dialects, but numerous manuscripts relating to Jesuit missions in Texas, California, and South America and books produced by the first Spanish printers to set up presses in Mexico during the sixteenth century.
When Bancroft was writing Literary Industries in 1890, his Pacific Coast Library exceeded fifty thousand volumes, which he proudly declared to be “the largest collection in the world of books, maps, and manuscripts relating to a special territory, time, or subject.” He did, however, confess one lingering anxiety. “I trembled for its safety through fear of fire,” Bancroft wrote, “well knowing that once lost no power on earth could reproduce it.” As a result, he moved the books from his warehouse on Market Street to a fireproof building on Valencia Street, a decision that proved farsighted. In 1905 the University of California at Berkeley bought the books for $150,000, but delayed moving them across San Francisco Bay. Before the transfer could take place, a catastrophic earthquake devastated much of San Francisco and leveled buildings up and down Market Street. Miraculously, Bancroft’s library on Valencia Street escaped destruction. Today, the 65,000 books and 100,000 manuscripts he “rifled” America and “ransacked” Europe to acquire remain the cornerstone collection in the university’s Bancroft Library.
Meanwhile, what Americans had been buying up and carrying across the Atlantic was not lost on the Europeans. “In fact, there is probably no country so well stocked as the States with libraries of from ten thousand to twenty thousand volumes,” John Hill Burton (1809–1881) wrote just seven years after Luther Farnham offered his mid-century “glance” at private libraries. The evidence overwhelmingly suggested “that they have bought what was to be bought, and have done all that a new people can to participate in the long-hoarded treasures of literature which it is the privilege of the Old World to possess.”
Many years later, Julian P. Boyd, the librarian of Princeton University, pointed out that the removal of books to North America was a “prodigious accomplishment” made possible only by a “kind of materialism that Americans would like to forget,” though had it been less, the accomplishment would not have been nearly as thorough. “Conquest and warfare, let it be said, were not among the factors that produced the tidal wave of books and manuscripts that came to American shores,” Boyd wrote. “Coin of the realm, willingly offered and freely accepted, often in heroic quantity, was the sovereign agency involved.”
5
Brandy for Heroes
Robert Hoe III (1839–1909) is remembered today not so much for the great library he built as for causing it to be broken up and dispersed o
n the open market. Whenever it is asked why some people decide to dissolve their collections rather than give them to institutions, his words invariably are recalled: “If the great collections of the past had not been sold where would I have found my books?” In 1991, eighty years after the sensational sale of Hoe’s library began in 1911, a Norwegian collector, Martin Schøyen, explained why he chose to put his collection of fifteenth-century printed books, known as incunabula, up for auction:
Donating the incunables to a public institution, or forming a private foundation for them (as some other collectors have done recently), was never considered. A greater gift to future generations would be to give them the thrill of the chase, the excitement at the moment of capture, the privilege of owning such great books, the intriguing study of their printing, decoration, binding, and provenance. The present sale may give them this opportunity.
If the age of Dibdin, the early nineteenth century, was the Heroic Age of Book Collecting, then the six decades that bracketed the turn of the century was the Golden Age, particularly in the United States, where the building of great libraries became an emblem of wisdom and accomplishment. Even though the Brinley sale a generation earlier had demonstrated that Americana was a worthwhile pursuit, the most desirable items were still European classics. The Brinley sale may have been the greatest sale of Americana ever mounted, but it was by no means the nation’s greatest book auction; that distinction belongs to the dispersal of Hoe’s library.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 22
