A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Two weeks after it had dismissed Huntington in one paragraph, the New York Times featured a major profile of him under a banner headline, “The Man Who Paid $50,000 for the Gutenberg Bible.” A six-line subhead identified him further: “Henry E. Huntington Leaps Into Fame as a Book Collector by Buying the Church Library for $1,300,000, as Well as the Chief Treasure of the Hoe Collection.” Large photographs of Huntington and the Beaux Arts-style “ranch” he had built in what is now San Marino, a small community eleven miles outside Los Angeles next to Pasadena, accompanied the article. “He had worked constantly and strenuously since early youth,” the journalist wrote, and described what factors made Huntington decide eleven years earlier to become a book collector. “He had made himself the street railway king of the Pacific Coast. He had piled up millions of dollars. He was fifty years old.” It was then, after all his hard work, that Huntington expressed a single wish: “Now I want some fun.”

  Just as interesting as the main story was a sidebar the Times published under a five-column headline, “J. P. Morgan’s Librarian Says High Book Prices Are Harmful.” Belle da Costa Greene did not mention Huntington by name, but she left no doubt about whom she was criticizing. The amounts being spent “are perfectly ridiculous—they are most harmful,” she complained. “They establish a dangerous precedent.”

  In a lengthly digression, the journalist confided that for the previous two weeks “strange doings” had been taking place. “From all over the world buyers had come, many of them dealers, some private collectors, and some—poor things—agents for great libraries that wanted to fill gaps in their collections.” But just a few of the prizes were going to those dealers, and outside of “one or two rich men,” few were going to collectors. “The appearance of a new collector has been the surprise of the sale. Perhaps the old-fashioned lover of books might object to the use of the term collector in this connection, for the newcomer has none of the instinct of prowling around in shops and browsing among catalogues,” an experience that “has always seemed to the book-loving outsider the essence of collecting, but the new man comes in with a shovel. By the time the sale was two days old his agent was said to have spent $150,000.”

  Miss Greene then addressed herself directly to the issue at hand: “The Hoe collection is being sold practically en bloc,” she told the reporter, and opened her annotated sale catalogue to reveal the name of one dealer— George D. Smith—that “ran down in an almost unbroken column, page after page.”

  What Greene did not mention was that J. Pierpont Morgan had made a number of en bloc purchases of his own over the years, some of them quite spectacular. In 1899 Morgan bought the Toovey library, which included 529 Aldines, numerous French bindings, and a superb copy of the First Folio in the original calf bearing the arms of Robert Sydney, earl of Leicester. A year later he bought for $200,000 a distinguished collection of early manuscripts, incunabula, Shakespeareana, and Americana gathered by Theodore Irwin of Oswego, New York. In 1902, at a cost of £130,000, he acquired from Richard Bennett of Manchester, England, twenty-four Caxtons, the Subiaco Lactantius of 1465, and a copy of The Book of Saint Albans, material formerly owned by the designer William Morris. The following year, William Blake’s drawings for the Book of Job and the John Edward Kerr collection of French romances and chivalry became Morgan’s property as well. If, for all that, Miss Greene was still annoyed at the impertinence of George D. Smith to buy so aggressively, she must have forgotten the night in 1900 when she was in London to bid on fourteen Caxtons collected by the late Lord Amherst, and how a group of booksellers kidingly asked her during dinner not to embarrass them by posting bids they could never hope to match. When a telegram arrived at the table with news that Lord Amherst’s estate had accepted her private offer of $125,000, she told her colleagues, “You may now have your reply, gentlemen. I shall not bid against you tomorrow.”

  Miss Greene’s motivation in protesting the “perfectly ridiculous” and “harmful” prices being spent at the Hoe sale is not fully apparent in the Times article. But the very next day, a book described in the auction catalogue as the “only perfect copy known” of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, printed by William Caxton at Westminster in 1485, was going on the block; with sixty-two Caxtons already in his collection, Morgan coveted this prize for his shelves. Miss Greene opened the bidding with an offer of $5,000. George D. Smith countered immediately with $10,000. A rapid succession of $1,000 bids carried the contest to $30,000, at which point only Smith and Belle Greene remained in the action. The two then exchanged $500 advances to $42,000, twenty-four calls in all. From there, the stake grew by $100 increments. Finally, Smith withdrew at $42,700, and when Miss Greene affirmed $42,800, the Caxton belonged to the Morgan Library. “Her victory evoked a hearty round of applause, and a number of persons personally congratulated her,” the Times observed, and added: “It is said that it was the book of books in the Hoe library that Mr. Morgan wanted,” and had it been necessary, Miss Greene “would have gone beyond the $50,000 paid by Henry E. Huntington for the Hoe copy of the Gutenberg Bible.” Indeed, two days before the lot was to be sold, Miss Greene had cabled Morgan at Aix-les-Bains: “Shall I buy at any price?” His answer: “Use your discretion. Would give seventy-five or even a hundred rather than lose.”

  All this came within the first two weeks of the Hoe sale, which continued periodically for another year and a half, and though Huntington emerged as the decisive victor, plenty of impressive material was spread around. Henry Clay Folger, one of John D. Rockefeller’s top executives at Standard Oil, added to his collection of items relating to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era. The Chicago industrialist Cyrus H. McCormick (1859–1936), son of the inventor of the reaper, acquired the “Italian Vespucci” of 1504 and the 1488 editio princeps, or first printed edition, of five volumes of Homer, books that ultimately went to Princeton University. William K. Bixby (1857–1931) of St. Louis bought heavily in manuscripts, which he would later sell privately to Huntington. Though the Wideners of Philadelphia did not get the Gutenberg Bible on vellum, for $24,000 they did secure Hoe’s other remarkably nice copy on paper, which is now the property of Harvard University.

  Though only twenty-six years old when the Hoe sale began in 1911, Harry Elkins Widener was already attracting attention for the enthusiasm he was applying to the formation of his library. A. Edward Newton, a Philadelphia collector who wrote several entertaining books about the pastime in the early decades of the twentieth century, recalled how he attended the first sessions of the Hoe sale with this heir to a Philadelphia streetcar fortune. One night after dinner, while the two were walking on Fifth Avenue, Widener wondered how he could ever become a great bookman if all the finest treasures continued to be claimed by his older contemporaries. “I do not wish to be remembered merely as a collector of a few books, however fine they may be,” the young man told Newton. “I want to be remembered in connection with a great library, and I do not see how it is going to be brought about. Mr. Huntington and Mr. Morgan are buying up all the books and Mr. Bixby is getting the manuscripts. When my time comes, if it ever does, there will be nothing left for me—everything will be gone.”

  Despite the fierce competition, young Harry managed to buy a few items at the Hoe sale, some scarce issues of the Guardian and Tatler and Isaac Jaggard’s 1620 edition of the “English Boccaccio” among them. But as events turned out, his time came sooner than he ever might have thought, and in ways he could never have imagined. In March 1912, Widener sailed to England on the Mauritania with his parents, George D. and Eleanor Elkins Widener, where he viewed lots at Sotheby’s for an upcoming sale of books gathered over two generations by Henry Huth and his son Alfred and shopped at various bookstores. Eager to get back to New York for part of the Hoe sale, he arranged on April 1 for Quaritch Ltd. to ship on the Carpathia eight books he had just acquired, but he decided to take a rare 1598 edition of Sir Francis Bacon’s Essayes with him. Newton told the story first—and it has been repeated frequently
enough ever since to become apocryphal: how Widener quipped to Quaritch, “I think I’ll take that little Bacon with me in my pocket, and if I am shipwrecked it will go with me.”

  In a carefully documented essay published in The Book Collector, Arthur Freeman, a Quaritch bookseller, demonstrated that what Harry Widener actually said regarding the small duodecimo volume and when he said it were surely more poignant and consequential than “prophetic.” Widener is believed to have said, “Mother, I have just placed the little Bacon in my pocket; the little Bacon goes with me!” Harry obviously did not say those words jestfully to a London bookseller on April 1; he expressed them two weeks later, in the face of doom, as he helped Eleanor Elkins Widener board a lifeboat on the foundering steamship Titanic.

  A few hours before the “unsinkable” passenger liner struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912, Captain Edward J. Smith had joined a group of Philadelphia socialites in the first-class restaurant as dinner guests of Mr. and Mrs. Widener. Shortly after one in the morning, with cabin lights still blazing through the portholes, the pride of the White Star fleet rose sharply at the stern, taunting the 705 horrified survivors who watched from lifeboats nearby. Abruptly, the Titanic went dark, then slid beneath the surface, taking with it 1,517 passengers and crew. Aboard lifeboat Number 4 with Mrs. Widener and her maid were Mrs. John Jacob Astor and her maid, along with forty other women and children.

  Though a casualty list was not available until the end of the week, word of the disaster reached New York just a few hours before the Hoe sale was scheduled to resume in Anderson Galleries. Rosenbach’s biographers assert that he had a commission from Harry Widener to go after Caxton’s edition of Gower’s Confession Amantis that day, though once again George D. Smith had a higher limit and bought the book for Henry Huntington. On Friday, April 20, when word arrived that George and Harry Widener were among the missing, Rosenbach wired Quaritch in London to confirm the awful news. “I think if Harry Elkins Widener had lived he would have been the greatest collector the world has ever known,” Rosenbach declared fifteen years later. “Books were his life work, his recreation, his passion.” Yet Harry Elkins Widener would achieve greater eminence in death than he might ever have thought possible while alive.

  “All joy of living left me on April 15, 1912,” Mrs. Widener wrote Dr. Rosenbach two years later. To ease her grief, she had undertaken the creation of a monument to perpetuate the name of her son at his alma mater, Harvard University, and Rosenbach was helping make the woman’s gift truly outstanding. Acting on her instructions, the book dealer had commenced what Rosenbach’s biographer, Edwin Wolf 2nd, called a “hurricane of buying,” quietly acquiring such treasures as Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a presentation copy of Chapman’s Homer, the manuscript of Sir Walter Scott’s life of Swift, Cruikshank’s drawings for Oliver Twist, and Phiz’s illustrations for Little Dorrit. Mrs. Widener spent about $120,000 for these purchases, which she had Rosenbach discreetly add to the library already formed by her son. In addition, Peter A.B. Widener, her father-in-law, committed $6,000 for the manuscript of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” When everything went over to Harvard, some 3,300 rarities were in the Harry Elkins Widener collection.

  Once Mrs. Widener decided that the books were going to Harvard, she took immediate steps to make sure they would be housed properly. At first she wanted to give the university a “wing” where the collection could remain safely deposited forever. But at the time of Harry’s death, Harvard had been groping for ways to correct what the university librarian Justin Winsor eighteen years earlier had called “the utter inadequacy” of Gore Hall, its existing library facility. “I have exhausted the language of warning and anxiety,” Winsor declared in his annual report for 1894. “Each twelve months brings us nearer to a chaotic condition. The Library goes on with its natural accessions, and friends of learning give us the means to add more to our growth. We have as yet no assurance to give them that their gifts can be properly cared for and the use of their books properly regulated for the general good.”

  In November 1911, five months before the Titanic set sail from Southampton, Archibald Cary Coolidge, the recently appointed library director, informed a Harvard alumnus that all plans for a new building were “in a state of suspended animation,” and that the absence of a major donor had left the university “living, however badly, from hand to mouth.” Word inevitably got out that the university was looking for a wealthy benefactor. A Boston newspaper ran a lighthearted piece on the subject, with a paragraph bordered in black made to look like a classified advertisement. “WANTED—A MILLIONAIRE,” it teased, and added: “Will some kind millionaire please give Harvard University a library building? Mr. Rockefeller, take notice. Mr. Carnegie, please write.” The newspaper item was intended for amusement, but on January 31, 1912, Harvard’s President Abbot Lawrence Lowell asked J. P. Morgan, Jr. (1861–1943), to seek Andrew Carnegie’s help. Two weeks later, Morgan wrote back his feeling that “Harvard is too dignified to have a Carnegie Library.” Lowell replied that he had no objection at all “to having our library called the Carnegie Library,” providing the steel magnate agreed to “give us the whole of it.”

  On April 3, 1912, Lowell wrote Morgan once again, this time with another request: “Do you know anyone who could speak to your father about the Library? If he happened to take a real interest in it, he could do any part of it or the whole thing; although he has done so much for us that we have no right to ask him.” Six years earlier, J.P. Morgan, Sr., had funded three new Harvard Medical School buildings to honor his late father, Junius Spencer Morgan, but as Lowell noted in his letter, “There is truth in the old saying that ‘one good turn deserves another’; only the second is not generally done by the same person as the first.” The younger Morgan replied on April 5 that his father was abroad, and that the best time to approach him with such a proposal would be later in the summer, after he returned. But as William Bentinck-Smith has pointed out, the Morgan “fishing expedition” ended dramatically ten days later, when “out of tragedy came the completely unexpected possibility of a solution to Harvard’s predicament.”

  The university learned that it would be getting Harry’s rare-book collection, but as Coolidge explained in a May 24 letter to a colleague, the Widener family had stipulated that “we should have a proper place in which to put it.” Coolidge added that some newspapers were reporting the likelihood that Mrs. Widener might give a “wing,” a prospect that caused him some apprehension. “It is uncertain what the phrase ‘a wing’ means. If it is an addition to this old building, my enthusiasm for the gift is dampened.” A week later, Coolidge outlined the dilemma to J. P. Morgan, Jr., who replied hopefully: “I should not be surprised if the Wideners did the whole thing. It would be much better than having a small detached library just for Harry Widener’s books. If I can put in a word—and I may have an opportunity—I shall of course do so.”

  It soon developed that Mrs. Widener was willing to do “the whole thing.” She readily committed the $2 million it would take to see the project through, but she insisted on bringing in her own architect, Horace Trumbaur. In February 1913, a month and a half after Mrs. Widener’s formal offer was ratified, seventy-two-year-old Gore Hall, a local landmark that is still featured on the city seal of Cambridge, was gone, and earth was being broken for the new structure. On June 16, 1913, Mrs. Widener, dressed and veiled in black, laid the cornerstone. On commencement day two years later, the building was dedicated. Within hours of the ceremony, books that had been crated and stored all over the campus started coming in by the truckload—for three and a half months they arrived at a rate of 46,000 volumes a week. Today, ten levels of load-bearing stacks built around two interior courtyards remain the primary repository for Harvard’s vast library system, accounting for a quarter of the university’s 12.8 million titles. At the center, in an elegant room of dark oak and white marble, is a collection of rarities conceived and shaped by Harry Elkins Wid
ener, class of 1907, and completed by Eleanor Elkins Widener, his devoted mother. “When the Library is finished, I want all the books installed there,” she directed Rosenbach a year before completion. “Then I will feel happier and know I have done as my dear boy wished.”

  About the same time the Hoe sale was getting under way, an “unremarkable but grateful” member of the class of 1896 at Yale College was repaying his gratitude for a stimulating undergraduate course with a gift of his own. Alexander Smith Cochran, heir to a Yonkers, New York, carpet manufacturing fortune estimated in 1903 to be worth $50 million, made an interesting proposal to William Lyon Phelps, the professor who taught an Elizabethan drama class he recalled with such special fondness. Though primarily interested in yachting—his schooner Westward was undefeated in international matches with Shamrock, Meteor, and Germania in 1910—Cochran wanted to create a small but distinguished library of dramatic works. To house the books in style, he also proposed establishing a kind of literary gathering place near the campus for undergraduates, to be known as the Elizabethan Club.

  Years later, Professor Phelps admitted that all he could remember about Cochran was that he had been “shy and reticent” in class. “I had no means of knowing whether or not the course had made any impression upon him. Nor did I know anything about him personally, or that he was a millionaire in his own right.” But when Phelps saw the list of books Cochran wanted to give, the educator “nearly fell out” of his chair. “He had an astounding collection, every item a rarity, and the whole worth several hundred thousand dollars—Shakespeare quartos, a copy of the first edition of the Sonnets, of Bacon’s Essays, and so on.”

  Central to the proposal was Cochran’s insistence that the books be placed in a clubhouse for junior and senior undergraduates, not in the university library. He committed $75,000 to buy and refurbish a charming old building on College Street for that purpose, and promised another $100,000 as the initial endowment. President Arthur Twining Hadley at first rejected the idea as “too experimental,” but quickly changed his mind when he learned that Columbia University was more than willing to accommodate the yachtsman’s wishes. As an added incentive, Cochran retained Quaritch of London to make the core collection even better. A few days before an important session at the Huth sale was to get under way in London, the American’s preemptive offer to buy thirty-two Shakespeare quartos for £30,000 was accepted. Included in the purchase was the 1594 narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, one of just three copies in existence, a set of proof sheets for the Richard III quarto, and an exceedingly scarce copy of the 1599 “good quarto” of Romeo and Juliet.