These books formed a base that other friends of the university have augmented with other Shakespearean era gifts over the years. “What makes the Elizabethan Club unique is that it has a collection of very rare books which quite specifically were given for the edification of undergraduate students,” Stephen Parks, the curator of the collection, said as he unlocked the steel door to a twelve-by-twelve treasure vault. “The fact that there are twenty million dollars’ worth of books in here is beside the point. Seven days a week during term, this place is full of students having cups of tea and sandwiches, and the sandwiches haven’t changed in thirty years. We have tomato on Monday, cucumber on Tuesday, chicken salad on Wednesday, cinnamon toast on Thursday, tuna on Friday, date-nut bread on Saturday, and peanut butter on Sunday.” Out back is a large lawn where students can play croquet in the fall and spring. “We occasionally challenge the Signet Society at Harvard to a match.” And on Friday afternoons, when the mock wall is rolled back and the vault is opened, the books are displayed and the unmistakable aroma of hot English tea mingles with the fragrance of hand-made paper and fine leather bindings. In his memoirs Professor Phelps wrote, “Little did I guess when I started giving my course in the Elizabethan dramatists years ago, that it would come to this.”
Yale had sparked Alexander Smith Cochran’s enthusiasm for English drama, just as Harvard had worked magic on Harry Elkins Widener. In both instances, there was wisdom to be gleaned from the results, though Harvard was the first to act affirmatively upon it. Shortly after the Widener Library opened in 1915, George Parker Winship, class of 1893, accepted an offer to leave the John Carter Brown Library in Rhode Island and become his alma mater’s first rare-book specialist. His first order of business was to set aside a secure area in the new library and designate it the Treasure Room. He then culled the general stacks for rarities already owned by the university and sifted through the “welcome flood of gifts” occasioned by construction of the new building. Of more far-reaching consequence was the noted bibliographer’s uncanny ability to recognize future benefactors among the student body and the ingenious methods he used to cultivate their interest in beautiful books.
Once settled in his new job, Winship began teaching what curriculum catalogues of the period identify as Fine Arts 5e, a sort of “handson” course attended almost exclusively by the sons of wealthy families. In a short essay written for the Grolier Club, Boies Penrose, one of Winship’s fortunate few, recalled how students did not simply sign up for the “celebrated” course, they “applied for membership,” and competition was keen. “For, let it be said, it was no ordinary course, to be enrolled in simply by filling in a form at the beginning of term.” To ensure that applicants were “properly qualified,” admission was “rigorously guarded by the master himself.” As a result, “5e” became known as one of “the more exclusive clubs of Harvard, although Winship’s draconian screening was certainly justified in that many of his pupils became lifelong bookmen.”
Not only did the “standards of admission” make the course exclusive, but the “physical setting was likewise unique.” The students met in the elegant new Widener Room, home to Harry’s rare-book collection, where “easy chairs and an open fire” provided “all the sybaritic comforts of a palace” and “the environment of a connoisseur.” Winship would sit at the head of a long table,
intermittently handing around illuminated manuscripts and incunabula for our inspection. Technical instruction was at a minimum; aesthetic appreciation and cultural background at a maximum. It was the book as a creation, as a work of art, as an important factor in its time and place, that he stressed, rather than the devitalizing details of pagination and collation. And he stressed these things well; so well, in truth, that most of us were carried away with enthusiasm.
Winship taught Fine Arts 5e from 1915 to 1931. Its description in course catalogues was straightforward enough, though a few revealing phrases do appear. “This course is intended for men who are interested in books as objects of art, and who desire to possess or to produce beautiful books. An important object of the course is to train the taste of book-buyers, and to cultivate a well-informed judgment of the value of rare and attractive volumes.” Arthur A. Houghton, Jr., class of 1929 and heir to the Steuben Glass fortune of Corning, New York, took Fine Art 5e. Eleven years after receiving his bachelor’s degree, Houghton underwrote construction of the first library to be built by any American university exclusively for the storage of rare books. When the Houghton Library opened in 1942 it was called “the most advanced library building in the United States, if not the world.” Bayard L. Kilgour, Jr., of Cincinnati, class of 1927, another Winship student, gave the university what was regarded at the time as the preeminent collection of T. E. Lawrence books, letters, and manuscripts in private hands, and after turning over more than two thousand examples of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature—considered the finest collection of its kind outside Russia—he was named honorary curator of the Slavic Collection. Kilgour had bought most of the material from a New York bookseller after it was turned down by several institutions. “Mr. Kilgour realized the importance of it as did none of the institutional libraries to which it had been offered,” William A. Jackson, then librarian of the Houghton Library, wrote in the catalogue to the collection.
Stanley Marcus, Lucius Beebe, Carl Pforzheimer, Jr., and Walter Whitehill were other prominent graduates of Fine Arts 5e. When the Houghton Library opened, another Winship protégé, Philip Hofer, offered his services free of charge and remained at the university for the rest of his life. Hofer collected with consummate taste and discrimination, and his gift of illustrated books and manuscripts “qualify him to be called the greatest benefactor of the Harvard Library,” according to Roger E. Stoddard, the current curator of rare books at Houghton Library. William A. Jackson, dubbed the “grand acquisitor” for the wealth of material he added to Harvard’s collections during his tenure as rare-book librarian, was “obviously envious of Winship’s influence” over wealthy young bibliophiles, and once asked the master how he picked the students for his course. The response came without hesitation: “Whiskey breath and club pin.”
In 1924, Chauncy Brewster Tinker, Winship’s distinguished counterpart at Yale, complained to Yale alumni that Harvard was “perpetually in the lead,” and acknowledged how “galling” it was to accept “Yale’s being always second in the race; but even that is better than fifth or sixth.” Tinker performed similar miracles on a generation of Yale collectors, but as Thomas Adams, former librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, said, “Harvard was twenty-five years ahead of everyone else.” Roger Stoddard agreed, noting that “just about every major benefaction to the Harvard Library from 1935 on was related in one way or another to Winship’s Fine Arts course.”
• • •
Henry E. Huntington never went to college and never attended any seminars where he could marvel at the beauty of illuminated manuscripts or handle exquisitely tooled leather bindings. Born in Oneonta, New York, in 1850, he spent most of his adult life creating and consolidating a railroad empire with his uncle, Collis P. Huntington, at first in the South and then, most dramatically, in California. No one really knows why he decided rather late in life to commit so much energy and money to collecting. A. S. W. Rosenbach probably guessed his motives as well as anyone. Rosenbach quoted Huntington as once saying: “Men may come and men may go, but books go on forever. The ownership of a fine library is the surest and swiftest way to immortality!” Rosenbach did not say where Huntington got that idea, possibly because he did not want to pay tribute to the late George D. Smith, the only person who could challenge Rosenbach for the title of the greatest American bookseller of the twentieth century. But in an article written for a short-lived publication called the Literary Collector, Smith wrote: “When the rulers of kingdoms today have crumbled into the dust and their names forgotten of the people, the memory of a maker of a great collection will be a household word in the mouths of tho
usands. This is the real road to fame.”
If building a great library was the surest and swiftest way to immortality, then it made sense that Huntington’s actions would be sure and swift as well. Not surprisingly, the same bold methods that helped him build a vast transportation empire in California were brought to bear in his collecting. Huntington was sixty-two years old when the Titanic sank on April 15, 1912. By the time the final lot in the Hoe sale was hammered down seven months later, he had accounted for half of the $1.9 million spent. For another $1.3 million, he also acquired the entire Church collection. And that was just the beginning.
While the phrase en bloc did not originate with Huntington, the practice of buying the complete libraries of other collectors became his trademark. The first issue of the Huntington Library Bulletin, published in 1931, four years after Huntington’s death, identified 112 individual collections bought largely en bloc between 1904 and 1927. “It cannot be stated too often,” Professor George Sherburn of the University of Chicago wrote, “that the Huntington Library is essentially a ‘library of libraries or a collection of collections.’”
A few collections are worth mentioning. In 1913, Huntington acquired Greenville Kane’s collection of letters and documents written by George Washington, at least one item for each year of Washington’s adult life. Then came an archive of material assembled by Ward Hill Lamon, Abraham Lincoln’s former law partner. Though Huntington would never catch up to Morgan in Caxtons, he made a noble effort in 1914 when for $750,000 he secured twenty-five superior examples from the duke of Devonshire, a trove that also brought with it 7,500 early English plays and 111 volumes of playbills gathered by the celebrated British actor John Philip Kemble.
In 1915 Huntington bought the New York lawyer Frederick R. Halsey’s twenty thousand–volume collection of English and American literature, which was strong in Dickens, Stevenson, Milton, Shelley, and Poe, including two copies of Tamerlane and Other Poems. Two years later he acquired Baron Ellesmere’s Bridgewater House library of 4,400 books that included handwritten material by Chapman and Marston and twelve thousand manuscripts, most notably the exquisitely illuminated Ellesmere Chaucer displayed prominently today as a centerpiece in the Huntington Library gallery. Huntington also understood that there are times when it is more appropriate to be discreet than decisive. When he showed up one morning at the home of New York collector Beverly Chew to conclude the purchase of 1,600 English rarities, he encountered a man in anguish. “I have not slept a wink all night for thinking about parting with my books,” Chew allowed.
“If that is the way you feel about parting with your books, Mr. Chew, I will not take them,” Huntington replied, “but, if at any time you decide to dispose of them, I wish the first opportunity of acquiring them.” Within a year, Huntington paid Chew $500,000 and got the books.
For the first ten years of his collecting, Huntington was ably represented by George D. Smith, the wily New Yorker who appreciated cigars and racetracks with as much gusto as he did a battle in the auction rooms. His swaggering performance at the Hoe sale led to his boast: “I had the satisfaction of having taught those English and Continental booksellers something about American sporting blood that they didn’t forget for many a day.” On September 25, 1918, Huntington wrote Smith a letter in which he bought thirty lots from a recent Huth sale and added: “I am very glad to see that you are going to sell your valuable string of horses, and I think that by so doing you will be able to keep in the book business. If you should have succeeded in the horse business, you would have been a wonder, for I think that there is hardly one in a hundred keeping at it who does not go ‘dead broke’ before they turn up their toes.”
There is little doubt, however, that Smith knew how to hedge. When he sailed to England in 1916 with a group of American booksellers, each intending to bid on the first part of the Britwell Court library, he “neglected to tell his fellow passengers that he had some days earlier bought the collection en bloc by cable,” Richard S. Wormser wrote in a sketch of Smith for the Grolier Club. Shrewdly, Smith maintained offices at 48 Wall Street in New York’s financial district, not farther uptown where most of the other prominent dealers conducted business. “All of the great collectors of the time were among his clients,” Wormser pointed out. “His famed ability and stock of important books drew them to his shop, possibly in part because they saw, in his activities, methods similar to those by which some of them had amassed their fortunes.”
Had Smith lived beyond his fiftieth birthday, he probably would have continued as principal agent for Huntington and other wealthy clients, but his unexpected death early in 1920 left the lucrative field open for his competitors, most prominent among them the learned doctor of philosophy from Philadelphia, Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach, who already was chipping away at Smith’s monopoly of Huntington’s business. The Rosenbach Company archives record several sales to Huntington prior to Smith’s death, one in December 1916 for a collection of William Blake drawings, another two weeks later for some Americana. Clearly, Smith no longer was acting as Huntington’s exclusive agent; Rosenbach already was making significant inroads.
On August 1, 1919, Rosenbach wired Huntington with news that he had just “purchased for stock” the Marsden J. Perry library, and that he was willing to offer the Californian “first offer of Shakespeare quartos not in your collection,” including “three of the earliest known published in 1591 and 1592.” This was a stunning announcement. The Marsden J. Perry Shakespeare collection was not known to be on the market, and it included a number of extraordinary items. Dr. Rosenbach informed Huntington that he was traveling to California in two weeks and asked whether he could stop by to discuss the matter. “Please consider Perry purchase confidential,” he added. “Telegraph me at once as would like to give you first opportunity before offering elsewhere.” A reply from Huntington is not in the Rosenbach Company files, but there is no question but that the two men got together in California. A one-page agreement, written in longhand and signed by Huntington on August 19, 1919, confirms the sale of eleven quartos from the Perry collection, King John, First Part, and King John, Second Part, both 1591, among them, “all for the special price of $121,000 cash,” with two of the items, a 1676 Hamlet and a 1684 Julius Caesar, “to be delivered to me tomorrow.”
The Marsden J. Perry coup also enabled Rosenbach to sell material to Henry C. and Emily Jordan Folger, who were building what would become an unequaled collection of Shakespeare material. By the time George D. Smith died seven months later, Rosenbach already had made his first major deal with Huntington. The reason this was possible may have been a result of Smith’s arrogance toward Marsden J. Perry, the Rhode Island financier who had been collecting Shakespeare material since the 1870s.
In a 1946 essay written in honor of Dr. Rosenbach’s seventieth birthday, Clarence S. Brigham told how Marsden J. Perry’s chief ambition had been to acquire the duke of Devonshire’s fifty-seven Shakespeare quartos:
One day I was talking with Mr. Perry, and I said, “I saw George D. Smith yesterday and he told me that he had bought the Devonshire quartos for Mr. Huntington.” Mr. Perry’s face showed his disappointment, and he said, “My collection can never now achieve top rank, and I think that it’s time to sell it.” In 1919 he disposed of his entire Shakespearian library to Dr. Rosenbach for a price of about half a million dollars. George D. Smith was angling for the collection and fully expected to buy it, as he didn’t think that any other dealer could finance so large a deal, but his judgment failed him in not counting on the acumen and enthusiasm [of Dr. Rosenbach].
Brigham did not say this, but Perry just may have picked Rosenbach as one way of letting Smith know how he felt about losing the Devonshire quartos to Huntington. In any event, the decision gave Rosenbach, then forty-three, immediate contact with some of the most important collectors of the day. On July 23, 1919, in fact—a week before he telegraphed Huntington—Rosenbach wrote Folger in Hot Springs, Virginia, acknowledging receipt of $100,
000, which he applied toward the $128,500 price of material selected from the Perry library. “At this time,” the doctor wrote, with the kind of embellished aside that characterizes so much of his correspondence, “I want to congratulate you upon obtaining, what I consider, the FINEST SHAKESPEAREAN VOLUME IN EXISTENCE, and upon which no price can be placed, namely the famous GWYNNE VOLUME of 1619.” This collection of nine Shakespeare plays, named for the owner whose name appears stamped on the original calf cover, predates the First Folio by four years and is probably more valuable than any other single Shakespeare item. Eight years later, in an article written for The Saturday Evening Post, Rosenbach managed a wild guess as to its possible worth: “I do not hesitate to say that this book would bring at least $200,000 if it were sold on the block to-day.”
This tendency to boast publicly about the big prices he recorded was a chronic weakness with Rosenbach, and though dazzling numbers delivered a degree of glamour, talking freely about them caused problems. After he finished selling off most of the Perry library—William Andrews Clark of Los Angeles and Joseph Widener of Philadelphia also bought some of the material—the doctor leaked details of his coup to the newspapers, prompting a rebuke from Folger, who was then the president of Standard Oil of New York. Folger testily told Rosenbach about a discussion he had with his boss, John D. Rockefeller, after the news got out. “Henry, I see from the papers that you just paid a hundred thousand dollars for a book,” Rockefeller supposedly said. Folger admitted improvising an answer—he blamed the press for exaggerating the transaction’s cost—which brought another unsettling response from Rockefeller. “Well, I’m glad to hear you say that, Henry. We—that is, my son and I and the board of directors—were disturbed. We wouldn’t want to think that the president of one of our major companies would be the kind of man foolish enough to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a book!”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 25
