Warren Roberts said that Texas bought the Maximilian letters through Feldman, not some anonymous university alumnus. Thomas F. Staley confirmed that detail for me and furnished a document that clearly indicates “L.D.F.” as the source. “Looking back, to tell you the truth, I don’t recall that as being any big mystery,” Roberts said. “That was something that Lew Feldman got and wanted us to have, and we were pleased to get it from him.” Whatever the reason for vagueness— perhaps Feldman wanted to keep his European source confidential— the mystique that surrounded Harry Ransom was enhanced by news accounts lauding his ability to know “when and where rare books and papers will become available.” His commitment to education got an endorsement as well. “Collecting,” Ransom told Waldron, “is an empty vanity unless it’s useful.”
David Kirschenbaum, the founder of the Carnegie Bookstore in 1928 and for many years the undisputed dean of New York booksellers (he died in January 1994 a week after observing his ninety-ninth birthday), described to me a time in the late 1950s when Lew Feldman proposed that the two of them join forces and sell books to Texas. Kirschenbaum was a legend among his colleagues for having attended every major book auction over an eighty-year period, starting with the Robert Hoe sale in 1911, where he worked as a runner, and continuing without interruption through the Richard Manney sale in October 1991. One of Kirschenbaum’s best-known clients was the late H. Bradley Martin, for whom he acquired George Washington’s autographed copy of The Federalist, which fetched $1.43 million at auction in 1990; fifty years earlier, it cost Martin $5,000.
I talked with Kirschenbaum about his eight decades in the book trade over lunch at one of his favorite East Side restaurants. Inevitably, Feldman’s name came up. “We were sitting down in a place just like this when all of a sudden, right out of the blue, Lew said he had a ‘live one’ lined up,” Kirschenbaum said. “He was talking about the University of Texas, and from what he had to say it was pretty clear that he had the account all to himself. I have always been my own boss, so I told him I wasn’t interested. But it turned out that Lew did some serious business with Texas, very serious indeed.”
Bart Auerbach, who worked at the House of El Dieff from January of 1973 to July of 1976, said he could remember Feldman saying several times that he had tried to join forces with Kirschenbaum; Auerbach added that a phrase such as “a live one” would not have been out of character for Feldman. “That sounds just like Lew,” Auerbach said. “I asked him once why he hadn’t been paying any attention to a particular customer we had done business with in the past, and he said something like, ‘Why bother with a bunch of roosters when you’ve got the golden goose laying eggs in your lap?’” An alliance with Kirschenbaum would have been especially attractive, Auerbach said, “because Dave was well known for having built a lot of important collections. He knew where everything was, and his contacts were tremendous. Lew felt that Dave could have opened the doors to some fresh material which they could have offered to Harry Ransom. It made a lot of sense for Lew to try and bring Dave into the operation.”
A perfect example of why such a proposal made sense is underscored by an event that took place about the same time Texas was embarking on its great acquisitions program, and about the same time the two booksellers had their lunch. “It’s a cute story,” Kirschenbaum said, recalling the morning when one of his best customers asked him to find a new home for an exceptional private library he had spent many years building. “The man’s name was DeCoursey Fales and he was the president of a big bank here in New York. He had a great collection of English literature, just wonderful material. He collected everything—first editions, translations, criticism, pamphlets, broadsides, hundreds of letters. If something had anything at all to do with the people he liked, he bought it. And he loved the stuff, he was nuts about it. So one day he came into my office—I was still up on Fifty ninth Street at the time—and says he needs to talk to me. You have to understand that he had thousands of things in his house, thousands and thousands, the place was just splitting apart. And he says, ‘Dave, I have a problem; my wife tells me she can’t take it anymore. Either the books go or I go. What am I going to do?’”
Such domestic dilemmas are common among book collectors. “I am booked out of one wing and ratted out of the other,” the exasperated wife of Sir Thomas Phillipps wrote to a friend about the congestion at Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham. A. N. L. Munby, the biographer of Sir Thomas Phillipps and a considerable collector in his own right, wrote how two of his friends routinely bought books they “dared not bring home” for fear of angering their spouses, and opted instead to leave their new acquisitions in the shops where they had bought them. “Such a compromise between retaining one’s books or one’s wife seems to me a dubious solution, but I have the problem continually in mind,” Munby added.
Faced with similar opposition, DeCoursey Fales sought a solution that would satisfy his wife’s demand for a bit of uncluttered living space and his wish to be near his beloved material. Kirschenbaum proposed finding a local institution willing to accept his collection, with the stipulation that adequate quarters be provided to keep it intact. “Everybody in New York wanted the collection, but nobody wanted to give him a room of his own,” Kirschenbaum said. “I finally went over to New York University and the president there told me on the spot that he wanted the collection. ‘I think we can do something,’ he said. We got three rooms on Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. We moved the stuff in there, and later we moved it to a bigger place in Washington Square. Ask them over at NYU what they had in special collections before DeCoursey Fales came along. They didn’t have anything.”
Frank Walker, curator of rare books at the Fales Library at New York University, confirmed the story. “DeCoursey Fales is remembered as a totally self less man around here,” Walker said. “He named the library in memory of his father, Haliburton Fales, not himself, and when he gave us the books, he came along with them as the unpaid librarian. He worked here without compensation until he died in 1966, and he single-handedly built the collection up to where it was four times larger than when he brought it in. And once the Fales material was here, other people began giving us material. Before he came along, NYU did not have much of anything in special collections. We were never able to compete with the New York Public Library or the Pierpont Morgan or Columbia or the New-York Historical Society. A university could not ask for a better benefactor than DeCoursey Fales.”
Another collection that subsequently went to New York University was the Robert Berol Collection of Lewis Carroll material, and Kirschenbaum was instrumental in arranging this transfer as well. “I always got the greatest satisfaction out of bringing the right people together,” Kirschenbaum said, explaining that he saw his role in such cases as matchmaker, not agent, which may explain why he never found Lew Feldman’s offer attractive. “You like to see things go where they belong.”
Kirschenbaum agreed that Lew Feldman was an authentic character, a crude and flamboyant philistine to some, a sensitive and knowledgeable connoisseur to others. How Feldman managed to line up what amounted to an exclusive arrangement with a state university has remained a matter of great curiosity to this day. Bart Auerbach said he recalled Feldman telling him how he met Harry Ransom. “Lew had bought some letters from Bertram Rota in London sometime in the late fifties that Harry Ransom wanted but missed getting by a telephone call. Ransom called Lew, and Lew agreed to sell the correspondence at his cost plus ten percent. They got together shortly after that, and apparently they developed a simpatico kind of relationship at their very first meeting.”
Auerbach confirmed the unusual financial relationship Warren Roberts said that Texas established with Lew Feldman, and suggested that this may have been a key reason no other dealers were able to do major business with Texas. “I don’t know many other dealers who would be able to extend that kind of credit over such a long period of time,” Auerbach said. “It was an interesting procedure Lew had. He would factor the invoices at
Banker’s Trust as collateral for the loan. He would be able to demonstrate that he had firm accounts receivable, then would get the loan to buy the material. They would give him the money, some of which he would turn around and put into certificates of deposit to earn interest. It was a pretty clever way of doing business, and as far as I know it worked as a gentleman’s agreement between Lew Feldman and Harry Ransom. I don’t think there was ever anything to document it.”
Ellen S. Dunlap worked in the HRC from 1971 to 1983 in a variety of capacities before becoming director of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, a position she held for nine years before succeeding Marcus A. McCorison as president of the American Antiquarian Society in 1992. “I had various titles, but eventually I became the research librarian, and it was my job to help people who were using the manuscripts,” Dunlap recalled. “I spent lots of time trying to sort out the history of the acquisitions and figure out when we got what and who we got it from. What is particularly amazing is that there are no proceedings whatsoever in any kind of ledger book. I can’t speak for what it is like down there now, but the record keeping was never very straightforward while I was there. The only time I ever went in to see Dr. Ransom was when I was trying to untangle something, and every time I asked him a question, he always said the same thing: ‘Well, my child, that’s a very complex matter.’”
Auerbach agreed that the arrangements between Ransom and Feldman were unusual, but they worked. “Virtually nothing so far as I can recall was written down. Lew used to say that Harry would come up to New York and they would do most of their business in a limousine driving back and forth from the airport.” Though productive for the most part, this informality occasionally led to some misunderstandings. “In 1971, Lew took an option for one hundred thousand dollars on Arthur Houghton’s Gutenberg Bible that Kraus had bought, expecting to sell it to Texas. This was one of those rare cases where Lew guessed wrong, that this was something Ransom would want, but it fell through, and it cost him the hundred thousand. I remember Lew saying, ‘Well, let’s see what’s in the files on that.’ It gnawed at him, but it wasn’t there. There was nothing at all in writing.”
Possibly because the Ransom-Feldman files at the HRC are “complex” at best, or vague, superficial, and inconclusive at worst, Thomas Staley denied my request to examine them during my visit.
Finding a range of opinions about Lew Feldman is not difficult. The British bookseller Colin Franklin recalled doing several “quite major things” with Feldman, and judged him “perfectly correct” in all of their transactions. “I admired Lew Feldman,” Franklin said. “He trusted me and I trusted him. He was a man of his word.” Formerly vice chairman of the British publisher Routledge & Kegal Paul, Franklin left London publishing in 1967 and took up the life of an antiquarian bookman outside Oxford.
“Like many booksellers, he put up a tough front to the world,” Franklin said. “But he was devoted to his books. And he knew his books. There were times when he couldn’t sleep that he got up in the middle of the night and roamed around among his books. I don’t know what was going through his head, whether it was dollars or literature, but he liked the presence of his books.” Franklin said he believes Feldman “was wonderful” for Texas. “I think it was a great moment. Buying all sorts of things and complete archives of living people was an originality.”
Dr. Haskell F. Norman, a San Francisco psychoanalyst who built an internationally respected collection of science and medicine, said flatly, “Despite his arrogance, I rather liked the man. I’d meet him in New York and we’d go out to dinner. He liked to have airs. He wore this lovely fur coat with a big collar, and he carried a gold cane. He had this beautiful apartment. And he had carte blanche because Harry Ransom was bankrolling him. I am certain that he was the source of great envy in the book trade.”
The Hollywood television producer William Self, a prominent collector for more than thirty years, offered a decidedly different memory of Feldman when I met with him in California. “The night before the Stockhausen sale in 1974, we had dinner and we talked about the Tamerlane that was going to be sold the next day. He told me he was pretty sure it would go for fifty thousand. He said he had heard there was a reserve on it for forty-five thousand, that the universities couldn’t afford it at that price, so he was pretty sure the very next bid over that would probably get the book. I said fine, if it goes for that, I’ll take it, and if it starts to go any higher, I’ll be right there and we’ll make a decision before we drop out.” Self arrived at the Sotheby Parke-Bernet salesroom the next morning “all excited” with the prospect of finally owning one of the most coveted titles in American literature. “But then Lew came over and said, ‘Another party has come to me.’ He said, ‘I have dealt with this man before, and he is a very reputable fellow. He’s an old customer, and he’s willing to bid more than we discussed.’ I was a little upset because I had told him the night before I hadn’t decided how far I was willing to go. He said, ‘Well, Bill, very honestly, I don’t think you can meet what this man is going to bid.’ So I said, ‘Well, fine,’ and then I proceeded to drive Feldman out of the bidding at a hundred five thousand dollars.”
Satisfaction was sweet, but like so many book stories, this one does not end with that little victory. “When I drove Feldman out,” Self continued, “I was thinking, ‘Oh boy, I am actually going to get this book,’ because when he dropped out, I was the only one left. Well, right there is where John Fleming spoke up for the first time and said one hundred six thousand. I stayed with him for a few more bids, but John finally got it at one hundred twenty-three thousand. John and I talked a little later and he said he wished he had known I was interested, because he was going to get the Tamerlane at any cost. So I wouldn’t have gotten it. But that was what ended it with me and Lew Feldman.” A month later, the Baltimore Sun reported that Fleming had bought the Tamerlane for the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation in Chicago, where the acquisition “will complete the collection of Poe first editions at the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.”
Charles Hamilton, the New York authority on autographs who has made headlines over the years for his role in uncovering several frauds— including the purported diary of Adolf Hitler in 1983— wasted few words when I asked him about Feldman. “A pompous thief,” he said one morning in a telephone interview. “I never liked the man,” a repugnance he made bitingly clear in his 1981 book, Auction Madness. He wrote there:
The ability to bilk one’s clients at auction is a fine art, make no mistake about it. To succeed for a lifetime without detection or exposure, the auction-buying crook must have the cunning of a polecat, the ethics of a Gabon viper, and the acquisitive drive of a dung-beetle. All these feral qualities were uniquely fused in the late Lew David Feldman, a rare-book and manuscript dealer who operated under a firm name devised from his cutely bastardized initials—The House of El Dieff. Feldman’s consuming ambition, like that of several contemporary rare-book czars, was to dominate the auction world by his spectacular purchases and grandiose catalogs. In 1974 Lew published at a cost of $15,000 his Fortieth Anniversary catalog, a collection of forty rare and costly books and manuscripts. In a colophon he proudly announced the total buck value of the forty items ($1,925,077), a slip into bad taste that offended even his most vulgar competitors.
Aside from his personal attacks, Hamilton made a serious allegation, one that probably would have prompted a lawsuit if either Ransom or Feldman had still been alive when Auction Madness was published. Citing no specific instances and providing no substantiation of his charges, Hamilton stated outright that Ransom and Feldman had enriched themselves by selling the state of Texas thousands of worthless documents for tremendous sums of money. “The best deal Lew ever worked out was with the University of Texas where his ‘arrangement’ with the chancellor, Harry Ransom, blew in a gusher for both men,” Hamilton wrote. “They made millions by bilking the University Library. They bought virtually worthless collect
ions privately, then sold them to the university at an immense profit. Lew cut the chancellor in for a percentage of the take and Ransom made sure Lew’s bills were quickly approved and promptly paid. Both men died rich, another proof of the old truism that crime pays.”
Nine years after the publication of Auction Madness, I asked Charles Hamilton what information he had to support those allegations. “While a person is alive you cannot attack him in the way I attacked Lew D. Feldman,” Hamilton pointed out. “You cannot libel the dead, and therefore, I felt free to use the information I possessed, which I got from Feldman’s former private secretary, who is a close friend of mine.” He would not name the secretary, but he did say that he saw her “every few days,” that the woman knew “a lot about” Feldman, and that she had “speculations, which are numerous.” He would not, however, detail any of the information he maintained he received from the former secretary. “Ransom and Feldman made a lot of money,” he insisted, and they did it, he stressed, by trading in “tons of junk.”
I asked Bart Auerbach, who worked with Lew Feldman during the final three years of his life, what he knew about this “former private secretary” and whatever “speculations” she might have shared with Charles Hamilton. “That explains it,” Auerbach said. “All these years, I’ve been wondering what the hell Hamilton was trying to say there, and now I know.” The “private secretary,” Auerbach explained—and he named her—“was actually more of a companion in Lew’s later years. Lew’s wife had died sometime earlier, and this woman, who lived in the YWCA, came to work as what you would call his companion. She expected to be taken care of in Lew’s will and she wasn’t. I can’t imagine what she could have told Hamilton about the business, because she never had anything to do with it. So she is the source of those charges? It’s an outrage.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 42
