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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Bernard McTigue, former keeper of rare books at the New York Public Library responsible for Arents Collection, said that such a concept is something that “only an obsessed amateur” could ever possibly have imagined, let alone assembled. “Institutional libraries would not exist as we know them if it were not for private collectors like George Arents, James Lenox, the Berg brothers, Arthur Alfonso Schomburg, Mary Stillman Harkness, Florence Blumenthal, and all the others you see represented here,” McTigue explained one afternoon as he guided me through an exhibition he curated in the fall of 1990 called “In Praise of Collectors: Historic Gifts to the New York Public Library.”

  “Private collectors have always been the people who put the pieces together,” McTigue said. “It is their passion that builds these collections, along with their energy, their resources, and their expertise. They do all the work, and when everything is complete—and if we’re lucky—they turn it over to us intact. Carter Burden’s science fiction collection is a very recent case in point. That was a great addition for us because we never collected science fiction, certainly not as fastidiously as he did. Yet he made up for our past omission with a single gift, and he did it better than we might have ever done by ourselves.”

  Shortly after observing his seventieth birthday in 1989, the chef and restaurateur Louis I. Szathmary II closed his popular restaurant on Chicago’s Near North Side. The time had come, he decided, to “take care of the books.” Since several hundred thousand items were involved, completing the massive series of benefactions he had started a few years earlier to half a dozen institutions scattered throughout the United States was a task that demanded his full attention.

  For twenty-six years, Szathmary (pronounced ZATH-ma-ree), a Hungarian who came to the United States in 1951, owned the Bakery restaurant, an unpretentious storefront eatery that Gourmet magazine declared a “gastronomic landmark” when it closed for good. “Chef Louis is not cooking anymore,” the magazine lamented, “and too soon all traces of the Bakery will be gone from Lincoln Park when its sign comes down and the restaurant is replaced with office space.” Szathmary was renowned for his exceptional Continental menu, but the most popular dish by far was his beef Wellington. “The food writers joke about beef Wellington now, but they all raved about it once, and I know that after twenty-six years, fifty percent of our sales is still beef Wellington,” he told a reporter as the closing drew near. He grossed more than $1 million a year for much of the time he was in business. “And that’s only five dinners a week—no lunch, no bar and no ‘early birds.’ ”

  Szathmary, a heavyset man with a generous face and large bushy mustache, has written five cookbooks, including one, The Chef ’s Secret Cookbook, that made the Time magazine best-seller list. He also served as general editor for Cookery Americana, an encyclopedic effort published by Arno Press that was issued in fifteen volumes. Chef Louis, as he prefers to be called, speaks in accented but precisely phrased English, and his publicity photographs invariably picture him wearing a crisp white apron and a high chef ’s hat with a billowing flare at the top.

  When I first met Chef Louis, he was neither in a kitchen nor wearing a big white hat, and seemed completely at ease and very much at home puttering about a cavernous warehouse in Providence, Rhode Island. Sitting behind the same old wooden desk he used in Chicago and surrounded by many familiar books and trinkets, Szathmary was supervising the installation of 200,000 assorted items from a culinary collection he recently had shipped to Johnson & Wales University, the world’s largest school devoted to the food and service industry, where he has been given the title of chef laureate. “This will be a museum,” he said with pride. “And it will be the best of its kind anywhere.”

  Thirteen hundred miles away, another segment of his collection, some 22,000 items comprising rare cookbooks, scarce pamphlets, and unique manuscripts spanning five centuries of culinary art, already was installed at the University of Iowa Library, while in his adopted city, Chicago, twelve thousand volumes devoted entirely to what is called Hungarology were being accessioned at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library. Gifts to other institutions were being finalized as well: a collection of several thousand menus to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, ten thousand books of Hungarian literature to Indiana University, and a small collection of Franz Liszt letters to Boston University—offerings from a man who forty years earlier left Europe with nothing more than loose change in his pocket and a few words of English in his vocabulary.

  The Johnson & Wales warehouse, a temporary home for the culinary collection, is in an old industrial neighborhood on Providence Harbor. Some eighteen thousand square feet of floor space is available inside for the Szathmary Culinary Arts Collection, and the day I arrived much of it was crammed from stanchion to stanchion with fully loaded bookcases and cabinets, all recent arrivals from Chicago. Sixteen trailer trucks were used to make the transfer, and the cargo had been reunited here. Scattered around the floor were crates loosely packed with antique kitchen implements, a panorama of cheese graters, meat grinders, nutcrackers, raisin seeders, chocolate molds, fruit choppers, cherry pitters, coffee mills, and ice cream scoops. Wedged in between them were stacks of ephemera from all over the country, plus every manner of almanac and magazine related to food and cooking that one could imagine. And this, the chef said, was just the tip of the iceberg.

  Where in the world, I asked, had he stored all this material?

  “My restaurant was very small, just one hundred and seventeen chairs downstairs for the customers to sit,” Chef Louis said, and there was a twinkle in his hazel-brown eyes. “But I owned the whole building, you see, and upstairs there were thirty-one rooms in seventeen apartments. That’s where I kept all the books.”

  I learned about Chef Louis Szathmary in an unexpected way. Shortly after Stephen Blumberg was arrested in Ottumwa, Iowa, and charged with plundering libraries all over the United States, the curator of rare books at the University of Iowa, David Schoonover, was asked by the FBI to make a preliminary evaluation of what Blumberg had taken. As a consequence, Schoonover was among the first people I contacted for information on the intriguing Blumberg case. After telling me what he knew about the book thief, Schoonover mentioned an “amazing collector from Chicago” who recently had presented the University of Iowa library with “one of the very finest cookbook collections you are going to find anywhere.” Overnight, the library had “become a major research center in the culinary arts.”

  The collection had many wonderful things, some of them going back several centuries. Schoonover mentioned the first printed tableside trencherbooks, or guides to cutting meat, in Spanish, Italian, German, and French as four examples. There was a cookbook in typescript that the novelist Nelson Algren had written for the Federal Writers Project during the Depression. The University of Iowa Press published it in 1992 as part of a new project called the Iowa Szathmary Culinary Series. Another curiosity in the collection is the handwritten cookbook of Katharina Schratt, the official mistress of Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria from 1849 to 1916 and king of Hungary from 1886 to 1916, who recorded recipes of interest from the royal kitchen.

  Schoonover noted that the archive has many scholarly applications. The evolution of food and culture is anthropology; types of foods and where they are grown is agriculture; the importing and exporting of foodstuffs is economic history; how people have perceived food is folklore; how food is dealt with by artists and composers is cultural history; food as remedies is the history of medicine. “The Szathmary Collection of Culinary Arts provides excellent source material in all of these areas,” he said. “And it came to us as a one hundred percent gift.”

  After service in the Hungarian army during World War II, Louis Szathmary spent time in a succession of German and Soviet prison camps, and thereafter was a “displaced person” confined to the American occupation zone in Austria. Even though he holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Budapest, his education was little help when he wa
s looking for meaningful work in postwar Europe. “My family in Hungary were book collectors for many generations,” he said. “We had a standing account with one dealer going back to the 1790s. But then came the war, and when it was over, it was all gone; everything was destroyed or stolen. When I came to America in 1951, I had one dollar and ten cents in my pocket and fourteen books in my bag.”

  The chef paused, taking care to shape exactly what he wanted to say, and then continued. “We have this attitude in the old country, which is enforced by history and by nature, that says there are times when we must look in the mirror to make sure there are no eyes in the back of our heads. We feel that if God wants us to keep looking back, He would give us at least one eye for that purpose. But we have both of our eyes, and they are not looking behind us or to the sides, but to the front. That is the message—that we should look forward, not backward. Instead of crying about what we lost, we learn what to do for the future. So the books I give away now, they stay in my heart, just like all the others. I don’t have to see them to love them.”

  There was silence for a few seconds, and then I asked what happened to the fourteen books he brought over with him from Europe. “They go nowhere,” he said, “not until I meet my demise.” The books Chef Louis carried with him to America included a Bible he received as a child, three books on Mozart, several volumes of Hungarian poetry, “and three or four things that I bought from other emigrants in Austria” before boarding the U.S.S. General Hersey in Bremerhaven, Germany, for New York. “I decided that this is what I wanted with me in America. I have my books on Mozart, the greatest Hungarian poets, and my Bible.”

  Before moving to Chicago in 1959, Szathmary worked at a variety of jobs in New York and New England. “When I got my first paycheck, I went to Marlboro Books at the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway and bought a cookbook by Ludwig Bemelmans for nineteen cents. I had lots of time then, so I was able to pass whole days in a Salvation Army basement with secondhand books, and after sitting there for six or seven hours, I could come out with some books for five cents each. Later on, I had some very good jobs and I was highly paid. After I left my job in the day, I would work a second job in the evening, and on the seventh day, I spent all the money I made on books.”

  Before opening the Bakery with his wife, Sadako, in 1962, Szathmary worked as product development manager for Armour, coming up with ideas for new foods and ways to prepare them. He is credited with improving the freeze-drying process that is used by many food manufacturers today, and he designed a kitchen for military field hospitals that could be dropped by parachute and assembled quickly in combat zones. Once the Bakery was a success, Chef Louis formed his own consulting company, which he continued to operate after closing the restaurant.

  Szathmary explained that he always bought books for various reasons. “When you bet on the horse race, you bet for win, for place, for show. When you buy books, you buy some to read, some to own, and some for reference. You want to possess the books, you want to own them, you want to hold them. Perhaps you even hope that you will read them. But I will say that most of the books I have ever had, I know what is inside. Many of our recipes at the restaurant came from the collection, and I have used them in my lectures and for my own cookbooks. So this was a living library.” One reason the culinary materials were divided among several universities is that “some things were more appropriate to certain collections; but Iowa, I must tell you, only wanted the best books, they were very selective. So I said, ‘You know, you want to collect the cream and leave me the skim milk.’ So we made a very amicable, very friendly agreement, that we stop with the cookbooks I already gave them.”

  Included in the gift to Johnson & Wales is a “collection within the collection,” a presidential autograph archive comprised of documents dealing in one way or another with food, drink, or entertainment, written or signed by every American chief executive up to the time of the transfer. In George Washington’s handwriting is a list of table china he inherited from a relative. A handwritten letter from Mary Todd Lincoln invites a friend from Baltimore to the White House for an evening of relaxation. In a penciled note to his wife, Julia, Ulysses S. Grant asks that two bottles of champagne be sent to the Oval Office for a reception with congressional leaders. A family recipe for beef stew bears Dwight D. Eisenhower’s signature. “I am interested in the presidents as eaters,” the chef explained. “I intend to write a book on this subject, which I will call The First Stomach. That is my next project.” The autograph collection includes items written by other historic figures, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Charles Dickens, as well as a note from the fourth earl of Sandwich, credited with inventing the most frequently ordered food item in the world.

  For all the passion Chef Louis invested in his books, he showed little anxiety about passing them along to institutions. “I still cry a little bit at night,” he said, “but that is all part of love.” When we spoke again several years later, the Johnson & Wales materials were being used by students, while plans were afoot for a move from the warehouse by the harbor to permanent quarters. “I am still buying books,” Chef Louis confessed. “It is like getting pregnant after the menopause; it’s not supposed to happen.”

  When the Watergate Apartments were being built in the 1960s, one split-level suite in the East Wing was reinforced with extra steel and concrete to accommodate the exacting requirements of a methodical book collector who worked a half hour’s drive outside the nation’s capital, in Langley, Virginia, and whose ten thousand-volume library, as a consequence, is divided in two distinct sections. One part of Walter L. Pforzheimer’s library contains an elegant selection of French bindings and dramatic works that he received as a gift from his father several decades earlier; the other is a collection of books, manuscripts, and curiosities that illuminate the history of his veiled profession. Pforzheimer’s former colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency know these books as the “spy collection.”

  On the walls of Pforzheimer’s apartment are four silk-screen prints produced by the KGB spy Colonel Rudolph Abel while he was imprisoned in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. “Colonel Abel was what we call an ‘illegal,’ a Soviet agent here without official cover,” Pforzheimer said. “Part of his cover was that he worked as a commercial artist, which accounts for the excellence of the drawings you see here. He was a top Soviet agent in this country, and he never broke. We don’t really know what he did here.”

  The library is on the second floor of the apartment, and entry must be made through a wrought-iron door that is always locked and equipped with a sophisticated security system. On the grille is an insert with the laced initials WP. Inside, two oversized plaques take up equal space on the walls, one the familiar seal of the CIA, the other the insignia of Yale University. “My father’s library door was always open to me, because he saw that I could handle books. I liked being in his library. On my twenty-first birthday, he called me over and said, ‘Well, son, you don’t need another car, so I’m giving you this library as a present. Here it is.’ It was quite a shock, but after all these years, it’s still with me, and it stays with me along with all the other material.”

  Pforzheimer received his bachelor of arts degree in 1935 and his law degree in 1938, both from Yale. When World War II began, he attended officer candidate school and got a commission in the Army Air Force in 1942. “About a week before my graduation from OCS, an officer I had never seen before and have never seen since tapped me on the shoulder and asked me whether I would be interested in intelligence. I said that sounds great, and I’ve been in it every day since then. Even now, though I’m supposed to be retired.” During the war, Pforzheimer was on the intelligence staff of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, and in July of 1945 he entered Berlin with a team of American officers. “Once in a while you get a chance to collect, even in wartime,” he said, as he pulled a book from one of the shelves. “Some people have books that they aren’t going to need anymore. I was in this fellow’
s office in Berlin, and a few of these were lying around. So I took five out with me.”

  On the inside cover of an obscure German novel from the 1930s titled Kamts Battle um Thurant is a bookplate that features an eagle in profile, a swastika underneath, and the name Adolf Hitler. The author, a man named Robert Allmers, wrote an inscription, dated March 1933, to the Führer. “I was in the Reich Chancellery, and there they were,” Pforzheimer said. “I didn’t think the Führer was going to be needing them anymore. I gave one to the guy who cut my orders for Berlin, I gave one to the Grolier Club, I gave one to Yale, and I kept the other two.”

  When Pforzheimer took the five books from Hitler’s shelves, he did not consider them as additions for any future collection, however. “I was acting instinctively, that’s all,” he said. The decision to collect intelligence material came after he joined the newly established Central Intelligence Group as legislative counsel and helped draft the legislation that formed the CIA in 1947. He continued in that position until 1956 and performed a variety of other assignments until he retired in 1974.