Old Books, Rare Friends

by Madeline B. Stern

  We walked past gutted buildings and cluttered debris at which only visitors stared. The Londoners no longer saw them. They were far more concerned with muddling along as best they could, spending much of their day queuing for buses and theaters, queuing for everything, especially food. They did not queue for clothing, for everything in that category was so strictly rationed and so overpriced that it remained unsold. If you had the necessary coupons, you could buy a blouse made of parachute silk, worth three dollars, for six times that amount. Whatever was coupon-free had a 100 percent purchase tax added to the price. One hefty London woman informed us indignantly, “I need a permit from the Board of Trade to get a bust supporter!”

  The British seemed to us to be well equipped with grit but less so with ingenuity. They persisted with their traditional forms. Waiters’ coattails swished around sparse tables. Monocled gentlemen sat at napkinless dinner places manipulating fish forks with languid elegance. Having suffered rockets and buzz bombs as well as points and rations, they somehow listened imperturbably to Clement Attlee’s warnings over the wireless that things could be worse.

  Although all of England seemed to want to flee to America, most of its countrymen had turned anti-American. In Hyde Park the orators targeted America in general and Wall Street in particular. Yet despite their distrust, they still looked to us for help. We were also reminded, at a tea party given by the British in-laws of Leona’s cousin, that the poor Germans cannot be allowed to starve. We must forgive and forget.

  At the bookshops it was easy for us to forget not only the “poor Germans” but the devastated English. For us two, prowling together through the pitted streets of London, climbing to the attics or basements of London’s bookhouses, there was an abiding enchantment. In this worn and war-weary city we found our books and began to know our booksellers.

  We started our book hunt in earnest on August 9, 1947. “Tuppence ha’penny, love.” The conductor’s voice was shrill, cheery, and warmly Cockney as the number 12 bus lunged down Oxford Street. We scrambled to the upper deck, secure in the knowledge that we had all of $2000 to spend on books, a world of dealers to meet, and treasures waiting for us in Mayfair and Bloomsbury, Soho and Holborn, Wimbledon and Golders Green.

  Our first stop was on Berkeley Street. In the absence of the proprietor, Thomas Thorp, we were greeted by his associate, one Mr. Harris, bulbous-domed, stocky, who told us that the firm had lost forty thousand books in the Blitz. It seemed to us that they must have another forty thousand left, and among them we found a prize, an Italian architectural work by Domenico Fontana, published in Rome in 1590. Just a few years earlier, Signor Fontana had accomplished the remarkable feat of engineering described in the book. Back in the reign of Caligula, a great Egyptian obelisk had been brought to Rome. Centuries later, the Pope wished the obelisk moved from its ancient location to the front of St. Peter’s, where all the world could see it. This triumph of engineering Fontana accomplished, and the book describing the transportation of the obelisk became an architectural landmark. We found it on Thorp’s decimated but still crowded shelves and ordered it to be transported to East 179th Street in the Bronx.

  Just so we found other exciting sixteenth-century books and met the colorful British dealers who had been no more than names on catalogues to us. It was only natural that the McLeish firm should have been among our very first targets. Had not the Pilgrim Press book that gave Leona Rostenberg—Rare Books its first coup come from 22 Little Russell Street? And so we bused, one of our first mornings in London, to the bright and comfortable shop, introduced ourselves to Mr. McLeish, and headed for his irresistible shelves. At the time we did not know he had a brother, and when we recorded our visit in our journals we described the proprietor as the affable Mr. McLeish. Later, when we published an article based on our 1947 European book hunt and referred to the affable Mr. McLeish he would twit us about which of the two brothers we had meant. The term covered both of them, as it turned out. They were affable, voluble, full of welcome and book talk. Their rooms were comfortable, and we decided that if ever we had an open shop we would also provide chairs and tables for scanning books and ash trays for the inevitable cigarettes. Now, in 1947, we found no Pilgrim Press book on the enticing shelves but we did find a few interesting rarities, including a 1508 legal discussion of whether or not hanged criminals should be buried, a 1511 first edition of the Ship of Penitence by a preacher at Leona’s Strasbourg Cathedral, and a 1550 Decameron, adorned with a portrait of Boccaccio and ten large woodcuts. We were happy indeed with our first encounter with McLeish, though it would not be until a year later that we would be served tea and cake for “elevenses” in the room overlooking Little Russell Street.

  Another bookshop nearby, Grafton’s on Great Russell Street, would be as unforgettable to us as McLeish, though for quite a different reason. The proprietrix, whom we assumed to be Mrs. or Madam Grafton, turned out to be neither. When we first met her, she was seated in a corner of the shop arrayed in a black silken cloak adorned with a garnet brooch, a wide-brimmed hat on her head, and a cup of tea in her hand. As a result of our later visits to her domain, we came to believe that she never moved from that location and almost never changed her attire. Certainly the hat would be a constant. Now, from her command position, she issued orders to her two assistants, the bibliographer Robert Peddie and the authority on the Elzeviers, H. B. Copinger. These two eminent scholars, advanced in years, were visibly cowed by their termagant employer. Before we could even glance at the shelves, she voiced the admonition, “You can buy the books, gels, but don’t touch them!” We paid no attention and proceeded to remove from her shelves a most appropriate volume, the life of another more famous termagant, Catherine de Medici. Meantime the Grafton proprietrix expostulated about consular invoices and the difficulties of shipping to the States. She would greet us annually with her admonitions and complaints, to which we scarcely listened. Besides finding books at Grafton’s we would learn more as the years passed about the cloaked and hatted proprietrix of 52 Great Russell Street, who turned out to be “Frank Hamel,” author of popular historical novels.

  During our first two days in London we bought fifty-one books. Some had been brought back to the city from safekeeping in warehouses; some had endured the Blitz in cellar hideouts; some bore traces of flame and damp; but all were survivors—survivors of Renaissance battles, survivors of twentieth-century devastation. At the palatial quarters of Maggs Brothers, at 50 Berkeley Square, we saw few signs of the war. The place breathed elegance. Its showcases displaying gleaming calfbound volumes intimidated these two novices. In 1947 we bought nothing from Maggs, but we carried away its essence. Maggs was, we decided, a champagne dealer.

  We fared a little better at the great house of Bernard Quaritch, on Grafton Street, next to the Medici Galleries. The huge circular display cases lured without intimidating, and we carried off two trophies from the somewhat amused chief of staff, Mr. Edmund Dring. One was a discourse on peace of mind by a noble Renaissance lady, Isabella Sforza; the other was the first biography of the Queen of the Nile, who antedated Isabella by more than a millennium. When we returned home we would offer our Cleopatra to Katharine Cornell, who was impersonating her at the time on Broadway. The resulting phone call from her office declined our offer, but what did that matter? We had been in close contact with the greatest of all actresses—greater even than Cleopatra herself—whom we had long worshipped from afar.

  On our first bookbuying trip to London we came to know two other legendary dealers, at least to begin to know them. Irving Davis, of the firm of Davis & Orioli, was more Italian than he was English. He was surely the Italianate Englishman incarnate. He scurried off to Italy at the slightest provocation and returned to London with his finds—all Italian, all sixteenth century, all, to us, magnificent. He looked like a keen-eyed elf, with goblin-like wisps of hair sprouting from his dome. He was a kind of literary hobgoblin. He talked incessantly, despite the omnipresent pipe he sucked on. And he introduced
us to a world of Italian Renaissance books that we fell in love with. From his rooms on Maddox Street we carried off not only a Vasari life of Michelangelo but an indelible image of a personality, a character inextricably connected with the books that surrounded him.

  Not far away was the domicile of the greatest scholar-dealer in early printed books. To us E. P. Goldschmidt, of 45 Old Bond Street, was the apex of learning, the nonpareil of booksellers, the patron saint of humanism, as well as the author of the definitive Gothic and Renaissance Bookbindings. Born on the continent, he had settled in London in his youth. We came to him as worshippers, but we also came to him with some trepidation. A homosexual, he had the reputation of not taking kindly to women. Besides, his schedule was a rigid one and had to be complied with. Since he worked at his books all night and never rose before noon, any appointment with him had to be set for after 4 P.M.

  We conquered our fears and after 4 P.M. on an August afternoon followed Mr. Goldschmidt’s assistant up the stairs to his book-lined sanctum. Leona’s excitement was such that she missed the chair proffered by the elegant young man, Randall, and almost flopped on the carpeted floor. We recovered sufficiently to look around us. E. P. Goldschmidt sat like a deity at his desk. Behind him was a drip coffee pot, brewing and aromatic. Within easy reach was the fireplace, littered with his discarded cigarette butts. The smoke-filled air was dense. All around us were bookshelves holding magnificent bindings, folios in calf, pigskin, and vellum, pocket editions in tooled morocco, books that combined beauty and knowledge. In addition, wonder of wonders, E.P.G. seemed to take most warmly to us, chatting on about his books as easily as if they were friends. Year after year we were to return to 45 Old Bond, listening, telling our book stories, discussing bookish points with him. When he died a few years later, Leona wrote a brief recollection of him for Antiquarian Bookman that evoked a poignant response from a London colleague, who commented on her “flavored memory of E.P.G.,” adding that “It brought back memories of his inimitable little anecdotes in that first-floor room … He used to tell me how you were his favourite ‘in statu pupillo.’ ” Now, on our first visit to the Goldschmidt shrine, we were both enchanted, enchanted with his stories about his finds in Austria, his purchase of books from the famous Abbey of Melk, enchanted with him. Our only problem was—what to buy? “How much would this be, Mr. Goldschmidt?” we asked timorously, holding up a slim volume. “Oh, I should say only $75.” “Would there perhaps be something a trifle less expensive?” He seemed to understand our predicament, and we were actually able to purchase from the god of our idolatry a Renaissance pamphlet for $11. Bemused, exalted, we walked back to the Cumberland on air.

  Cecil Court was a far cry from Old Bond Street. It resembled to some extent New York’s Fourth Avenue, lined then with small second-hand bookshops. A short alley intersecting Charing Cross Road, it was tenanted by antiquarian dealers whose cluttered stores were filled with promise. We might not be able to make a find at Quaritch or Goldschmidt, but here surely, in this warren of books, we might sleuth and make a discovery. The shop of E. Seligman was not easy to enter—books were piled on the floor and the bookshelves reached to the ceiling. There was a table in the center, but it too was so covered with books that it was scarcely discernible. In the back was a tiny office all but impossible to penetrate. There, at a cluttered desk, sat the proprietor. E. Seligman was a German refugee, a short man of short temper. When we tried to extricate a volume from a pile, he became quite irate, stamping his foot. We had the temerity of youth, however, and even ventured up a swaying ladder to his topmost shelves. A volume bound in pigskin caught our eyes and we descended the ladder to examine it. In our hands was a collection of sixteen sermons delivered by Martin Luther between 1519 and 1522. As we flipped the pages we noticed that one of them—the earliest, published in 1519—bore on the title page a woodcut portrait of the Reformer. We eyed each other. Was this the sleeper we had been hoping for? We knew that there was a portrait of Luther by the German artist Lucas Cranach, but we were sure that was done later. Was it possible that we had found Luther’s first portrait? Seligman glanced over our shoulder. “Ein schöner Sammelband,” he commented. We agreed. The “Sammelband,” the collection, might be even “schöner” than Herr Seligman believed. We would have to make sure, of course, but our instincts were already quite certain. The 1519 sermon showing Martin Luther in his monk’s habit just might be a landmark portrait. We bought other books that day from E. Seligman, all of which we had shipped to the Bronx. But the “schöner Sammelband” we carried carefully with us when we departed the haunts of Cecil Court.

  The refugee from Germany was part of the postwar London scene, along with the battered buildings and the empty spaces where weeds grew. Several joined the rare book trade, and we met a few of them in 1947. Heinrich Eisemann, who lived in a rambling flat in Maida Vale, resembled an aging Mephistopheles. He would set a price only after he had consulted his “bible”—his huge inventory book—and had done the necessary mathematics aloud to himself in German, which he assumed we did not understand. With another refugee dealer we became far closer. Ernst Weil of Munich had become Ernest Weil of Golders Green, where he lived with his mother, his wife, his housekeeper, and his cat. He welcomed us with warmth, sold us a few books as he sat in his study with a fire going, and then marshaled us into the drawing room for Kaffee und Kuchen. There, overlooking the garden, we talked of the war and its aftermath, of America, and of books, while his mother coughed, his cat purred, and his wife urged us to eat more of the open sandwiches and the homebaked Kugelhopf.

  It was still another dealer who epitomized for us the ravages of war. He was a refugee, not from Germany, but from life. A German bomb had found its target. During Francis Norman’s absence, his wife and child had been killed, much of his stock destroyed. He lived alone in a cellar on Gower Street, where we searched through his dust-laden, fire-singed books while he played the piano. He lived and would continue to live in a private world, diffident, remote, unsure. Eventually he would move from Gower Street, but the grime and debris that surrounded him would always accompany him. He would remarry and have a new family, but essentially he would never change. He would carry with him, wherever he went, whatever he did, the unforgettable scars of war, and through him we would catch a glimpse of them.

  In 1947 the journey from London to Paris was an all-day affair. It included several de luxe elegancies after the rigors of Britain. We boarded the Golden Arrow, a luxurious train well named, and at Dover we embarked on the Invicta, crossing the choppy waters of the Channel for Calais. There, the French alter ego of the Golden Arrow awaited us, the Flèche d’Or. The fancy waiters flying up and down the aisles introduced us to luxuries unknown to London tables—supplements of beef, melon, and creamy pastries. We were already not only in France but in another world.

  More of that world became familiar to us, and we realized that, while England addressed the problems of postwar economy by rigorous official regulations and restrictions, France resorted to the black market. A luscious peach could be had for the outrageous price of fifty francs. Black market, however, did not control our breakfasts at the Hôtel Lutétia. There, ersatz dominated—ersatz coffee or ersatz tea—supplemented by a confiture from Africa and, as the maître d’hôtel put it, it was “pas fameux.” The books in Paris were not “fameux” either. The bookstalls along the Seine offered postcards or modern paperbacks. Many of the antiquarian dealers were still closed for the congé annuel. We learned in 1947 to date our future Paris bookhunts with reference to unchanging French customs. There was little purpose in extending our stay in the city.

  Instead, we revisited Strasbourg on the Rhine. More than ten years had passed since Leona studied there—ten appalling years. The bookshop where she had gazed upon Renaissance folios in pigskin bindings had nothing left of livres anciens. At the library, François Ritter greeted his erstwhile inamorata with deep affection and warmth, but his face betrayed the agonies that the Alsatian city had endured.
We had carried our Luther Sammelband with us and we showed it to him. When he saw that vignette of Martin Luther on the title page of the 1519 sermon, he looked at it from every angle, took a deep breath, and made his judgment: “C’est inconnu; it is unknown. You have made a great discovery.”

  The city itself was a symbol of the war that had ended. The stained glass was gone from Strasbourg Cathedral. To us this became the hallmark of postwar Europe. Europe had lost its vibrancy, its élan, its color—Europe had lost its stained glass.

  We two spoiled Americans, already war-weary, fled to Switzerland for rest and comfort. After the balm of white rolls and fresh eggs, the view of the Jungfrau from our windows, the familiarity of the sparkling Hoheweg, we were refreshed. Interlaken restored us, and en route to The Hague we took time off to visit Basle. There, we rushed forth to the Haus der Bücher, a bookshop on the Bäumleingasse, also known as the Erasmushaus. In that very building the great sixteenth-century Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, author of the Praise of Folly, had lived for a time as the guest of the printer-publisher Froben. The stock room still had the original timbered ceiling of 1534, blackened now by age. Appreciating our deep interest, the proprietor, Herr Doktor Seebass, showed us around the domain of the “Stupor Mundi” Erasmus. He showed us books too, and to our delight we purchased some Renaissance beauties. The jewel that crowned our joy was a copy of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly—Moriae Encomium—published in Paris in 1524 by the celebrated printer Badius and bound in blind-stamped morocco. A jewel in any crown.