Reluctantly, I dispatched a letter to Dean Robey, presenting the facts of my case: my passing the oral examinations “with honor”; my dissertation on “The Influence of the Strasbourg Printers upon Humanism and the Reformation” and its rejection as invalid by Lynn Thorndike. I listed my published writings during the intervening years, offered to submit them in lieu of a dissertation, and expressed readiness to discuss my request for “this long delayed degree.”
Almost immediately the wheels started turning. An interview with the chair of the History Department, Dr. Eugene Rice, Jr., was encouraging. Columbia already had two copies of each of my publications, but would need five copies of the works selected. In addition, I would need to defend my publications much as I would have defended my dissertation—before a committee of five university pundits. The dissertation defense took place on March 12, 1973, in Fayerweather Hall, where I had taken so many courses and heard so many lectures. My emotions were mixed: I was stirred by the return to a temps perdu; I was eager now for right to be done; I wanted the degree. At the end of the in-depth questioning, I was invited to retire to the student lounge to await the committee’s decision. The young occupants eyed me with considerable surprise and amusement, but soon I was escorted back to the defense room. As I entered, the committee rose and greeted me in unison: “Congratulations, Dr. Rostenberg.”
In the April 9 issue, an AB Bookman’s Weekly article on “Dr. Leona Rostenberg” began: “Yes, Virginia, there is justice. On Monday, March 19, Leona Rostenberg, President of the ABAA, was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy from Columbia University.” I was happy with the satisfaction of a task accomplished, a wrong righted. The elation I would have felt over thirty years earlier was missing. It was really Mady who experienced that elation. Her joy was unbounded. She immediately arranged a grandiose celebration—a graduation party—attended by nearly a hundred well-wishers. One of them gave me an album filled with all the appropriate rhymed aphorisms for a girl graduate, from “Roses are red, violets are blue” to “Long may you live, happy may you be, blessed with 40 children, 20 on each knee.” Those who could not come wrote—some exulting in the thought that “it is good to give an institution its comeuppance”; others seeing it not only as a personal honor but as one “for our whole profession”; but most simply wondering, “Where do you go from up?”
The first place we went was commencement. I rented a cap and gown and on May 16 marched in the academic procession to the terraced plaza of Low Memorial Library. The sun shone on a crisply cool day. No war protests cast a shadow upon academe that day. Only the Watergate break-in marred the national horizon. Nothing marred mine, except perhaps the thought that it was all a little late. But a doctor of philosophy, I reminded myself, had better be a philosopher.
By 1973 we were both beginning to think that the story of our thirty years in the rare book business might make a good book. We dedicated our chronicle of those thirty years in the book business “To our friends in the trade: On Approval.” They approved. We traced the stages of our business, from apprenticeship days to book hunts abroad, from Holmesian detections to the final chapter that presented a kind of philosophy of the antiquarian trade. There, we wrote that “it is one of the excitements of life to understand fully that there is nothing new under the sun, that in one way or another, by suggestion or indirection, hints of the present have been given in the past, and that over all seeming chasms there are bridges. This is one of the excitements imparted by the antiquarian book.” In antiquarian books, we mused, could be found all the causes célères of our own day, from liberty of the press to perpetual peace, from space travel to Utopia, from modern medical break-throughs to the Xerox machine. In our book Old & Rare we tried to see connections, especially connections between past and present, and in tracing connections we both experienced the joy of discovery.
“To be writers and rare book sellers—how much nearer Heaven can you get than that?!” wrote our charming and outgoing colleague Ardis Glenn, proprietor of Glenn Books in Kansas City, after reading about our thirty-year partnership. We had been heading toward Heaven in the books we had written individually over the years. Now, in our first collaboration, we set out for the empyrean together.
Madeleine FOR MANY YEARS I HAD BEEN leading not only a double life, but an entwined one. My life in rare books was closely connected to my life as a writer; in some instances the former actually shaped the latter. I spent a good part of the late 1950s researching and writing a book whose subject had been suggested by our feminist collector Miriam Holden.
Miriam had entered our lives with a phone call requesting a few books from our Renaissance catalogue—the 1539 poems of Vittoria Colonna and the letters and orations of Cassandra Fedele—books that reanimated the place of women in a sixteenth-century Rialto. Then she had asked, “By the way, is the Madeleine Stern associated with the firm the same Madeleine Stern who wrote biographies of Margaret Fuller and Louisa Alcott?” That question and its answer paved the way for what would become an enduring association. I borrowed books from her shelves almost as often as she purchased books from ours. Now, one day in the late 1950s, Miriam remarked to me, “We need a good book on women who pioneered the professions in this country.” “Of course,” I immediately concurred. “They are the women who reached for economic independence—the backbone of the women’s movement.”
And that was the beginning of a book that would be called We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America, which I naturally dedicated to Miriam, “who suggested that this book be written … and [whose] splendid library of books by and about women helped bring it to completion.” I included twelve biographies of women who lived equal rights by storming the professions and trades, arts and sciences previously closed to them: the first American women in architecture and law, dentistry and chemistry, interior decoration and stockbrokerage. Margaret Fuller had written, “Let them be sea-captains, if you will,” and my women had taken her at her word.
Unlike Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott, the protagonists of We the Women had for the most part been completely overlooked. Tracing their lives and careers, therefore, often required the expertise of Sherlock Holmes. He came to my assistance frequently, notably in the case of the first American woman ophthalmologist, who also happened to be the first woman stenographic reporter for congressional committees. I knew her name—Isabel C. Barrows—but little else; the nineteenth-century press had apparently paid her scant attention. Yet records must exist about a woman who had achieved two such important firsts, and Holmes and I decided to go after them.
One fact that I did unearth was that she had hailed from Vermont; another was the name of her husband: Samuel June Barrows. The name “June” for a man seemed unusual, and at that point I suddenly recalled another man with the same name. In connection with research on an earlier book I had at one time been in touch with one June Barrows Mussey, also of Vermont. There could be—there must be!—a connection. As Sherlock lured me on, I traced Mr. June Barrows Mussey, no longer in Vermont, but now settled in Düsseldorf, Germany. Had he, I asked, ever heard of Isabel, wife of Samuel June Barrows?
The answer came with stunning swiftness. Mr. Mussey had indeed heard of Isabel Barrows. She was his grandmother. What was more, she had written an autobiography—never published—and he had a typescript copy of it. Would I like it? Ten days later, the lengthy document, entitled “Chopped Straw, or the Memories of Threescore Years,” was on my desk. Its dateline was Washington, D.C., February 23, 1908. It became a major source for my reanimation of a woman whose background shifted from Vermont to Washington, from New York and Boston to Vienna, from India to Russia, a woman who lived many lives and pioneered two professions, who had begun life on a Vermont farm and ended it attempting to rescue a prisoner in czarist Russia. The fortuitously detected “Chopped Straw” (Bits and Pieces) became my link with the past, my source for the reconstruction of a life.
Other lives in We the Women were reconstructed, often wi
th Sherlockian assistance. My first American woman dentist, Lucy Hobbs Taylor, received her degree from Cincinnati’s Ohio College of Dental Surgery in 1866, the only woman in a class of nineteen. The valedictory, addressed to the “Gentlemen Graduates,” disregarded her completely. But she was awarded a parchment that became a historical document, recording a professional first for women. In the Kansas State Historical Society I found it—a document almost as telling to the woman dentist’s biographer as to the woman dentist herself. The diploma of this “young girl [who] had so far forgotten her womanhood as to want to study dentistry” ended her long struggle for admission to dental school. It adorned the office of “the woman that pulls teeth.”
Taylor’s struggle for a dental education was duplicated by Ellen Richards’s struggle to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a struggle dramatized by the discovery of the minutes of the institute’s meetings. Richards, a pioneer environmentalist who would devote her life to that triangle upon which all life is built—air, water, and food—was early determined to study chemistry, and after her graduation from Vassar applied to MIT for admission as a special student. The story of her progress is disclosed in the minutes of that institution. On December 3, 1870, “the question of the admission of female students was postponed till the next meeting.”
The following week, although the faculty were of opinion that “the admission of women as special students is as yet in the nature of an experiment,” they admitted the applicant as a special student in chemistry, with the understanding that her admission would set no precedent for the future. My chemist did not care. She had “the chance of doing what no woman ever did … To be the first woman to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and so far as I know, any scientific school.” The minutes of faculty meetings for December 3 and 10, 1870, still preserved at the institute, became telltale testimonials for We the Women.
First published toward the end of 1962, shortly before the appearance of Betty Friedan’s influential Feminine Mystique, We the Women was a precursor to the feminism that was one of many isms attracting followers in the 1960s. My own literary contributions to that offbeat decade were two wildly divergent books. In The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews I traced the deviational career of an eccentric nineteenth-century reformer who attacked any infringement of individual freedom. Abolitionist, champion of free love, he tried to free the Texas slaves almost single-handedly; he organized a community of individual sovereigns on Long Island; he campaigned for the presidency of the seductive Victoria Woodhull; he invented a universal language; and he talked interminably before the Manhattan Liberal Club. A man out of his own time, he would have been extremely comfortable in the sixties.
My second response to that deviational decade was a book on a firm of phrenologists who were also publishers: Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers. My Fowlers were also sovereign individuals who taught a Delphic gospel: Know thyself. To any who would attend, they imparted self-knowledge through phrenology, examination of the skull to determine the faculties of the brain. Walt Whitman, who worked at one time for the Fowlers, was extraordinarily receptive to their phrenological beliefs and teachings. As a system, phrenology attracted some and repulsed some. It surely would have attracted the offbeat generation of the 1960s. Indeed, if it had only been true, it would have attracted us all.
It was in connection with the Fowlers that I made another exciting discovery: nothing less than the first book appearance of daguerreotypes by the photographer who would become Mr. Lincoln’s camera man, the renowned Mathew Brady. The book, published in 1846, was entitled Rationale of Crime, and was the illustrated, annotated American edition of an English publication on the phrenological interpretation of criminal jurisprudence. Phrenologists had a profound interest in crime, believing that the discovery of criminal tendencies in a subject could dissuade the potential criminal from a baleful course of action. Criminal leanings, like every other evil trait, could be overcome. The view blended well with nineteenth-century American optimism, and doubtless increased the clientele who flocked to Fowler headquarters on New York’s Nassau Street to have their heads examined.
It was natural for Lorenzo Fowler to play a role in the American edition of the Rationale of Crime. It was he who selected some of the criminals on Blackwell’s Island as case studies. It was natural too for Eliza Farnham to edit the book, since she was matron of the women’s prison at Sing Sing and a strong believer in phrenology. When I examined the Rationale at the New York Public Library, I turned first to Farnham’s “Introductory Preface,” in which she acknowledged the help of Mr. Fowler and of the artist Edward Serrell. When I read on, the Finger-Spitzengefühl came to life. “Nor must I omit to name … Mr. Brady, to whose indefatigable patience with a class of the most difficult of all sitters, is due the advantage of a very accurate set of daguerreotypes.” Mr. Brady! Could this possibly have been the earliest, previously unidentified work of the Mr. Brady whose first name was Mathew? There was no doubt that the nineteen engraved daguerreotypes were marvelous: the Irish vagrant, the Indian half-breed, the grand or petit larcenist—all seemed alive and desperate.
Now research had to bolster Finger-Spitzengefühl. It was not difficult to ascertain that the twenty-one-year-old Mr. Brady—Mr. Mathew B. Brady—was listed in the New York City Directory for 1844–45 with a “Daguerrian miniature gallery” at 207 Broadway, corner Fulton. The corner of Fulton and Broadway was not far from Nassau Street, where the brothers Fowler were examining heads. The young daguerreotypist must have been attracted to the Phrenological Cabinet and must also have shared in the newness of reform that saw crime as avoidable. There was no doubt that, with his cumbersome camera and his copper plates coated with silver, young Mathew Brady had crossed to Blackwell’s Island and there exercised “indefatigable patience with a class of the most difficult of all sitters.” There too he had produced extraordinary likenesses of the convicts. Included in the American edition of the Rationale of Crime they formed the first public appearance of America’s first great photographer. My article in the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress shook the dust from the Rationale of Crime and opened a window on Mathew Brady’s earliest work. It had resulted from a brief acknowledgment in a forgotten book, along with a touch of Finger-Spitzengefühl.
Shortly before Mathew Brady set up a “Daguerrian” gallery on Broadway, corner Fulton, an eighty-year-old Franco-American died in Paris. My interest in Joseph Nancrede stemmed from the fact that between 1795 and 1804 he had published and sold books in Boston that introduced to American readers French Revolutionary philosophy. He had been a citizen of two worlds, serving as a young soldier in the American Revolution, teaching French at Harvard, increasing Franco-American understanding. I wanted to reconstruct his career for a book on the Franco-American book trade, but unfortunately original sources seemed wanting. It occurred to me then that often the end explains the beginning. Perhaps a last will and testament would bring to life the motivations and actions and accomplishments of Monsieur Joseph Nancrede. Sure enough. It had been preserved in the Archives de Paris—the “Déclarations des Mutations par Décès,” or dispositions of property of the deceased. It was dated June 15, 1842, and there indeed were sketched the trappings of a long rich life: his furnishings, his silver money, his investments. And there too were described the objects of my hunt. Nancrede had bequeathed to his friend, a French-Canadian exile in Paris, Louis-Joseph Papineau, all his books and all his papers. Fortunately for me, Louis-Joseph Papineau proved a faithful legatee. When his exile ended, Papineau, I discovered, had returned to Canada and taken with him the bulk of Nancrede’s correspondence. Where had he deposited all this? My correspondence with Canadian manuscript depositories was extensive, but eventually I hit the target. In the Public Archives of Canada, among Papineau’s own papers, were all the Nancrede documents I sought: his family letters and the correspondence of printers and booksellers with whom he had dealt; communications from William Cobbett and
Joel Barlow; the letters of statesmen and rulers—Timothy Pickering and John Jay, Lafayette, Bonaparte, Louis Philippe. Here, in short, were the source materials for a life, the bricks to build or rebuild the past.
Leona AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED, my original thesis was still in my blood, and I was determined to prove that thesis as an independent scholar. After all, the imprints of many of the books we bought led me to the study of the printer-publisher. Had he issued them because they reflected his own point of view or for financial gain, or both?
In 1949 we had purchased from the prestigious London firm of Quaritch a run of the monthly Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1665 to 1702—thirty-six wonderful years when Newton and Boyle, Leeuwenhoek and Hooke were introducing the new science to England. Their articles on light and vision, chemistry and biology, blood transfusion and microscopy were ground-breakers. Their discoveries were published by John Martyn, Printer to the Royal Society, and my attention was focused upon him. Had he, as publisher, advanced the scientific innovations of his time?
John Martyn had assuredly been identified with the new scientists. Hooke browsed at his shop, The Bell, where the proprietor coddled that avid purchaser but slow payer. Martyn published Hooke’s masterpiece, the Micrographia. It was doubtless through his connection with Hooke that he became Printer to the Royal Society and as publisher to its members was responsible for most of the highlights of the scientific resurgence. I determined to investigate the printing and advertising, the distribution and sale of those works. In our run of the Philosophical Transactions I found John Martyn’s catalogue and lists, substantiating his specialization in the sciences. I followed him through the plague and the fire of London; I researched his career in the Stationers’ Company; I studied his advertisements and his wants in the Philosophical Transactions; I saw him as his contemporaries had seen him in their diaries. In a lengthy article published in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America I reanimated that “thriving man in his trade,” John Martyn, and indicated beyond doubt that he, too, though no scientist, had with his imprints “stimulated the intellectual and scientific development of the English Restoration … and … helped preserve for posterity an indelible record of an age of diverse experimentation, abounding curiosity, and enviable genius.”
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