Old Books, Rare Friends

by Madeline B. Stern

  The new science had helped crush Puritanism in England. Before reform took over, however, crusades for faith alone enjoyed a mighty sway. The archpriest of Puritanism during the first part of the seventeenth century was William Prynne, almost pathologic in his pursuit of godliness. His contempt for the pleasures of life was expressed in a famous book, Histrio-mastix, a violent excoriation of stage players published in 1633 by another staunch Puritan, Michael Sparke, himself the author of a work appropriately entitled Crums of Comfort. As Martyn had advanced the pursuit of science, Sparke aided and abetted Puritanism. At the time, the Queen of England, Henrietta Maria, French wife of Charles I, resented this intrusion upon the lighter side of life. The queen had brought performers from France to her adopted country, and it was not long before both Puritans, author Prynne and publisher Sparke, were tried in the Court of Star Chamber and a life sentence imposed upon Prynne. All copies of the Histrio-mastix were burned as the publisher stood in the pillory assailed by the stench of the conflagration. Subsequently, Sparke paid tribute to the Puritan author of Histrio-mastix by compiling and publishing the Catalogue of Printed Books Written by VVilliam Prynne … Before, During, Since His Imprisonment. This curiosity in the history of Puritanism we acquired at a Boston book fair, inspiring me to include in my gallery of influential publishers the life of Michael Sparke, uncompromising moralist, who with his “bleak and unadorned quartos” preached a bleak and unadorned doctrine.

  Yet another publisher who aroused my keen interest was Nathaniel Thompson. He, too, like Michael Sparke, was tried and sentenced to stand in the pillory, but for precisely the opposite reason. Nathaniel Thompson of Fetter Lane was as staunch a Catholic as Sparke was a Puritan, regarding himself as Protector of the Faith. From our old English bookseller friends, the brothers McLeish of Little Russell Street, we purchased a copy of The Tryal of Nathaniel Thompson … for Writing, Printing and Publishing Libels, published in London in 1682. We would sell that transcript to the University of Sydney, Australia, but before we did so I would use it as a principal source for my article on Thompson and the Catholic reaction in England. As I had pursued the printer to the Royal Society and the Puritan crusader, I pursued the Papist publisher—all members of minority groups, all persistent riders of hobbyhorses, defiant tilters at windmills, whose tool was the printed word.

  It was Anne Baldwin who, as a woman, represented for me the most interesting of the minority groups, even though her imprint usually read “A. Baldwin,” much in the ambivalent style of A. M. Barnard. She flourished at the end of the century and was the first woman publisher whose publications crusaded for the “Rights & Liberties” of the people. It was true that she inherited her business from her husband, but she had been and would be far more than his “help meet.” At the Oxford Arms near Warwick Lane after Richard Baldwin’s death she became, through the writings she issued, a proletarian force. Anti-Bourbon, anti-Papist, she published writings that championed the common people of England. From her office flowed tracts and books that advanced the rights of seamen and the wages of coachmen, opposed a standing army and exposed the state of the prisons.

  Between 1709 and 1710 Anne Baldwin’s imprint appeared on a periodical, The Female Tatler, edited by one Mrs. Crackenthorpe, “a Lady that knows every thing.” Mrs. Crackenthorpe would be identified as Mary de la Rivièe Manley, whom Swift described as “about forty, very homely and very fat,” with an amazing capacity for intrigue and slander. But Anne Baldwin would use anything, including The Female Tatler, to espouse social justice in England until the paper, its editor, and its publisher were indicted. The career of Anne Baldwin and her crusade for English political freedom took shape from my researches at the Stationers’ Company in London and the McAlpin Collection at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. My study joined its predecessors in the pages of the Bibliographical Society Papers.

  In time I added to my portraits of seventeenth-century English printer-publisher-stationers whose careers were reflected in Literary, Political, Scientific, Religious & Legal Publishing … in England, 1551–1700. And when I had completed twelve such studies, in 1965, they were assembled and published in a two-volume edition.

  As the Yale librarian Donald Wing commented in his preface to the work:

  A good many of us have watched the steady flow of articles from Miss Rostenberg’s pen with increasing respect and I am sure many others have also urged her to collect them into a volume. Here they are … These twelve essays cover the seventeenth century philosophically as well as chronologically—with a nice degree of emphasis on each facet of the publishing trade. Here is meat for the historian of science, of journalism, of theology, of Americana, of literature, and of politics … here is a feast. Bon appetit!

  In my ardor for tracing the lives and productivity of publishers, I had also covered the careers of English printsellers, portrait book publishers, and purveyors of art texts, decorative arts, and map publishers, the architecture publisher of a London swept by catastrophic fire—all who had introduced the graphic arts into “my” area of seventeenth-century England. My publisher, Burt Franklin of New York, issued my richly illustrated English Publishers in the Graphic Arts in 1963. Burt was a large man in every way. He was an insatiable collector of books on economics, an antiquarian dealer in that specialty, and a compulsive publisher of books for book people. Everything he did was on a grand scale. He ate hugely; he talked with indefatigable gusto; he had grandiloquent ideas. He loved to add books to the numerous series he launched. My graphic arts venture was issued as Burt Franklin Bibliography and Reference Series Number 42. Dedicated to my parents, “who would have been pleased,” it carried a preface by A. Hyatt Mayor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was hailed as “a lasting contribution.”

  The publisher of my third book was a study in contrast to the exuberant Burt Franklin. Bob De Graaf was a sober Dutch citizen with a passion for books—the antiquarian variety, which he sold, the modern variety, which he published. Annually we spent a day at his house near the canal in Nieuwkoop, selecting books from his shelves and enjoying his wife Emmy’s company and cuisine. During one of our visits I discussed my project for a book on the minority press in England, a book that would encompass the English attitude toward religious subversion during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. In those days religion was not only synonymous with politics—it was politics. Deviation from the established church, whether Catholic or Puritan, was heresy. Once again I was determined to trace the role of printer-publisher in the more or less unexplored field of minority belief and thought. The result was The Minority Press & The English Crown: A Study in Repression, which appeared in 1971 over the imprint of B. De Graaf.

  I had long before been introduced to an exciting example of deviational printing. Had not my first major find been the Calderwood, published at the Pilgrim Press in Leyden by the English expatriate William Brewster before he boarded the Mayflower? Had we not sold another example of Brewster’s clandestine printing to the Leyden University Library, located “about two hundred yards” from the press’s birthplace? In between, unexpectedly, serendipitously, and incredibly, we acquired still another even more noteworthy Pilgrim Press book. By then we were aware that Brewster’s very first publication from his underground press in Leyden had been a Latin work by a Puritan divine named William Ames, expressing his Separatist views. Ames’s book was not only Brewster’s first; it was one of only three in which he actually included his name in the imprint. It was a prize to be sought after. And we found it on the floor of the basement in a bookshop in London’s Cecil Court.

  When we first entered the shop and asked the proprietor for old and rare, he suggested we descend to the lower depths, where he had stored “bits and pieces” from a theological library he had bought about fourteen years earlier. We descended without much hope. Theology per se was not to our liking. Once in the basement we were paralyzed by the quantity of calfbound books surrounding us—on shelves, on chairs, on tables, and especially on t
he floor. Languidly, we picked up a little calfbound duodecimo that had presumably reposed for fourteen years on that floor. We opened to the title page. It was a Latin work by the Puritan divine William Ames. We looked at the imprint and needed no detection to read, also in Latin, “Leyden: William Brewster, 1617.” Here was the first issue from the underground press established in Leyden by our Pilgrim Fathers. The book bore the ownership inscription of one of the Lords of the Treasury, George Baillie, and the price he had paid for it in 1704: 2 pounds 9. We did better in Cecil Court centuries later. We paid one guinea—$2.90. Our book would go for $900 to our friend Donald Wing at Yale.

  I had long ago been fascinated by the friendship between the Printer to the Royal Society, the bookseller John Martyn, and his illustrious but difficult customer Robert Hooke. For me, Hooke epitomized the seventeenth-century English book collector: he did not hesitate to spend hours browsing, haggling over prices, taking books on approval, returning them, and buying the same books at another dealer’s. He bought books not for decorative purposes but for use. In my study of Hooke and his library, The Library of Robert Hooke: The Scientific Book Trade of Restoration England, published in 1989 by Modoc Press of Santa Monica, California, I discussed at length the scientific book trade of Restoration England. I profited, as my subject had, from the importation of scientific texts from abroad. With him I journeyed to the second-hand bookstalls of Duck Lane and Moorfields; I visited purveyors of mathematical texts and alchemical specialists, and attended auctions of his day. When, researching Hooke at the British Museum, I read the catalogue of his library auctioned after his death at Exeter-Exchange in the Strand, I decided to reprint it in my study of Hooke, analyze it, and draw bibliographical and ideological conclusions from it.

  Long before I saturated myself in the life and reading of Robert Hooke, I had applied my love of books to another mania, stamp collecting. For years I had been collecting stamps that depicted every phase of bookish history, from the invention of printing to early printers and publishers, from the printing press to libraries, from first editions to woodcuts and illustrations, from bookplates to book fairs. Stamps from Malta and Iran, the Cook Islands and Ceylon, Israel and Barbados, the Congo Republic and the Maldive Islands lent color to my collection, and I pursued a book on a stamp with almost the same fervor as I pursued a book in an English basement. I invented a name for my mad passion—Bibliately—and decided to make a book out of my books on stamps. Bibliately was published serially in 1977 and later in book form by The American Philatelist, introducing a new “philatelic topical” to the hordes of stamp collectors and a new book about books to bibliomaniacs.

  The books and articles—We the Women and Heads & Headlines, Publishing in Seventeenth-Century England and Robert Hooke—were produced against the continuing background of business as usual. Business as usual meant attendance at auctions. At the great Thomas W. Streeter sale of Americana at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1968 we sat on tenterhooks with a Library of Congress bid of $25,000 for Pigafetta’s Narrative of the Voyages of Magellan and, becoming glummer and glummer, watched in agony as the bids climbed beyond us to the hammer price of $56,000.

  Business as usual meant catalogues that punctuated the years and offered to our clientele works on The Court of Louis XIV and Sources of History, The French Revolution and The British Connection. Many of our catalogues were of course designed for the book fairs in which we continued to participate. Plums at the Plaza offered a fruity assortment for an elegant fair at the Hotel Plaza. We gave, tongue-in-cheek, a self-promotional title—New York’s Finest—to our catalogue for the 1980 book fair, and were duly thrilled to read in a letter from an Ann Arbor dealer to our trade journal: “Our unanimous choice for the most delightful bookseller duo at the Fair was that redoubtable team, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern.” In his Times survey of the 1983 book fair, Herbert Mitgang singled out for comment our feminist books from Pope Joan to Mary Wollstonecraft, our first edition of The Wealth of Nations, and a Brewster Pilgrim Press imprint. The next year, when our fair catalogue was entitled Showcase, we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the firm and had a poster printed to mark the event. Our booths at book fairs were graced not only by our own “Fare for the Fair,” but by our browsers and visitors. At one fair Irving Wallace chewed the literary rag with us, discussing his books and ours. At another, Jacqueline Kennedy, who of course needed no introduction, was introduced to us and left us with an enchanting memory. By the time of the 1989 book fair we were described as a “venerable firm.” The “venerable firm” commented, “We never think about retirement, because we’re continually invigorated by new discoveries.”

  THE BLOOD-

  AND-THUNDER

  Madeleine IN 1983 the American Printing History Association conferred upon us jointly its annual award “for distinguished contributions to the study and dissemination of printing history.” In doing so, the association broke with precedent, for it was the first time the award was given to rare book dealers and the first time it was given jointly. We were asked to give acceptance speeches at the presentation in Columbia University’s Butler Library, and we chose to give them in tandem. It was indeed appropriate that the award of the American Printing History Association was bestowed upon us jointly. In many ways the two recipients had led and were leading joint lives. We were partners in business; we lectured in tandem; and although we had written many books separately, we had also written in collaboration. We continued to do so.

  All our joint publications were written in the Barnes Landing section of East Hampton at the eastern end of Long Island during the long summer months when we recessed our book business. We began renting a cottage in 1962 and—foolish as it may seem to investors in property—we have been renting ever since. At first we rented for a month, later for three months, and always we have loved our island summers. We spend our mornings writing, our afternoons beaching, swimming in the bay, and enjoying the lazy summer talk of our good beach friends. As one of our guests sagely commented, “It’s a way of life you could easily get used to.”

  Our first collaboration was written in a house on Winding Way. It is a toss-up whether we had more pleasure in the writing than in the reading aloud to each other, or vice versa. We wrote about the “Public Relations” of antiquarian dealers; of “Books That Swing the Pendulum”—political writings that led to action; of books that escaped our net; of catalogues and collections. Books and their life cycles formed the basic theme of our works. Then, in 1993, our third collaboration was produced. Unlike its predecessors, this was a novel centering on our search for a “fabulously rare copy of the 1511 Erasmus Praise of Folly.” We traced its history from its publication in Strasbourg, its experience of fire and flood, war and epidemic. We told the tale of the colorful personalities through whose hands it passed: a Nuremberg patrician, a great artist, a celebrated Czech engraver, a woman hawker, a seventeenth-century auctioneer, a London butcher, a chandler of Southwark, an adventurer in the New World. We related it, too, to our country house guests, and in the end we described its discovery at a Ladies’ Village Improvement Society Fair in East Hampton. We called our concoction Quest Book—Guest Book: A Biblio-Folly.

  But it was our greatest find ever, the one that most mirrored our own double lives, that continues to enthrall today’s reader; that is, of course, the unmasking of Louisa May Alcott. Had she lived today, Louisa May Alcott—or, rather, her alter ego, A. M. Barnard—would have written this chapter as a sensation story. Her cast of characters would have included an ambitious, self-promoting male villain and a woman ignored. Her plot, based upon an attempt to mislead the public, may well have involved a pact with the devil. After riding on the heroine’s coattails, the Mephistophelian hero would abandon her utterly and, indifferent to her fate, bask on his own in literary glory. The plot would of course demand a subplot, hinging on a rejected sensational manuscript and its eventual resurfacing. But the Alcott version of this thriller would end in triumph for the woman scorned a
nd doubtless find a place in such a collection as The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power.

  It was toward the end of 1973 when it dawned on me that nobody had ever thought of digging up those wonderful stories that Leona discovered Alcott had written anonymously or under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. Leona’s discovery, announced to the public thirty years earlier, had been briefly applauded before being completely disregarded. No one, including myself, had thought of tracing the Alcott blood-and-thunders and making them available to the public. Until now.

  The other projects of my double life over the past thirty years had deflected me from the fascinating spinster of Concord. But now I was drawn to her again. If the world could learn that the author of Little Women had penned stories of violence and revenge when she was not writing wholesome domestic sagas, surely the world would take note. For my anthology of blood-and-thunders I selected a quartet of shockers, including the earliest I had uncovered, the anonymous prize winner of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” Against the background of an exotic paradise, Pauline Valary, a “handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps,” paces “to and fro, like a wild creature in its cage,” planning revenge upon the man who has abandoned her. “Leave Gilbert to remorse—and me,” she declares, and proceeds to weave her vengeful web and the author’s suspenseful plot.