James Agee Randall Jarrell
Conrad Aiken Erica Jong
Guillaume Apollinaire Carolyn Kizer
John Ashbery Somerset Maugham
Djuna Barnes Mary McCarthy
Donald Barthelme Carson McCullers
Saul Bellow Claude McKay
John Berryman Arthur Miller
Simone de Beauvoir A. A. Milne
Elizabeth Bishop Anaïs Nin
Louise Bogan Charles Olson
Paul Bowles George Orwell
Ray Bradbury St. John Perse
Albert Camus James Purdy
Truman Capote Mario Puzo
Willa Cather Thomas Pynchon
Louis-Ferdinand Céline Adrienne Rich
Raymond Chandler Laura Riding
Gregory Corso Theodore Roethke
Baron Corvo Philip Roth
e. e. cummings Muriel Rukeyser
Edward Dahlberg Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
James Dickey J. D. Salinger
Joan Didion Carl Sandburg
J. P. Donleavy William Saroyan
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Jean-Paul Sartre
John Dos Passos Siegfried Sassoon
Norman Douglas Anne Sexton
Lawrence Durrell George Bernard Shaw
Richard Eberhart Edith Sitwell
Ralph Ellison Gary Snyder
E. M. Forster James Stephens
John Gardner William Styron
Herbert Gold J. M. Synge
Edward Gorey Allen Tate
Robert Graves Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Graham Greene Diane Wakoski
Dashiell Hammett Mary Webb
John Hawkes Eudora Welty
Joseph Heller Nathanael West
Lillian Hellman Thornton Wilder
Chester Himes Edmund Wilson
Christopher Isherwood Thomas Wolfe
Tom Wolfe
(Note: The author cannot, will not, engage in correspondence relating to the buying or selling of rare books. Please consult a bookseller.)
Death of a Bookshop
When Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue in New York decided to give up its rare-book department, it was a sad piece of news for me and, I’m sure, for other collectors. A lot of history was made in that store. Harold Graves, the last manager of the shop and successor to the famous David Randall, had the lugubrious job of liquidating the stock and closing the department in 1973.
David A. Randall (until his death in 1975 with the Lilly Library at Indiana University) joined the Scribner rare-book department in 1935 and ran the show until 1956. John Carter, bibliophile sui generis (I published his Books and Book-Collectors at World in 1957), assisted him from England. Between them the New York rare-book business hummed. Its reverberations were felt around the world. The shop handled two Gutenberg Bibles in its heyday. Randall reviewed and clobbered (and rightly so) one of my very early books, a rare-book manual; but I respected his judgment and superior knowledge too much to hold it against him. I liked him, too. Get a copy of Randall’s book, Dukedom Large Enough. It’s full of good book-collecting lore and vignettes of bookmen.
I don’t know why Charles Scribner decided to give up the rare-book end of his very successful bookshop, “the cathedral of bookshops.” Presumably it wasn’t making enough money; I never asked him, since it is not my business to inquire. But I miss that part of his great store. I bought some of the best books and autographs I own from it, including my first edition of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (with Christabel and The Pains of Sleep [1861]). I also acquired some remarkable Thomas Wolfe letters from Scribner’s. It was always a pleasure to step into its rare-bookshop door, to visit and browse. A shop like this should not have been allowed to die.
From the Journal: “A Thing of Beauty”
The acquisition of a first edition of Keats’s Endymion (from Scribner’s in November of 1971) enlivens my week. It begins: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” When a line like that hits a poet, what can he do for an encore? Can I convey to my readers the excitement of reading that opening line from the first edition of this book of poetry? I’m sure most will not understand how one can work oneself up into a quiet state of hysteria over such an experience. Okay. But does it—could it—mean anything to you? Explore the notion.
The book has given me a sense of happiness, which is, I suppose, comparable to a sultan’s having added a great beauty to his harem. Possessiveness is an evil, agreed—and the root of this evil is collecting. Why deny it—unless one has a plan to make the books and autographs available to the public, to students, to poets. Time will decide this. Meanwhile, I hold the book in my hand and wonder how many persons on this planet would share my feelings about the physical possession of this book by Keats. I hesitate to guess; the figure would probably depress me.
Keats was in his early twenties when he published this allegory dealing with ideal beauty. It was attacked viciously, and there are theories that the criticism helped to hasten his death. True or not, he died at twenty-six.
Another treasure acquired from Scribner’s (on June 11, 1971) was a first-edition (first issue) copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, published in Brooklyn in 1855. “Published” is not an accurate word—“printed” would be more to the point. It was received with indifference or scorn, except by Emerson, one of the few civilized Americans of the time. He greeted Whitman “at the beginning of a great career.” Emerson knew.
The Whitman is one of my most treasured books, and though the price seemed a fortune at the time, it is, thanks to time, one of the great bargains in my collection. Every time I remove the tall, green slender book from its slipcase, to read a page or two, I have the feeling that I am touching the poet. It is said that he set some of the type, and he may have handled the very binding I am holding.
John Carter
I’ve mentioned John Carter elsewhere in this book, but an additional comment is not without purpose. I knew him from the time I had the pleasure of publishing one of his books, and a bit of his expertise rubbed off on me. At least so I like to think.
Carter, who died at sixty-nine on March 28, 1975, has a historic place in book-collecting history for having exposed Thomas J. Wise, the famous book forger. Together with Graham Pollard, Carter unmasked this heretofore eminently respected British bibliophile in a book entitled An Inquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth CenturyPamphlets. Published in 1934, the book was virtually a David vs. Goliath encounter. (My inscribed copy seems to be missing from my library, but I do have a letter from Wise written shortly before he died in disgrace.)
Carter had many distinctions; one not generally known is that he was an expert in the field of musical manuscripts. He unearthed many forgotten or “lost” scores, including the original score of Mozart’s Haffner Symphony. He also loved and collected detective fiction.
Any student of book collecting, searching for a thesis or graphical subject, will find it in the life and works of John Waynflete Carter. He was an ornament to society, to literature, to the fraternity of bookmen.
Lawyers and Literature
One of the noblemen of the legal profession in New York is Melville Henry Cane, a poet of talent and sensibility, who continues, in his nineties (he was born in Plattsburg, New York, on April 15, 1879), to write excellent poetry—and to practice law. He represented the interests of Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and other men of letters. O rare Melville Cane.
But unique among New York lawyers—and, alas, a man I never met—was John Quinn. He died in 1924 at the age of fifty-five. When I say unique, I mean just that. He was a self-made man, a lawyer who lived only from his earnings as a lawyer. This is not in itself unique. But the man was gifted with a special sight and artistic sense seldom found in a layman or a lawyer. His taste for art and literature was intense, and he spent all his spare time and money cultivating (the word is used in its best sense) writers, poets, painters— especially men of genius who had not quite arrived at universal recognition.
For example, he recogn
ized T. S. Eliot, Synge, Lady Gregory, Ezra Pound, Joyce, and Yeats, as well as Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, Brancusi, Rouault, Duchamp, and Rousseau when they were barely known in America—or elsewhere. He provided legal aid to James Joyce when Joyce ran into trouble with the serialization of Ulysses; eventually, Quinn owned the manuscript. (Rosenbach acquired it later at auction: a long and complicated saga.)
Quinn bought works by the great unknown artists and holograph manuscripts by writers who were yet to be recognized. He would give or lend money to artists in need and kept up a heavy correspondence with them. He was the ubiquitous patron, “the bravest and most serviceable patron of modernism of his time, and probably the greatest collector of modern art.” Aline Saarinen called him “the twentieth century’s most important patron of living literature and art.” He favored, above all, the living Irish writers; Yeats’s father called him “an angel.”
A detailed biography of John Quinn, The Man from New York, was written by B. L. Reid. What is significant in this story is the fact that Quinn, whose livelihood depended solely on his daily appearance in his office or in the courtroom, had the time, the genius, the will, to partake of the best around him and to befriend men and women of genius through gifts, friendship, and old-fashioned patronage. In the process, he amassed an incredible private art and literary collection. Collecting is obviously an art, and the results depend on the passion, devotion, and seriousness of one’s dedication to the pursuit.
Though Quinn remained a bachelor throughout his lifetime— and one might surmise that he had no time for romance or family— his biography reveals some curious documentation relating to his romantic affiliations. He was definitely not asexual. In this respect he reminds me of A. S. W. Rosenbach, who also never married, but who loved women only next to books. I suspect that if the choice had been put to him, Rosenbach would have preferred a copy of The Bay Psalm Book to the company of a beautiful woman. Possibly I underestimate him.
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.
—LOUIS SZATHMARY
The Newark Public Library
BY PHILIP ROTH
Philip Roth, a native of Newark, New Jersey, has had one of the most remarkablecareers in American letters this century. This piece appeared in his 1975 collection, Reading Myself and Others, with the following note: “In February 1969, after riots had already destroyed much of Newark’s black slums, the City Council voted to strike from the city’s budget the $2.8 million required to finance the Newark Museum and the Newark Public Library. Hundreds of Newark residents vehemently opposed this move, which would have shut down two exceptional civic institutions. In the face of the protest, the council eventually rescinded its decision. My piece appeared on the editorial page of The New York Times about two weeks after the announcement of the budget cutback (1969).”
What will the readers of Newark do if the City Council goes ahead with its money-saving plan to shut down the public library system on April 1? Will they loot the stacks the way Newarkers looted appliance stores in the riot of 1967? Will police be called in to Mace down thieves racing off with the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Will scholars take up sniping positions at reference-room windows and school children seize the main Washington Street building in order to complete their term papers? If the City Council locks up the books, will library card holders band together to “liberate” them?
I suppose one should hope not. Apparently there must be respect for Law and Order, even where there is none for aspiration and curiosity and quiet pleasure, for language, learning, scholarship, intelligence, reason, wit, beauty, and knowledge. When I was growing up in Newark in the forties, we assumed that the books in the public library belonged to the public. Since my family did not own many books, or have the money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of my municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted from that grandly austere building downtown on Washington Street, or from the branch library I could walk to in my neighborhood. No less satisfying was the idea of communal ownership, property held in common for the common good. Why I had to care for the books I borrowed, return them unscarred and on time, was because they weren’t mine alone, they were everybody’s. That idea had as much to do with civilizing me as any I was ever to come upon in the books themselves.
If the idea of a public library was civilizing, so was the place, with its comforting quiet, its tidy shelves, its knowledgeable, dutiful employees who weren’t teachers. The library wasn’t simply where one had to go to get the books, it was a kind of exacting haven to which a city youngster willingly went for his lesson in restraint and his training in self-control. And then there was the lesson in order, the enormous institution itself serving as instructor. What trust it inspired—in both oneself and in systems—first to decode the catalogue card, then to make it through the corridors and stairwells into the open stacks, and there to discover, exactly where it was supposed to be, the desired book. For a ten-year-old to find he actually can steer himself through tens of thousands of volumes to the very one he wants is not without its satisfactions. Nor did it count for nothing to carry a library card in one’s pocket; to pay a fine; to sit in a strange place, beyond the reach of parent and school, and read whatever one chose, in anonymity and peace; finally, to carry home across the city and even into bed at night a book with a local lineage of its own, a family tree of Newark readers to which one’s name had now been added.
In the forties, when the city was still largely white, it was simply an unassailable fact of life that the books were “ours” and that the public library had much to teach us about the rules of civilized life, as well as civilized pleasures to offer. It is strange (to put it politely) that now, when Newark is mostly black, the City Council (for fiscal reasons, we are told) has reached a decision that suggests that the books don’t really belong to the public after all, and that what a library provides for the young is no longer essential to an education. In a city seething with social grievances there is, in fact, probably little that could be more essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than access to those books. For the moment the Newark City Council may have solved its fiscal problem; it is too bad, however, that the councilmen are unable to calculate the frustration, cynicism, and rage that this insult must inevitably generate, and to imagine what shutting down its libraries may cost the community in the end.
Why Does Nobody Collect Me?
BY ROBERT BENCHLEY
Robert Benchley was an essayist, humorist, and actor who invariably portrayedhis life as a series of humiliations and frustrations. In this essay— which first appeared in The Colophon in 1934 and was subsequently included in William Targ’s excellent 1947 collection, Carrousel for Bibliophiles—he is true to form. In it, he questions why first editions of books by his friend Ernest Hemingway are valuable while his are not, when “I am older than Hemingway, and have written more books that he has.”
Some months ago, while going through an old box of books looking for a pressed nasturtium, I came across a thin volume which, even to my dreamer’s instinct, seemed worth holding out, if only for purposes of prestige.
It was a first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, the edition brought out in Paris by the Three Mountains Press in 1924, while Hemingway was just “Old Ernie” who lived over the sawmill in the rue Notre Dames des Champs. I knew that it must be worth saving, because it said in the front that the edition consisted of one hundred and seventy copies, of which mine was number thirty-nine. That usually means something.
It so happened that, a few weeks later, “Old Ernie” himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from literary columnists and reporters during one of his stop-over visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air
of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and the furniture has been repaired.
More to interrupt his lion-hunting story than anything else, I brought out my copy of In Our Time and suggested that, in memory of happy days around the Anise Deloso bowl at the Closerie des Lilas, it might be the handsome thing for him to inscribe a few pally sentiments on the fly-leaf. Not, as I took pains to explain to him, that I was a particular admirer of his work, so much as that I wanted to see if he really knew how to spell.
Encouraged by my obviously friendly tone, he took a pen in his chubby fist, dipped it in a bottle of bull’s blood, and wrote the following:
To Robert (“Garbage Bird”) Benchley,
hoping that he won’t wait for prices
to reach the peak—
from his friend,
Ernest (“———”) Hemingway
The “Garbage Bird” reference in connection with me was a familiarity he had taken in the past to describe my appearance in the early morning light of Montparnasse on certain occasions. The epithet applied to himself, which was unprintable except in Ulysses, was written deliberately to make it impossible for me to cash in on the book.
Then, crazed with success at defacing In Our Time, he took my first edition of A Farewell to Arms and filled in each blank in the text where Scribner’s had blushed and put a dash instead of the original word. I think that he supplied the original word in every case. In fact, I am sure of it.
On the fly-leaf of this he wrote:
To R. (G). B. from E. (——). H.
Corrected edition. Filled-in blanks.
Very valuable. Sell quick.
Now, oddly enough, I had never considered selling either book. I had known, in a general way, that a first edition of the Gutenberg Bible would be worth money, and that, if one could lay hands on an autographed copy of Canterbury Tales, it would be a good idea to tuck it away, but that a first edition of one of Ernie’s books could be the object of even Rabelaisian jesting as to its commercial value surprised and, in a vague sort of way, depressed me. Why are not my works matters for competitive bidding in the open market?
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