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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  In July 1923, Rosenbach offered Huntington an opportunity to purchase 750 incunabula gathered a century earlier by Sir Thomas Phillipps. The transaction, one of many impressive “private treaty” agreements negotiated by Rosenbach during the 1920s, demonstrates how his spreading reputation was bringing him exclusive access to superior material. “It may interest you to know that I am the only bookseller that has ever inspected the collection,” he wrote. “The only other American who has ever had access to it was Mr. J. P. Morgan, who purchased five illuminated manuscripts from it some years ago.”

  The volumes, all bought by Phillipps from an ancient German monastery in about 1845, “generally are in the original bindings, just as they were issued.” Two paragraphs later came the ultimate teaser: “the purchaser of this collection will place his library among the very first in printed books. Sotheby’s have been at Mr. Fenwick for years asking him to sell at auction, claiming that it would realize far more at public sale than by private treaty, but I have been fortunate in having it offered to me before all others.” A bill of sale in the Rosenbach Company’s Huntington file, dated August 3, 1923, records the purchase of 105 items from the list for $36,500. Six days later, Rosenbach offered Huntington yet another magnificent lot from the Philipps collection, 99 folio volumes containing what are known as the Muniments of Battle Abbey, manuscripts dating from the time of William the Conqueror that are “invaluable to the student of English literature and history.” By midmonth, for an additional $50,000, they belonged to Huntington. In October Rosenbach negotiated the $65,000 purchase of twelve thousand early American imprints gathered by Wilberforce Eames, for fifty years the respected librarian of the New York Public Library.

  “It is unlikely that a collection so extensive and rich as that of the Huntington Library could have been brought together in so short a time by any but Mr. Huntington’s method,” Robert O. Schad wrote. By buying entire collections, Huntington not only acquired a tremendous volume of material, but was able to secure with single purchases what others had spent years assembling. “Each of these represented a lifetime or more of collecting,” Schad pointed out. What Huntington could not possess, though, was the kind of expertise collectors gain from decades of hunting. When he finally persuaded Beverly Chew to sell his library for half a million dollars, Huntington is said to have expressed a willingness to double the price if Chew’s knowledge could come along with it.

  Though Huntington had occupied his new ranch in San Marino at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains since 1910, most of the books and manuscripts he bought remained in New York for more than a decade, some at the Metropolitan Club where he maintained quarters, others in his third-floor library at Fifth Avenue and East Fifty-seventh Street, a few in bank vaults. All were waiting for a suitable repository on the West Coast. By the fall of 1920, the grand library he had been building on the grounds of his estate was ready, and the New York staff, which had grown to twelve just to process the rapidly arriving books, prepared for the big move. With this dramatic migration, California became home to a magnificent library.

  The following year, a deed was drawn that made the library, ranch, artwork, and botanical gardens a public trust. As he passed his seventieth birthday, Huntington concentrated on turning the library into a permanent institution. Significantly, much of his time was now spent on developing plans for a mausoleum on the San Marino grounds “above the spot where we have laid Mrs. Huntington to rest, and where in time I expect to be,” as he explained in a letter to Rosenbach, whom he wanted to come up with some suggestions for a design. Though Rosenbach’s expertise was literature, not architecture, he was only too pleased to help, and his letters show an almost frantic desire to contribute something meaningful to the project.

  Once Huntington started focusing on the mausoleum, it became harder and harder for Rosenbach to sell books to him. Even blunt suggestions that desirable items were being lost to rival collectors could not rekindle the old man’s enthusiasm. On May 27, 1926, Rosenbach wrote Huntington directly, explaining in a lengthy letter that some recent commissions he had received from him “were not at all flexible,” and that in the Anderson Galleries sale of John L. Clawson’s collection of Elizabethan literature, “I was only able to obtain four out of the twenty-eight within the limits.” For good measure, he added that one item “was secured by Mr. Folger for $4,000 on his unlimited bid.” Huntington’s limit for the lot was only $1,200. Rosenbach added that he bought a number of other important items “for stock,” on which he felt “it only right and just to give you the first offer”; he was willing to sell them at cost plus the “usual commission” of 10 percent.

  “You must realize that much water has passed under the bridge since the Huth Sale of 1912,” Rosenbach continued, getting to the central point of the letter. “The group of new collectors, recognizing that the Clawson Sale was probably the last opportunity to secure fine English books, was willing to pay good prices for them. I really advise that you purchase this lot of the greatest rarities, as they are nearly all unique and well worth the prices at which they sold.” Rosenbach stressed that he remained “always desirous of pleasing you, and I thought that even at a sacrifice of my own interests, I would purchase the lots that you desired, if the prices were at all within reason.” He added that he had recently purchased some other “collections abroad of the greatest interest,” one of which included the only known poem in Spenser’s handwriting. Rosenbach then asked if he could come out to California the following month for a visit. Huntington’s brief reply on June 4, 1926, must have been devastating. “I have received your letter of May 27th and shall be very glad to have you come towards the end of the month, though I would not expect you to bring any books with you!”

  The next day, a formal letter from Leslie E. Bliss, now acting librarian, made reference to an invoice for $539.99 received from the Rosenbach Company a week earlier. “You will pardon us if we call your attention to the fact that there is an error in addition.” Rosenbach’s bookkeeper apparently had overcharged by ninety-nine cents. “We have corrected this to read $539.00 and for this latter amount you have been certified and remittance will be made to you in due course. Kindly reconcile your books in this connection and let us know that you have so attended to the matter, for which courtesy we thank you.” Early in 1927 the bookseller’s older brother, Philip Rosenbach, went to California and tried to arrange a meeting. Huntington sent him a letter at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, and apologized for not receiving him personally. “Mr. Hapgood, who expects to see you tomorrow, will tell you a bit more concerning the attitude I have taken on the question of buying books.”

  During the eight heady years Huntington and Rosenbach did business with each other, the California collector had authorized payments of $4,333,610 to the Rosenbach Company. Now, except for a few odds and ends, the grand adventure was over. On May 23, 1927, three months after Philip Rosenbach’s California trip, Henry E. Huntington died of cancer in a Philadelphia hospital at the age of seventy-seven. Ten days after Huntington’s death, a letter to Rosenbach from Bliss clarified the attitude of the new regime: “Two boxes are in from you today. As soon as they are checked in I will pass the bill for payment, but I cannot promise a check at once, due to changed conditions here, the fact of there being no quorum of the trustees in California at present, and various other disturbing circumstances. However, you may rest assured that your account will be settled as soon as possible.”

  Huntington was gone, but as Rosenbach had explained to the tycoon a year before his death, new collectors had arrived on the scene, and many of them were engaging his services. He developed fruitful relationships with William Andrews Clark of Los Angeles; Carl H. Pforzheimer of New York; John Hinsdale Scheide of Titusville, Pennsylvania; Lessing J. Rosenwald of Philadelphia; and Owen D. Young of New York, chairman of General Electric Company. Rosenbach maintained a cordial but correct relationship with all of his customers, and his correspondence with J. P. Morgan’s librarian, Belle d
a Costa Greene—who often began her letters to him with “Dear Rosey” or “Dear Rosie”–seems especially at ease.

  On March 21, 1928, Miss Greene wrote Rosenbach at the Hotel Carlton in London, asking him to acquire on her behalf, if possible, the original manuscript for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “I should like to buy it personally and give it to the Library as I have always wanted to present something to the Library, and it is of course a book in which the Trustees would not be interested or find of sufficient importance for them to consider its purchase. I do not doubt that it is rather silly of me to want to do this, but as you know I am very silly!” She asked Rosenbach to cable her with information as to its probable selling price. “It may be such an insignificant looking little thing that even I could not justify my own weakness in buying it.”

  Rosenbach did buy the item, but not at the “reasonable price” Miss Greene suggested, and not, as it turned out, for the Morgan Library. In a tense three-way contest at Sotheby’s on April 3, 1928, Rosenbach scrupulously avoided making any advances on Bernard Quaritch Ltd., which was bidding for the British Library, but once that firm withdrew, he entered the competition and secured the prize with an astounding bid of £15,400. After his highly publicized offer to sell the nostalgic treasure to the British nation at cost was unsuccessful, he brought the manuscript home and allowed it to go on an exhibition tour of several East Coast libraries. Finally he sold the Alice to Eldridge R. Johnson of New Jersey, president of the Victor Talking Machine Company. Eighteen years later Johnson’s estate put the manuscript up for auction, and Rosenbach bought it back for $50,000. He then organized a fundraising drive and gave the manuscript to Great Britain on behalf of the American people.

  “It is now dawning upon us that we have been living in the most wonderful period of opportunity that book collectors have ever had,” Rosenbach wrote in Publishers Weekly in 1923. “It is also clear that we are never likely to see such a period again, for the rarities that have been passing through the market have been bought mainly by book lovers and collectors, not speculators, and will largely go into great university and public libraries, never to appear again at public or private sale.” On this point he was only mostly correct; much of what he had sold did stay out of circulation, but a lot became available again.

  As 1928 drew to a close, the biggest rare-book event since the sale of Robert Hoe’s library seventeen years earlier took shape with the news that Jerome Kern, the famous composer of such musical comedies as The Red Petticoat and Very Warm for May, would be selling his library. Among his treasures were Shelley’s own annotated copy of Queen Mab and a letter in which Edgar Allan Poe quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s enthusiastic response to “The Raven.” “As my collection has grown, books have not only fascinated me, they have enslaved me,” Kern said in his announcement of the sale. “As rare books became rarer, I battled for them, treasured them, and so became a collector. I never captured a prize, the prize always captured me.” When Mitchell Kennerley, the owner of Anderson Galleries, proposed a sale of his books, “in a flash I saw an escape from my slavery.”

  Unlike the Hoe sale, which featured more than 16,000 books and manuscripts and took nineteen months to complete, the Kern collection included 1,484 lots to be offered in two five-part sessions, the first to run from January 7 to 10, 1929, the second from January 21 to 24. When the first session was held on January 7, Kern’s musical, Show Boat, was playing to full houses on Broadway, but the most sought-after seats around town that night were at Anderson Galleries.

  Dr. Rosenbach set a fast pace by spending $14,200 for five Jane Austen lots, including $3,600 for Sense and Sensibility. For $17,500, he acquired a fine copy of the first edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s earliest known published work, the poem “The Battle of Marathon” (1820). Thirty Robert Browning items promptly brought in a total of $34,085. Rosenbach’s winning bid of $23,500 for an inscribed second edition of Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was the most spent that night on a single item and attracted the biggest headlines the following morning.

  Kern told Kennerley before the sale that he would be pleased to realize $650,000 or $700,000 for his books; by the time auctioneer Anthony Bade got halfway through the B’s that first night, they had made $166,363 toward the goal. When the composer heard the figures that were being bid, he sent Kennerley a telegram: “MY GOD WHATS GOING ON.” The second session brought in another $175,071.50, and Kern’s $700,000 goal had been passed by the time they reached the letter H. When the last item was hammered down on January 24, $1,729,462.50 had been spent, a $1,165.41-per-lot average that stood as a book auction record for more than fifty years.

  “For many of the volumes it was said that I had paid excessive prices, even ridiculously high prices,” Kern said shortly after the sale. “Now it is said that the prices paid for these same volumes were high, but in a few years I believe that it will not seem so.” He said there were dealers who used to say he sometimes spent too much money for books. “I can recall times when ripples of laughter went round the auction rooms when prices that I paid seemed too high.” When the stock market crashed nine months after the sale, Kern’s satisfied smile of vindication may well have become a prayerful sigh of relief.

  The biggest buyer by far was Dr. Rosenbach, who spent $410,000 at the Kern sale; some of the material was earmarked for his general stock, and he spent $198,210 as agent for Owen D. Young, the chairman of General Electric. Young later paid Rosenbach an additional $175,000 for more Kern books. On October 18, 1929, eleven days before the great stockmarket crash, Kern wrote Young to find out if he had bought the Queen Mab. “I am obliged to confess that I lacked two things, both of which were essential—‘courage and money,’ ” Young wrote back. “Had there been no difficulty on the second, I think I might have screwed up on the first. I find it is easier to raise the first than the second. Notwithstanding that I missed Queen Mab I think it must be true that I was still by all odds the largest single buyer at your sale.”

  Four years earlier, Young had become the proud owner of a previously unrecorded copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s scarcest work, Tamerlane and Other Poems, through the oddest of circumstances. In the summer of 1925, Vincent Starrett wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post on rare books titled, “Have you a Tamerlane in your attic?” An elderly widow in Worcester, Massachusetts, named Ada S. Dodd looked, and discovered that she had such an item in her possession. She wrote the Boston bookseller Charles Goodspeed, who contacted Owen Young. In return for $17,500, the work entered his collection.

  Young had invested heavily in General Electric and Radio Corporation of America stock, and when the market collapsed, his collecting came to an abrupt halt. “I have made it a rule now for two years not to spend any money in the rare book field until this period of terrific personal need for food and clothes is over,” he wrote a bookseller who had offered him some attractive items in 1931. “I would not feel justified in spending any money for anything, no matter how rare or how cheap just now, because such items instead of giving me pleasure in the future would always rise to curse me as a luxury purchase when luxuries should not be bought.” Young kept his ten thousand books for another decade, but in light of his debts of close to $3 million, his book-hunting days were over. When conditions were at their bleakest, and the temptation to sell strongest, he wrote a memo to himself, which his daughter, Josephine Young Case, preserved:

  Many years ago I conceived the notion of collecting from time to time rare and valuable books. In every generation there should be volunteers to take such treasures and to hold them for a time as trustees. The trust imposes an obligation to select carefully, to make sure that the items are sound and true and not impostors, to care for them not only carefully but lovingly; to make them available for use by scholars and finally to pass them on to other volunteers.

  In 1941 Young found a way to satisfy his deep sense of custodianship and ease his mounting debt. A wealthy Manhattan
collector, a surgeon named Dr. Albert A. Berg, agreed to pay him $375,000 for a half interest in the books, which both men then presented to the New York Public Library, where the volumes joined the great collection Dr. Berg had turned over to the institution the year before.

  Thousands of letters are preserved in the Rosenbach Company archives in Philadelphia, and if one feature is apparent in most of them, it is the tremendous respect Dr. Rosenbach always expressed for books. There is nothing artificial or transparent about his enthusiasm, and in the case of one distinguished client, his ardor was matched by that of a man of grace and eloquence. At his death in 1944 at the age of sixty-seven, Frank J. Hogan was remembered by the Washington Daily News as “the greatest trial lawyer in the country.” Among his many courtroom triumphs was the stunning acquittal of California oil baron Edward L. Doheny in the Teapot Dome scandal. “He knew his law, he was persuasive as all get-out before a jury with his wit and charming personality and his intuitive knowledge of dramatic effect. He was a fun-poker, but his wit was always kindly and everybody knew him and liked him, from elevator boys, hack drivers, traffic cops to stage, screen and radio stars and Supreme Court justices.”

  All these were impressive compliments for a man who dropped out of school at the age of twelve, worked in a dry-goods store for two dollars a week, went to night school, earned a scholarship to Georgetown University Law School, and graduated at the top of his class. On July 18, 1931, when he was fifty-four years old—at the top of his profession and about to leave on a business trip to California—Hogan wrote his first letter to the Rosenbach Company. He had just started to buy rare books, and the purpose of the letter was to pay for some material he had acquired the previous day. “In September, I promise myself a return visit, when once again I shall want to talk Shakespeare Folio and have the delightful sensation of handling some of your gems.”