Chapter IV (1)

Book dealers and dressmakers are very much alike. Both supply us with things most necessary in daily life, and with its useless luxuries. If you are rich you walk into an exclusive dressmaking establishment on Fifth Avenue. You tell the dressmaker: “I want to look slender, I like such and such a color, I want long skirts or short skirts.” You ask for an evening gown or for a street dress or for an afternoon gown. And if you are rich and wish to buy books you’ll go next door to the exclusive book shop, you will tell the salesman: “I want a novel or a biography, something serious or something humorous; I don’t want it too free.” The salesman will size you up and will bring forth the books which you will wish to take with you. At your next visit, dressmaker as well as bookdealer will have your “size” and your “number” and you will not have to repeat your special desires.

If you are only a well-to-do man or woman with a regular salary or income, you have your charge accounts in department stores and medium class shops, in book stores on Booksellers’ Row, as Fourth Avenue between Eleventh and Fourteenth Street was so justly christened, or perhaps in one of the many book shops on Fifty-ninth Street. The merchants here will not pay so very much attention to your wishes and to your tastes, but try to impress you with the sanctity of the merciless goddess “Vogue.” The salesman doesn’t care that you detest ruffles and fringes. They are in season and therefore you ought to wear them or you are a back number and he treats you with contempt. The department store book salesman will tell you that Robert Chambers’ last novel is “_The Best Seller_” and if you tell him that Chambers doesn’t write to your taste, he will simply pity you, and tell you that “_Everybody_” is reading it, and that is final.

But if you are poor or your circumstances permit you to expend only a certain amount of money for your clothes and for your books and you despise the department store atmosphere with its alluring bargains that persecute you ever after you were weak enough to buy them, like spooks of murdered souls, then adventures galore are in store for you, especially if you live in New York. Because one day surely you will run across “that marvelous dressmaker” who charges only a couple of dollars a day, follows your ideas, creates dreams of garments, and makes dressing a pleasure for you.

And in the strangest parts of the city, like a geranium pot on the sill of a tenement house, you encounter once in a while a real book store in New York. Is not the discovery an event in our unromantic lives? Looking over the dust-covered treasures is an exploration into strange lands, and usually a talk with the proprietor himself charms us like the fairy tale of long forgotten childhood.

Second Avenue, around First Street, is the promenade of that part of the Bowery which has not yet been turned into factories and sweat shops. Here are delicatessen stores, second-hand furniture dealers, grocery shops, ice cream parlors, drug stores, moving picture theatres, with crudely painted advertising boards depicting scenes from blood-and-thunder dramas. Then there is Kettel’s Theatre, where they play Shakespeare in Yiddish. Thousands of men and women people the sidewalks and street. Roumanian, Hungarian, German and Polish with a Jewish accent are spoken here, and Yiddish, of course, the guttural sounds of which give the ear the same sensation as the eye receives from the window display of the foreign looking pickles, fancily prepared onions, and enormous strangely-shaped sausages of the stores. The women are without headgear, in underskirts, with blankets or shawls around their shoulders, their shoes unbuttoned; they have run out to buy something. Everybody on this street seems to buy or sell, talking loudly, bargaining with a passion inherited through generations. On the corner of Second Avenue and First Street is the Municipal Court, with its crowds of lawyers, of fighting, screaming and excited men and women on the doorsteps.

Mr. Kirschenbaum’s Shop

Who in this beehive has time or desire to view the book stalls in front of Mr. Kirschenbaum’s book store? Why did he select this extraordinary location for his shop? A tall, heavy-set, broad-shouldered Pole, with blonde whiskers, blue eyes, and an expression of kindness on his face that doesn’t seem to correspond with the muscles of his arms of which no prize fighter need be ashamed. And if you walk into his shop you’ll find almost any time between eight a. m. and midnight, men and women there like yourself, from all parts of the city, buying all sorts of books, as recently on a Saturday afternoon when a young girl asked for a copy of Thomas a Kempis and an old man for a copy of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.

He has a little bit of everything in his shop, but you have to take the trouble of looking through it in order to discover the “gems” you are looking for. Here is Mr. Kirschenbaum’s story in a few words:

“I served twelve years in a Polish regiment of the Austrian army as a non-commissioned officer. Later on I was an agent of officers and of the nobility in Galicia. There was nothing that I wouldn’t buy of them or that I wouldn’t sell to them. If they needed money I got it for them. One day I decided to emigrate to this country.

“When I arrived here, I got a push cart, went through the streets of New York, bought up everything people had no use for, and then I sold it in the Bowery from my cart. They called me the “Siegel Cooper of the East Side.” Soon I specialized in books. I didn’t know books and their value and I sold them as I am selling them today, as merchandise. I buy them for a certain price and I sell them at a certain profit, and I don’t care how much they are really worth. I haven’t got time to look real values up. I’m too busy selling in quantities. One of my sons knows books. He opened a shop on Fourth Avenue, but I’m satisfied to turn over my stock as quickly as I can. I always had known big people in the old country, and some of them I met here in influential positions. I had a hard time during my first years in America, and they offered me great positions in some branches of business that they knew I was an expert in, but the first demand they made was to shear off my beard: I knew what that meant. I looked too Jewish to them. My beard was never touched by a razor and never will be as long as I live, and my insisting upon the preservation of the exterior of an orthodox Jew made me impossible in any leading position of a business organization, so you see I had to start an independent business. That’s how I happen to be here.”

Mr. Kirschenbaum’s shelves and tables contain something of everything in all languages about all subjects. To spend a couple of hours in his shop will prove that there is nothing new and original in this world that has not been written about by somebody years and years ago.

A Specialist in Excitement

If you think that the sensational paper novel, the mystery story in installments printed on newspaper, the dearly beloved Nick Carter stories, are things of the past because you don’t see them in the regulation book stores where “intellectuals” meet, you are mistaken. They are as widely read as ever, and Mr. Joe W. Knoke specializes in these delights of certain old ladies, of boys and young girls. His little store on Third Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets is filled up with the most gruesome experiences in crime and adventure.

“I have been here for twelve years,” he said recently, one could hardly hear his words, so great was the noise of the elevated thundering on its structure and the heavy delivery wagons rumbling over the old-fashioned cobblestones.

“I know my customers well. Some are reading detective stories exclusively; they don’t want anything but detective stories. The younger generation prefers old magazines with short stories to paper novels. I buy them by the pound from rag dealers, from the Salvation Army and everywhere I can get them. People pay as much as five cents for such back numbers. Once upon a time lots of Irish people used to live in this neighborhood and many Irish ladies still come to my shop to buy the works of Charles Garvice and of Bertha M. Clay. These are clean, good love stories. After they are through they bring them back and I allow them a few pennies on their next purchase, but in a few months they ask for the same books again, and some of my customers read every year the same books over and over.

“Then there are the shop girls from near-by department stores. They buy Street and Smith paper novels. The thicker the book the quicker they take it. They tell each other about the most exciting of these love stories, and they, too, read the same books constantly. Over there,” and he pointed to a whole shelf full of mysterious looking pamphlets and books, “are my dream books, books on palmistry and on fortune telling. Old ladies buy them. There are just as many dream books as cook books, and each of these ladies sticks to the same brand for almost a life-time. Often they bring in old torn, finger-marked copies in which the printing can hardly be distinguished, and they wish to get another copy of the very same book. Perhaps it hasn’t been printed for the last thirty or forty years, and you should see their disappointment if I tell them so, and how suspiciously they eye other dream books before they decide to buy one. Young girls also often are purchasers of dream books and books on palmistry. They use them for entertainment at parties and take them along on picnics. One old gentleman comes along every once in a while early in the morning, buys a magazine for a nickel and then spends a considerable length of time before my dream book shelf. I always wonder if he is looking up his last night’s dream. Once I suggested to him to buy a copy, but he got indignant “because he didn’t believe in such superstitious humbug.”

The Man Who Knows His Books

A spotlessly clean little store on Thirty-eighth Street near Sixth Avenue, book shelves all around the walls, friendly pictures right beneath the ceiling. In the middle of the room a little desk, and in a chair before it Mr. Corbett, who prides himself on having read every book that he ever sold. Jack London used to spend hours here whenever he was in New York, and Edwin Markham received a good deal of inspiration from Mr. Corbett’s suggestions. Literary hack writers are his daily visitors; to call them customers would be too optimistic. He dreams of magazine articles, he invents titles for them and he sells you for a few pennies all the material to write them if you happen to be a journalist on the lookout for suggestions.

He has his own peculiar ideas of what people should read and what they shouldn’t read, and it is not an unusual occurrence that, for instance, a young girl should enter his shop and ask for a certain book, and he would answer: “Yes, I have it, but you shouldn’t read it, and I won’t sell it to you.” And then he will tell her about some other book, and picture it in such desirable colors that she will change her mind and buy it instead.

“You know,” he told me once, “the bookseller has a very important mission in life. The writer writes his books, but he doesn’t know into whose hands they will fall, the publisher sells them as merchandise to dealers all over the country, but we little shop-keepers come in contact with the real readers. It’s up to us to place something in their hands that might be decisive for their future career, that might inspire them to great and noble thoughts, and that might make criminals out of them. A few pennies that we might gain might mean the perdition of lives and souls.”

The Farmer-Bookseller

Mr. D. L. Haberson is now on Saturdays only in his little book store that seems so lonesome and solitary on Twenty-third Street near Eighth Avenue in the midst of cheap rooming houses and the noise of the subway excavations and constructions that are going on day and night. After years of toil he has arrived at the goal of his ambition. He has bought a farm on Long Island. One of those small farms on which one has to be an artist in order to make both ends meet. But he was in the book business for such a long time that almost nothing seems impossible to him, and he used to display many curious books in his shop. Especially out-of-the-way magazines, edited by out-of-the-way people, were his hobby. A small man, pale and slender, with the eyes of a philosopher, what strange desire must have taken possession of him to wish to till the soil? He installed an assistant in his shop, surely not a lucrative job, but this man told me: “I like it here. I can read all day and can save the money that I used to spend for books.” That’s the stuff most of those little book dealers are made of. They don’t aspire to commercial success. If they make a living and can read, can read constantly, that’s their reward in life.

A Night Bird

On Columbus Avenue, between Sixty-seventh and Sixty-eighth Streets, near Healey’s Cabaret, a window is lighted no matter at what time in the night you may pass by. If you look into the narrow shop you will see a man sitting in a very small space, surrounded by heaps of books, smoking a long cigar, reading. His store remains closed in the day time and I don’t imagine that the people who spend their nights in Mr. Healey’s Cabaret buy books before they go home, or to some other place, but he doesn’t seem to mind and is perfectly happy with his books, which grow all around him and make the space in which he can move freely smaller from day to day. He sits there all night and reads his books and is delighted to discover some long-forgotten writer, to point out his charms to you, and doesn’t even ask you to buy.

And there is Mr. Lawson, somewhere far west on Forty-second Street, who travels about the country picking up old books in farm houses, and Mr. Schwartz, who used to be a waiter, and who started a book shop near Astor Place. He wanted to cater to the discriminating readers of the spices of life, but Mr. Sumner interfered with his intentions and twice he made the unpleasant acquaintance of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. He had to pay a fine and do something more painful than that, and now if a prospective customer asks for one of the proscribed books, he shudders piously, brings out an old edition of Shakespeare and recommends the English bard as a suitable substitute for some French writer.

Jim Gillin, who had threatened for the past eight years to sell out his book shop on the corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Lexington Avenue, has done it finally, and moved out to his place somewhere in Jersey in order to breed rabbits, the study and the dream of his life. He had delved in books for so many years that nobody would have supposed he would ever change his profession.

Then there is old man Johnson, who prints catalogues every once in a while and sends them out broadcast from his basement store on Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway, and who is constantly and mysteriously busy at his desk, day and night, writing in a big folio. Perhaps he is writing the adventures and tribulations of a New York book dealer.

Mr. Stammer, Their Great Patron

Do you ask “How do all these people manage to earn a livelihood?” Mr. Stammer, the great book dealer from Fourth Avenue, whose specialty is hunting up every book that anybody in the United States might desire, no matter when and where printed, and who knows the most obscure book dealer in the most obscure part of New York, answered this question: “Because two-thirds of the book dealers in New York are selling exclusively almost to the remaining third. The big book dealers very rarely buy books from private sources. These little book shops are our vanguards, that collect the honey for us and we come and take whatever we can use, or they bring it to us, and we are glad to have them come regularly.” Mr. Stammer makes his round to these small book dealers almost constantly every day. He is their educator and patron. He tells them what books are worth money, and he pays a good price whenever he can use them. He is a welcome figure on rent day, and most of the treasures of these cobwebbed corners wander to the comfortable shelves of his palace on Fourth Avenue.

1918

Dealers in Literary Property

Letters of celebrated men and women, dead and alive, can today be purchased in the open market. The more private they are and the more they incorporate of the writer’s soul, the higher the price.

There is no atmosphere of romance in these transactions. The autograph dealers sell because they wish to make money. The purchasers buy because they desire to possess something unique and because they know that the letters and autographs of celebrities are an excellent investment. Let us put aside untimely sentiment and assume that it is perfectly proper to sell at auction Shelley’s love letters, or that a letter of Poe’s grocer demanding in rude terms immediate payment of two dollars and fifty cents for food supplied, is a fitting library ornament if expensively framed together with the poet’s portrait, and let us visit a few of the important dealers in such literary property in New York.

Mr. Benjamin’s office is situated on the third floor of the Brunswick building facing Madison Square. This building occupies the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous as New York’s resting place for the literati who visited the United States.

The walls of this place of business are lined with enormous safes, a solitary typewriter clicks solemnly; the dignity of a broker’s office prevails, such dignity as obtains where deeds are executed involving the transfer of millions.

Behind an enormous table Mr. Benjamin is seated. Nothing here reminds one of an antiquarian’s cabinet or of a collector’s museum. It is the working table of a bank president, whose chief motto is “efficiency.”

“No, there is mighty little romance in this business,” Mr. Benjamin began, and there seemed no reason to doubt his statement.

“I purchase autographs, manuscripts, signed portraits and all kinds of literary property in order to sell again. There is an art in buying and a greater art in selling; it requires knowledge and a certain instinct or ability to associate events and people so that the value of the materials increases while in my possession.

“I deal exclusively in gilt-edged autographs of those men who have made history, literature and music. Our great statesmen are my specialty.

“No museum or library in the world has at present more authentic original material relating to our War of Independence and the Civil War than you can see in these safes of mine.

“Framed portraits with short letters by men of note are the side lines of book and art dealers. You cannot find them here.

“I am the only exclusive dealer in autographs in the United States. I have been thirty years at the game and I have made a quarter of a million dollars. Oh! Yes! I have about twice that amount invested in autographs.”

“How does one become a dealer in literary property? How does one buy and sell?” were my next questions.

“I can tell you how I did it, but as for the others--I would refuse to guarantee results--unlike the detective correspondence schools.

“I did not want to be a dealer in autographs as a young man, but about forty odd years ago I had dreams that some day my own autographs would be valuable, or that at least I should be able to sell some of them to publishers and editors. My father, Park Benjamin, had been a literary man and a poet of note. He successfully edited big daily papers in New York. I graduated from Union College, served my apprenticeship on country magazines and was at the age of nineteen, editor of the Schenectady _Daily Union_.

“I made good and went to New York. I worked for eleven years as reporter for the Sun, several years directly under the great Dana.

“Interviews with big men were my specialty and some day I shall write my reminiscences, which will, I think, make interesting reading. I inherited the poetical vein from my father. A book of my poems appears this month. In the book store of my brother, who sold once in a while an autograph of a celebrity, I met several collectors and studied their hobbies. I saw wide possibilities in the field if the business were handled scientifically, and I devoted myself to it exclusively.

“In September, 1887, I started a monthly paper, _The Collector_, and I have published it ever since. It reaches not only my customers and people to whom I might be able to sell, but librarians and historians as well, and it is largely quoted in biographies as I reprint unique letters and documents which otherwise would not be accessible to the public.

“So you see I am an editor and my paper is the oldest trade paper in the United States--if you can call it a trade to sell literary property.

“An autograph collector graduates from the ranks of book collectors.

“He usually begins by buying letters of his favorite authors to insert in their works, or to frame with their portraits. Bit by bit he becomes a regular collector. He finds that autograph letters take up little space compared with books, and that they are far less liable to injury by worms or decay. A well-selected collection of autographs will nearly always prove profitable at an auction sale. The sale draws in wealthy buyers whom the dealers never reach and their competition ensures high prices.

“Genuine autograph collecting has nothing to do with autograph fiends and their collecting of signatures. A large collection of signatures well arranged and illustrated with portraits and clippings, is a good thing--but albums of miscellaneous signatures with no system, and begged from annoyed celebrities, are little better than trash. When I buy such a collection I break it up at once. Notes responding to requests for autographs are no better than signatures. They are out of place in a good collection. A letter should contain some of the original thought of the writer, and, if possible refer to incidents of his life or to his writings.

“My regular customers, people who buy constantly whenever I have something to offer them in their special line, are not the movie millionaires you can meet in the art shops and book shops on Fifth Avenue. They are usually retired business men, and physicians, well-to-do or of moderate means, university professors who have to save in order to be able to buy autographs. Every one of them has made a study of some literary or political celebrity, or is interested in some period of our own history. All documents or letters needed to complete their collections are welcome. But I also count among my patrons of long standing, poor men whose only property in this world are their collections of autographs, and they actually often suffer privations rather than part with their treasures.

“Some people are greatly interested in minor literary men of bygone days, whose autographs were never thought worth saving. I have a search department for such cases, and I am often curiously successful.

“You would be surprised to find how almost anything you may want can be found if you do not tire in looking for it and if you know how and where to advertise.

“I advertise everywhere, and constantly. The smallest country paper sometimes means more to my business than the big city paper.

“I have bought many trunks of valuable documents and letters in the garrets of old homesteads in towns whose names you have never heard of--called there by some heir, who read my advertisement in the paper and who preferred to sell the literary remains of his grandfather to me rather than to the ragman!

“And here is the secret of success in this business: constant and wise advertising.

“Of course the autographs of our best writers are in constant demand. They have a market price, a price, however, which fluctuates almost from day to day.

“For instance, if a man dies, his value goes up instantly, if his fame has not been an overnight popularity. On the other hand, the signature of the favorite actress will lose all value at her death and will be forgotten by the public as well as by the autograph dealer.

“On the very day that James Whitcomb Riley was prostrated by a paralytic stroke and it became known that he would never be able to use his right hand again, the prices of his manuscripts and letters almost doubled.

“Living English authors, like Kipling or Wells or Chesterton, fetch higher prices here than in England. Kipling especially brings almost five times as much here as he does in his own country.

“Of course we buy at auctions. The Anderson Galleries are noted in New York for their sales and so is the American Art Association. Both appeal to the collector rather than to the dealer and prices are often prohibitive.

“Values are being created there and it very often happens that some collector pays five hundred dollars for something that he refused to pay fifty for to the dealer.

“One of the hobbies of American collectors is a page with the unbroken lines of all the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Another favorite object is the signatures of the presidents of the United States. I pay a good deal of attention to the latter, having collected them myself. Do you want to hear my opinion of the handwritings of our various presidents and some natural conclusions reached as to their character?

“Most of them wrote a good clear hand. At seventeen years of age Washington wrote a clear, round hand, upright with a tendency to ornamentation of the capital letters. In 1760 he wrote a smooth, running hand, and during the war of the Revolution this changed to the large beautiful round hand, the finest specimen of writing of which I have any knowledge. This persisted to his death.

“John Adams wrote an up-and-down, round hand, rather small, early in life, and gradually growing larger until the individual letters were bigger than those made by any other president. At the end, when his sight failed, his writing became an irregular scrawl--on and off the line.

“Thomas Jefferson started with a fluent running hand, and this characteristic his signature retained throughout his life. Shortly before the Revolution his hand changed to a round, upright form and so continued.

“James Monroe wrote a very running hand, crowding his letters together and often going off the line. He fancied a heavy writing pen.

“John Quincy Adams wrote a plain, perpendicular hand with no ornamentation, almost a backhand. In late years it showed much trembling in the letters, but remained clear.

“James Buchanan wrote a round, running hand, sometimes large and sometimes small, with each letter well formed. His writing continued the same all his life.

“Abraham Lincoln wrote at first a plain running hand with letters well made and words well spaced. As years passed it became more upright until at the end it was straight up and down.

“Ulysses S. Grant wrote an unformed school-boy hand when he left West Point. This improved and became firm, but was never a good hand. Of late years it was a running hand, with letters incomplete and other marks of haste. On the whole, one of the poorest hands of the lot.

“James A. Garfield wrote a handsome running hand when a general in the army. The letters were well formed and the words well separated. Altogether a fine, clerkly hand. Later it became irregular and tended towards the upright, and lost its beauty.

“Grover Cleveland began with a large, angular, running hand, and gradually changed to a small, lady-like hand of great regularity. At first it was like Madison’s.

“William McKinley wrote a fine plain running hand, with letters well formed and a tendency not to lift the pen between words.

“Theodore Roosevelt has written the worst hand of any of the Presidents. The letters are badly formed, the lines in poor alignment and altogether they have a very scratchy appearance. They bear marks of haste, of a mind outrunning the pen.

“William H. Taft has a fine, handsome, regular, large running hand. Altogether a handsome letter.

“Woodrow Wilson writes a very handsome hand, with letters well made, freely running in straight lines--altogether of the copperplate order. His letters seem to be written with deliberation and care.

“Washington and Polk wrote the handsomest letters, and Roosevelt and Grant the scratchiest.”

Mr. Benjamin is the great pioneer in his chosen field, the prince of the autograph-dealers. The money he makes in autographs he invests in real estate. He owns a magnificent summer home, and all because he knows how to buy and how to sell letters of dead and living celebrities.

The Market Price of Some Autographs

S. L. Clemens $11.50 Thos. De Quincey 18.00 George Eliot 23.00 Eugene Field 31.00 Alex. Hamilton 50.00 John Paul Jones 280.00 Rudyard Kipling 24.00 R. L. Stevenson 100.00 Alfred Tennyson 28.00 Wm. Wordsworth 21.00 Ben. Franklin 132.50 Geo. Washington 227.50 John Adams 57.50 Thos. Jefferson 37.50 W. H. Harrison 24.00 Zachary Taylor 90.00 Andrew Johnson 120.00 Wm. McKinley 67.50 Theo. Roosevelt 12.00 W. H. Taft 55.00 A. Lincoln 210.00

Mr. Madigan’s Interesting Shop

A complete change of scene. The most fashionable shopping district of New York, just around the corner of Fifth Avenue in Forty-fifth Street.

A window filled with expensively framed autographs marks the sanctum of Mr. Francis P. Madigan. He is a jovial man who has all the qualities which make for the success of our Fifth Avenue art shops. He knows when to stop talking, he knows when to say “the word” which closes the deal: he sells to his customers, they do not buy from him. The high walls are hung with innumerable autographs in appropriate frames, signed portraits of great celebrities; some little drawings and sketches by lesser known artists--Mr. Madigan also dabbles in art. His specialty is selling books signed by their authors. He is one of the few men who realized Oscar Wilde’s importance at a time when no one paid much attention to this unfortunate poet. In the course of years he collected a mass of Oscar Wilde material, and he is now reaping the harvest.

I spent an afternoon in his shop. Quite a study for the observer of human souls was the procession of visitors who came and went continuously. They pay for autographs of men who never could even sell their work during their lives. Mr. Madigan has sold more Poe material during the last ten years than anybody else.

Poor Poe! During his entire literary career he hardly got in direct returns as much money as this dealer in dead men’s letters receives for one single epistle.

The Poet’s Income

A letter of Poe, dated New York, January 18, 1849, also in the possession of Mr. Madigan, allows us to look behind the scenes of a literary workshop of the early fifties. It is addressed to John R. Thompson, the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, one of the most powerful literary magazines of the time. Poe offers his services as a critic at the rate of two dollars a page, provided Mr. Thompson obliges himself to take not less than five pages each month. The irony of fate was never better exemplified. The manuscript which he offered at two dollars a page is now worth four hundred and fifty dollars. The very letter in which he offers to sell it at that sum was purchased a short time ago for five hundred dollars.

“New York, Jan. 13, ’49.

“My Dear Sir:

“Accept my thanks for the two _Messengers_ containing Miss Talley’s
‘Genius.’ I am glad to see that Griswold, although imperfectly, has
done her justice in his late ‘Female Poets of America.’

“Enclosed I send you the opening chapter of an article called
‘Marginalia,’ published about three years ago in _The Democratic
Review_.... My object in writing you now is to propose that I
continue the papers in the _Messenger_, running them through the
year at the rate of five pages each month, commencing with the
March number. You might afford me, as before, I presume, $2 a
page.... If you think well of my proposal, I will send you the two
first numbers (10 pp.) immediately on receipt of a letter from you.
You can pay me at your convenience, as the papers are published or
otherwise....

“Very truly yours,
“EDGAR ALLAN POE.”

“Jno. R. Thompson, Esq.

“P. S.--I am about to bestir myself in the world of letters rather
more busily than I have done for three or four years past, and a
connection which I have established with two weekly papers may
enable me, now and then, to serve you in respect to The
_Messenger_.”

Our interview was interrupted by a handsome youth with a fashionable fur coat and who used very broken English.

He desired to buy autographs of French “big people,” and of composers and of musicians of all nations. Mr. Madigan brought out his royalty portfolios. Louis XIV. and Marie Antoinette were the star pieces. The youth did not hesitate long. He bought them and took about two dozen letters of musical people. He ordered them all framed and sent up to his studio. He offered English bank notes in payment of the bill (some four hundred odd dollars), but Mr. Madigan insisted on receiving United States currency, and so the man went to a nearby bank, returned shortly, and paid.

“What does he want with them?” I asked, astonished.

The whole transaction had lasted less than fifteen minutes.

“He is a musician,” replied Mr. Madigan, “who will play the social game. He will invite some very rich people to his studio, the walls will be hung with the autographs he has just bought, and he’ll tell them about his ‘dear’ relics of his ancestors and will also point familiarly to his ‘dear’ friends the musicians and composers.

“If he succeeds in his game, he will keep the autographs, but most likely he will come back to me in six months or sooner, financially embarrassed, and will beg of me to buy them back.”

A well-known poet came in. Mr. Madigan took him to the back of the store. The poet wrote for a little while and then handed the sheet of paper to Madigan. A short conversation in subdued tones, and the poet left the shop. Madigan told me that the poet had written an extemporaneous ode on Oscar Wilde. “He often comes in,” Mr. Madigan continued, “for a chat and presents me quite frequently with a few lines of his poetry. Once he had not left the shop more than half an hour. I sold the poem he had just written to another friend of mine for ten dollars.”

An old lady entered. She unwrapped a parcel that she had carried under her arm. A lot of letters and photographs. I felt that she resented my presence during the coming transaction. I turned my back. I listened to a long lecture by Mr. Madigan about the cheapness and undesirability of the autographs which she offered to him for sale. Finally he offered a few dollars and the old lady, reluctantly, pocketed the money and left her parcel.

A young woman entered next--an interior decorator doing Mrs. Van X’s breakfast room. It had come into her head that Cardinal Richelieu’s picture and signature in that charming Louis Quatorze frame would be ideal between the lavender window hangings. She asked the price and had it sent.

A newspaper man was the next visitor. He wanted a picture of Stephen Crane, the poet, to illustrate a Sunday story. Mr. Madigan fished out a portrait from many others, card indexed and filed away in a specially constructed cabinet.

And so it goes on continuously, the whole day, buying and selling.

Schulte’s Book Store

Scattered about the throbbing city are a few quiet nooks and corners that seem especially made for the lover of antiques. They are not numerous, but full of a certain charm. Book stores, with big boxes in front of the doors, where you can choose for your pennies, tomes in old-fashioned binding and printing. Inside are shelves laden with books in delightful disorder left by the book-hunter who looked through them before you. The narrow passageway becomes narrower on each visit you pay to the shop because of newly-arrived books and pamphlets.

A long vista of boxes and cases well filled with a delightful miscellany of books marks the front of Mr. Schulte’s book store on the southwest corner of 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. Don’t cast suspicious looks at the nice girls in immaculate white blouses who loiter about the aisles. They won’t interfere with you. They won’t ask you any questions. You will soon feel at home after you have glanced at the titles of the books on any shelf, and if you meet Mr. Schulte he won’t be a stranger to you. There is such a deep-founded relationship between the man and his books and customers. He is the appreciative, sympathetic co-collector and, after you have gained his confidence, if the friendship is mutual, he will spread out his gems before you: a first edition with a rare imprint, or some unknown etching by Whistler or Haden or Zorn.

George D. Smith, Speculator in Literary Property

A new type of bookseller has developed since books and literary property have become commercial and subject to corners created by shrewd buyers and holders, and to fluctuations caused by selling _en masse_. Mr. George D. Smith, the king of rare books and great dealer in literary property, operates on the largest scale.

Mr. Smith buys carloads of books for millions of dollars and sells again by the carload to millionaires who build palaces in California and who order their libraries complete. Mr. Smith is the leading figure in our auction houses where he buys, excluding all competition, by paying an exorbitant price for anything he desires to possess. He is a millionaire and the chief counsellor of our _nouveaux riches_ when they furnish their homes with rare autographs and valuable books.

Mr. Cadigan of Brentano’s

After you have passed the stairway in Brentano’s leading to the basement and properly admired the framed autographs and signed portraits which cover the walls, you will pass the gate that leads into the kingdom of Mr. Cadigan, another dealer in literary property but of quite a different type. Mr. Cadigan is the head of Brentano’s periodical department. He knows the development of the American magazine better than anybody else living. For a score of years he has watched successes and failures, but nearest to his heart are the magazines of those men who have had the courage to stand up for their own ideas and their own conception of the world.

Some of the most pathetic figures in American letters have founded magazines of their own; they would not follow the example of their contemporaries or submit to the wishes of their publishers and to the presumed desires of the reading public. Mr. Cadigan knows them all. He recommends them if he thinks them commendable. While the gigantic trusts of our American news companies afford them very little or no chances for circulation, Mr. Cadigan adopts them and presents them for sale on his tables next to the full-fledged products of the capitalistic press.

I get more satisfaction and pleasure out of Brentano’s basement devoted to periodicals than out of all the periodical reading rooms of all our public libraries combined, with the Carnegie institutions thrown in. To be able to look over the current issues of magazines and to take home just the interesting ones carries with it an intimate satisfaction.

1917

Young Madigan

Everybody calls him young Madigan to distinguish him from his father, “old” Madigan, the dean of the autograph craft in the United States. Tom Madigan is young in years; about twenty-five; but he was bred among autographs. There is a lot of romance and excitement in finding autographs. It stirred the imagination of the boy. While his schoolmates indulged in Indian stories and enthused themselves with the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, Tom Madigan went about searching for autographs. Old country houses, dilapidated and deserted mansions, garrets even were his hunting grounds. He had a wonderful scent. He found old trunks with letters and manuscripts, boxes with documents and deeds, and his father taught him to separate the chaff from the wheat.

Tom read a good deal. History and biography mostly. He became his father’s walking encyclopedia. There is a good deal of the born reporter in Tom, and at a tender age, he discovered his literary inclinations. His autographs furnished his material, dead letters became alive in his hands, magazines and journals were glad to print his rambles and discoveries. We thank him for a good many sidelights upon the private life of illustrious personages. One day Tom disappeared. The fact is he got married and started a shop of his own. Knowledge was his only capital, and today at the age of twenty-five he ranks among the first autograph dealers in America.

“Yes, we have to get high prices for autographs,” Madigan said, smilingly, while opening his enormous safe to show me some specimens. “I believe this is in some respects the finest tribute the present generation pays to genius and greatness. These prices are suggestive of reflection, however, in view of the now almost universal practice of typewriting letters and manuscripts.

“The written word, as it flows from the pen, has much of the inspiration, the mental process and the ideals of the writer; the typewritten word tells nothing.

“President McKinley, to give one instance, was an early user of the typewriter, and therefore, manuscript letters by his hand are exceedingly scarce, scarcer and more expensive than long letters by President Adams, Jefferson, Madison or Jackson. And I dare say that these will be far easier to procure in coming years than like specimens by Roosevelt, Taft or Wilson.

“Here, look at this letter written by John Adams. Isn’t it a delicious bit of intimate history that unrolls itself before our eyes? Adams, de jure leader of the Federalist party while Alexander Hamilton has the actual power, is peeved about ‘too much intrigue in this business both in General Washington and me.’ ‘_If I shall ultimately be the dupe of it, I am much mistaken in myself._’ And now read this memorable line: ‘_If I could resign him the office of President, I would do it immediately and with the highest pleasure; but I never said I would hold the office and be responsible for its exercise while he should execute it_.’

“Look at this letter by Henry Clay, ‘_Although I am not a member of any Christian Church, I have a profound sense of the inappreciable value of our religion, which has increased and strengthened as I have advanced in years_.’

“Read this note of Robert Fulton’s, the celebrated inventor, to his lawyer referring to a Mr. Church, his partner, in an ‘enterprise of small canals.’ ‘_By becoming a partner he took a chance of profit or loss, but was bound to pay me the purchase money. He failed in his second payment. I consequently stayed in Europe, not regarding a man who had no regard for his engagements._”

“Look at this distinguished handwriting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Can you read between the lines?

“‘_I lent you by mistake a copy of my book, which contains corrections which I, therefore, need in preparing the next edition._’

“Can you imagine the poet hunting for his corrected book, the printer waiting until he discovers that some friend has carried it away? And here is a suave note of John S. Sargent, the American portrait painter, asking some society woman in words of utmost politeness to come to his studio for a sitting. One almost can see the $5,000 check paid for the painting.

“Here read the fuming indignation of an American poet. A letter by Bayard Taylor, whose London publishers had refused to publish his ‘Masque of the Gods.’ He writes about English prudery to James R. Osgood, his American publisher. ‘_I return the two London letters. What prigs the publishers there must be. It is very evident they are afraid, though why I can’t see for the life of me. If there is reason for it, then you are the boldest of the bold.... If you see any unusually spicy or stupid attacks, I should be greatly obliged if you would send them._’

“Lucy Larcon is an American poetess, who is not very well known, but I think this little poem, evidently never published before, is not bad:

“I said it in the meadow-path;
I say it on the mountain stairs;
The best things any mortal hath
Are those that every mortal shares.”

1918

The Romance of a Chicago Book Dealer

Wells Street, between the river and East Chicago Avenue, is the Bowery of Chicago. Once a residential section, now the old mansions and frame cottages, hastily erected after the fire, are dilapidated and are used as lodging houses and factories of the inferior sort. Here and there a modern structure, a storage house or an industrial plant. Dan Martin’s Mission is here, several rescue halls, a Salvation Army citadel, the famous coffee wagons on the corners of side streets, where unfortunates are given a cup of coffee, a loaf of bread and advice that should lead to salvation. The Moody church is the aristocrat of the quarter. Drunken men and women line the sidewalks day and night; gruesome phonographs are continually heard in rum shops. Policemen patrol in pairs, and this beat is considered the most dangerous in the whole city.

In the midst of one of the worst blocks is a large show window. A pawnbroker would be most appropriate in these surroundings. But it is not a pawnbroker’s display; there are paintings and, if you choose to step nearer to examine them, you will scarcely believe your own eyes: a couple of portraits by Benjamin West, signed; a magnificent etching by Whistler, with the familiar butterfly in the left hand corner; high up near the ceiling, between mischievous gargoyles, a large canvas which one recognizes as a magnificent work of an Italian master. A few Duerers are pinned to the wall, rows of old books, not dusted for a long while, are on shelves in the center.

“If these things are genuine,” I thought, “they are priceless treasures; of course they cannot be.” I entered the shop. There was just enough space to open the door, to squeeze in: piles of books from the floor to the very high ceiling, drawings, paintings, carvings, leaned against the dusty backgrounds of old tomes. It was the most extraordinary place I had ever entered. There seemed to be some order in this most astonishing disorder. A little bell sounded somewhere in the faraway background. It was a very long room. I heard approaching footsteps, very energetic footsteps. I was astonished that a person could worm his way through an almost invisible passage between the heaped-up stacks of volumes--an old gentleman with hair hanging to his shoulders, a long beard, wonderful eyes which seemed to sparkle in the dim light of the strange place. I liked him at once; his quiet melodious voice, his dreaming faraway look and the decision of his manner. I told him frankly that the strangeness of the place, in such strange surroundings, had attracted me. I came again and again. And I treasure the hours I spent in Mr. Doerner’s “book-shop” as among the most pleasant of my life. I never grew tired of standing up there. There was no space for a chair, and I doubt if there was a chair in the place.

I think it a sacrilege to call Julius Doerner a book seller or antique dealer. He is a collector and an antiquarian. He knows his books, and has more than half a million of them. He treasures his works of art, delights in showing them to you, but selling? that is another question. There is not a phase of American history he could not lecture on with more thoroughness than any American University professor. His collection of pamphlets, of the earliest newspapers and periodicals, his gift of finding important contemporary notices relating to American history, in foreign journals, books and chronicles, is remarkable. I thought him an eccentric gentleman of means, who after extensive travel round the world, had decided to lead the life of a hermit among his treasures. He had, in fact, traveled very little; collecting had been his passion from earliest youth; he had denied himself for almost three decades the comforts and good things of this world; and he had found a very efficient way of beating our high cost of living.

“It is not the high cost of living,” he used to say, “it is the cost of high living that troubles the world. For years I have expended seven cents a day for my living expenses, and you can see, yourself, that I am strong and healthy.”

He is an excellent musician. Beneath thousands of pounds of books an old-fashioned piano is buried in his shop. He called the pile of material, that had to be removed before he could open the instrument, his time clock. Every once in a while he would forget his work (which consisted mostly of reading and compiling) and would devote himself with all the fervor of an enthusiast to Beethoven, Bach or Mozart.

Very few customers come to his place of business. If some curiosity seeker, like myself, attempts to break into his sanctum, they find in him a courteous but not inviting or solicitous shop keeper. “What do you want?” is his curt question. If a book is asked for, he will fish it out from among his five hundred thousand books with an almost miraculous quickness, name the price, and then it is up to the customer to say “Yes” or “No,” and the interview is ended. His treasures are all “finds.” He discovered them in junk shops, in garrets of old mansions, in unpromising trunks of storage houses. There is, for instance, a most magnificent soft-shell cameo, a biblical scene, marvelous workmanship of some exquisite artist of the early Italian renaissance. He bought it from a pawnbroker for five dollars. He refused a staggering sum from Tiffany’s and resisted the very tempting price which Mrs. Potter-Palmer was willing to pay for it, not because he did not need the money or was holding out for a larger profit (the sum offered him was two thousand dollars, I believe), but because he preferred to have the cameo himself.

Quite a Romance