W A R N I N G!
The Original Sketch of the Head
for the
Lansdowne Full Length
All Collectors, Museums, Dealers and other interested parties are advised to take no part in the buying or selling of a certain oil painting:—
Portrait of
Washington, by Gilbert Stuart
This portrait head is entirely my personal property. It is now being held by a certain party without my consent, who refuses to return it to me. I wish to warn anyone interested that the present holder of it has not my permission to negotiate its sale and that he cannot deliver title.
Very respectfully,
J. F. MacCARTHY.
339 Lexington Ave., N. Y. City.
Any portrait by Gilbert Stuart is worth from ten thousand dollars up. That there should be a new discovery of a Gilbert Stuart painting, especially one of George Washington, was a great surprise to me. And I know J. F. MacCarthy. He is one of those ideal antique dealers who could not help being one. Of course he sells the paintings, engravings and etchings he discovers, but I am sure he would prefer to keep them if circumstances did not compel him to earn a living, even as you and I. MacCarthy is a well-known figure in auction rooms all over town. He is well known down on Fourth Avenue, where old clothes, damaged shoes, cheap furniture is sold, together with works of art, tapestries, paintings, as well as in those fashionable auction rooms on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, which look like the orchestra of a theatre, where the visitors sit in comfortable plush chairs.
On Fourth Avenue, the auctioneers urge the people to buy, use all the tricks of their much-maligned trade to bring up the price a quarter of a dollar at a time. In the fashionable parts of the city, the auctioneers are well-posed orators who seem to beg the crowds not to buy because they will get so much better prices tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. These auctioneers are studies in themselves. At any rate they are excellent psychologists. And MacCarthy is their great friend. He knows perhaps more than they do. He gives them valuable pointers and he is such a pleasant chap to talk to because he knows stories and tells them well.
So I went up to his shop, which really is not a shop but a sort of connoisseur’s den, and asked him about the “ad” he inserted. “Tell me about it,” I cried. “Was the picture stolen from you? How did you ever get hold of a real Gilbert Stuart? How long have you had it? Why didn’t you ever show it and where is it now?”
MacCarthy is rather slow in his movements and in his speech. He settled himself comfortably in an old Chippendale chair, supposed to have been owned by General Beauregarde, and began in his epic manner:
“You did see the picture. I had it almost eight years. I had it long before I moved to Lexington Avenue. I bought it at the James Sutton sale. It was catalogued as a painting by Wertmuller, supposed to represent George Washington. Wertmuller was a Swiss painter of fame, who came to this country about 1790. Washington sat for him and later on he made several copies of the original portrait. His picture evidently didn’t interest the public very much during that sale and I bought it for little money. I had it in the shop for years. Many people looked at it, but not one seemed to pay any attention to it. It was not a good painting of Washington; the likeness was rather poor and the whole thing looked unfinished.
“One afternoon last year I was looking for some painting in my attic and there I ran across the Washington portrait. I took it downstairs to this room, where we are now sitting. I looked at it for a good long while, perhaps for the first time since I had bought it, and it struck me as strange that Wertmuller should have painted Washington’s eyes as brown, when everybody knows that Washington had blue eyes. The paint seemed very heavy in certain spots and the idea struck me that the whole portrait had been overpainted. I took a little solvent, touched up the eyes and you can imagine how astonished I was to see that the color came off.
“I was very careful, of course, but my interest was aroused. I spent the whole afternoon removing the paint from the eyes. My work was rewarded. Beautiful blue eyes were beneath the coat of paint. I tried the solvent on other parts of the picture and soon I found that the whole canvas had been overpainted. In the course of a week I had removed the entire coat of overpaint and beneath it was an entirely different painting.
“It was a beautiful portrait of Washington, but surely not the work of Wertmuller. I spent another week cleaning it and restoring the painting. It was unmistakably Gilbert Stuart, but it was entirely unlike any other Stuart picture of Washington.
“I at once went to the library and studied the work of Stuart, comparing carefully all paintings he had ever done with the one in my possession. The pose was exactly the same as that of his “Lansdowne” portrait.
“Lord Lansdowne was a very celebrated connoisseur who met Gilbert Stuart during the artist’s sojourn in London and commissioned him to paint a life-size portrait of General Washington in 1796. It is a matter of record that Gilbert Stuart executed this order under grave difficulties.
“France had sent innumerable painters to Mt. Vernon to paint the first President of the new Republic. Hundreds of artists from all parts of Europe came to America in order to paint Washington and on the strength of having painted Washington to receive commissions from the first families of America. Washington had grown tired of giving sittings to all these painters, some of whom were really great artists, but others second-rate craftsmen, who wished to build their reputations upon a Washington portrait painted from life. Gilbert Stuart begged Washington to sit for him again, but Washington had sworn off once for all. Then Stuart used his influence among Washington’s friends and finally Mrs. Bingham, a great favorite of George Washington in 1796 and also a great friend of the artist, succeeded.
“The following letter is on record in the Library of Congress:
“Sir:—I am under promise to Mrs. Bingham to sit for you tomorrow at nine o’clock, and wishing to know if it be convenient to you that I should do so, and whether it shall be at your own home (as she talked of the State House), I send this note to ask information. I am, sir, your obedient servant,”
“GEORGE WASHINGTON.”
“Monday evening, 11th April, 1796.”
“Stuart describes in a letter to Mrs. Bingham, Washington’s visit to his studio. The great man was nervous, ill-tempered and considered the whole thing an imposition upon his kindness.”
“I give you an hour,” he cried after entering the studio. “Tell me in what position you want me and do your work quickly. I am tired and I want to get back home.”
Washington’s nervousness proved contagious. Stuart became so nervous that he hardly knew what he was doing. He realized that he never could induce Washington to sit again, so he took a canvas and threw in hurriedly Washington’s face in broad strokes. He had set all his hopes upon this life-size portrait. He had made arrangements with a steel engraver to have the portrait engraved. He knew that everybody would buy a good portrait of Washington and that his success would not only crown his achievement as an artist but also make him financially independent for the rest of his life.
He made a color sketch of Washington’s features as well as he could. It was a short sketch of the head. Later on he engaged three different men to pose for the full length of the body. The Library of Congress retains the correspondence of Gilbert Stuart with Martha Washington, who loaned him a complete wardrobe of her husband, her husband’s sword and cape, to be worn by the models.
Stuart’s portrait not only pleased Lord Lansdowne but it became the portrait of General Washington. The steel engravings in life size were sold out the very week that they had been struck off. Millions of copies circulated all over the world. But the original sketch of the head was lost. Almost every work as well about Gilbert Stuart as about George Washington’s portrait contains the notice that the original sketch in colors of Lansdowne has been lost.
“My picture was that very sketch. I proved it conclusively. It would lead too far to tell you about the months of detective work I put in tracing back the proprietors of this painting for the last one hundred and fifty years. I was successful, and of course you can imagine how much the painting is worth.
“One day a well known art dealer of Philadelphia strolled into my shop and I told him the story as I have told it to you.
“‘I will sell the picture for you,’ he said. ‘Give me 50 per cent commission and I’ll sell it quickly.’
“I knew the man; he had sold very valuable paintings in the past. In fact, everybody in the art world knows him. I simply cried: ‘Go to it! Get me the best price that you can get.’
“He took the picture along with him and that is the last I ever heard of it. I let the matter rest for several months and then wrote him a letter requesting the return of the picture.
“His astounding answer came back: He claimed to be half owner of the painting; as I had let him in on the 50 per cent profit-sharing basis he refused to give up the painting.
“I went to my lawyer and my lawyer told me: ‘You are stung. That gentleman certainly did you. There are only two ways of action open for you. You either sue him for the value of the picture; no doubt you will get a judgment, but I doubt whether you will ever be able to collect on the judgment. And the minute that you sue for the money, you abandon automatically your proprietary rights to the painting. If you would know where the painting is you could replevin it.’”
“But do you know where it is?”
“I didn’t at the time. Finally this gentleman of Philadelphia made me a proposition to put the painting on sale in one of the most prominent art galleries of New York, who specialize in historic paintings and in old masters.
“The proposition was to pay this art dealer a commission of 20 per cent of the prospective purchase price. This proposition made me suspicious. It would mean 20 per cent to the art dealer; 40 per cent to the man of Philadelphia. Two votes against my one.
“I realized that I was helpless, therefore I inserted the advertisement. I at least wish to prevent him and his helpers to get the reward for my work, for my discovery and all the pains I took in establishing the identity of the portrait.”
I sympathize with MacCarthy. I wonder where Gilbert Stuart’s famous painting will find its last resting place?
EVERY city has its book streets. Book shops are gregarious, and they grow like mushrooms in groups. There is little competition in the book business. No matter how large and complete the stock of a second-hand book dealer may be, his neighbor’s collection will be quite different. The clients of second-hand bookshops like to “browse about,” they seldom ask for a certain book, and they love to have a large territory in which to hunt.
The location of book streets changes with the growth of a city. Seventy-five years ago the book centre of New York was far downtown on Ann Street; after the Astor Library had opened its doors, Fourth Avenue became the city center and soon was lined with picturesque bookshops. The city grew and Twenty-third Street became the Dorado of the book-hunter. Then people began to make immense fortunes and build palaces and mansions on Fifth Avenue, Central Park was opened to the public ... and Fifty-ninth Street became the book street of New York. Ever further the city expanded. Harlem grew in population and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is another shopping center for lovers of books and objects of art.
Most of the book dealers kept step with the times. They moved from street to street. The grandfather had been prominent on Ann Street, the son on Fourth Avenue, and the grandson flourishes on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth.
Fourth Avenue has come to honors again during the past four years. Some big book dealers had the idea to move back to old “book-sellers’ row,” new people soon gathered around them and today most of the second-hand book business of the United States is transacted here on this old street, surrounded by a ramshackle neighborhood, invaded by factory buildings and sweatshops.
But some book dealers could never make up their minds to move. They stuck to their shops. They are the landmarks of New York’s book streets.
The Nestor of the book dealers who “have remained” and have withstood the trend of the times is E. A. Custer on Fifty-ninth Street. Right near Park Avenue, next to a livery stable in the cellar of an old-fashioned brownstone house, is his picturesque shop. Large bookstalls with hundreds of books invite you to rummage about, quaint paintings and drawings will arrest your attention and make you stop even if you are in a hurry. Firearms of all descriptions, swords and shining armor add a war touch that seems quite appropriate in our time. If you look closer you see a pale face with keen black eyes behind the show window. You have to look very closely in order to detect it. And if you enter the store you will meet the proprietor of face and store, sitting at his look-out, watching his stalls, scrutinizing the passers-by who stop to glance at his wares. He continues in his position while he is talking to you; he never takes his eyes from his treasures, even while waiting on a customer, or delving into the depths of his shop.
“I have to watch my property,” he offers as explanation while excusing himself. “I am listening to what you say,” he adds, “don’t mind if I don’t look at you while we talk. All people who stop out there to look at my books are thieves, and if I give them a chance to get away with my books they prefer to acquire them that way rather than to buy. They steal from earliest childhood and never cease until they are dead. I have been forty years in this very place and I know what I am talking about. And though I am as watchful as a dog, I lose about twenty per cent of the stock that I put in my stalls through thieving. All book collectors are thieves; people who never would think of taking anything else without paying for it must think a bookshop is different from all other stores. Their consciences are not sin-stricken if they incidentally slip a book they like into their pocket and walk out with it. I have long ceased to read books. I read human nature for my pastime.
“There is not a day that I do not lose books by theft. Take for instance last week. I had a set of Dickens on my stands. A cheap edition on the table where I keep books for boys. I saw a little freckled, red-haired, bare-footed lad inspecting the Dickens books for longer than half an hour. Some time later he came back and looked at them again. This time he had a few books under his arm. He laid his books on the table and managed very cleverly to pick them up after a while together with one of my Dickens books. The boy really wanted to read the book and I let him get away with it. I knew that he was passing my shop every day, and I thought of speaking to him another time.
“The next day he came again, inspected the remaining volumes of my Dickens set for a few minutes, repeated his trick of the day before and stole another volume. He came every day and acquired six of the seven volumes. It was only on Saturday that he stole the sixth volume; this time I went after him, told him sternly to come back with me, handed him the seventh volume and said to him:
“‘Here, my boy, I don’t keep open on Sunday, and somebody might buy this one and spoil your set. Better take it along. You have the right spirit. Continue and one of these days you will find yourself a millionaire. Perhaps then you will endow libraries.’
“Or the old Irish woman whom I caught only yesterday. She came with a basket covered with newspapers, examined my books very carefully, and dropped every once in a while one of the books in her basket. I waited until the basket was filled, then I told her to come inside of my shop; I emptied the basket and handed it back to her. I didn’t say a word. She took her basket and went outside.
“Well-to-do-looking men come in, examine books, tear out plates, and walk out again without buying a penny’s worth of my stock.
“I don’t think they are all bad at heart. They simply don’t look at books as merchandise and if they can get something for nothing, they take it. Women are the worst. Especially those modern women who write and try to reform humanity. They are quite shameless and do anything as long as there is a slight chance of getting away with it.”
“But,” I interjected, “mustn’t it be dreadful to sit in your shop day after day as a sort of watchman?”
“I’m accustomed to it,” he answered, “and that’s the only way I can make my business pay. It was not always so. There was a time when people really loved books and bought them in order to read. Then they had time to read. The successful man of today has an automobile, has to go out joy-riding after business hours, has to spend his time in cabarets and road-houses. He needs books only as decorations when he buys a home or furnishes an apartment. And then he leaves it usually to his decorator to choose the most attractive and expensive bindings in keeping with the color scheme of his library.
“I tell you, New Yorkers dont know books, dont want to know them. The men read newspapers, the women magazines, and the young people trashy novels. Of course there are our modern book collectors. They know as much about the commercial values of books as I do. They buy books as an investment, just like pictures. They follow the auction sales and gamble in books. You can hardly call such people booklovers. Thirty years ago I used to have comfortable chairs in my shop and in the evening big business men, lawyers, and physicians would drop in and examine at leisure some tomes that I had laid before them because I knew they were interested in this or that subject. Today most of the men who are interested in books are so poor that they can hardly pay their room rent.”
And then he proceeded to show me some of his treasures. “Who do you think buys this sort of books in our day? Dealers, nobody but dealers. And they sell them again to dealers. Finally they find their way into the auction rooms and are bought again by a dealer.”
Mr. Custer has traveled all over Europe and is a lover of beautiful paintings. Original Corots, Millets, original drawings by Aubrey Beardsley lean against piles of books, hang in cobwebbed corners. “Are you not afraid that someone will steal them?” I asked him, commenting on his carelessness.
“They don’t know enough,” was his answer. “Some months ago I had a wonderful painting of Corot’s in the show window. A man whom I knew as a notorious miser came in and asked if it was genuine. I said in a matter-of-fact way that I have no proof but the picture, and that I would sell it for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I myself had paid for it three thousand. He looked at it for a long time and then said he would come in again. The following day he brought his wife and brother-in-law to look at it. They examined it very carefully and went out. The following week I sent the painting to an auction sale where it realized eight thousand eight hundred dollars, notwithstanding the bad times on account of the war. On the very day that I received my check in payment for the picture, the man came in again and proposed to buy it for one hundred dollars. I showed him the check, and it pleases me even today to think how disappointed and crestfallen he was; because I never told him that I would not have sold him the picture even if he had given me a hundred and twenty-five dollars at the time I offered it to him.
“I have my worries, but I also have a lot of enjoyment watching my contemporaries and noting their faults.”
Mr. Custer is a small man with a kindly smile, and after I saw him chatting with the ragamuffins swarming around his bookstalls, and talking kindly to a girl who wanted some information, his piercing dark eyes did not seem so very misogynic and his pessimism seemed of the kind of the dog who barks but does not bite.
Little Max Breslow, who isn’t taller than a good-sized doll and has such tiny hands that he can hardly hold two books at the same time, is so vivacious and young looking that everybody must like him if for no other reason than his continuous smile. He is the last of his guild on Twenty-third Street. Max sold books since his earliest youth; he sold his school books. When a boy he used to go about “picking up” books and selling them to book dealers; he started in as apprentice in an out-of-the-way bookshop on Eighth Avenue, and then opened up the cellar which he has made so attractive since.
As neighbors he had the potentates of the second-hand book market, Mr. Schulte and Mr. Stammer, both of whom have moved to Fourth Avenue since, and many other less important sellers of books who have dispersed in all directions during these latter years. He loves Twenty-third Street and intends to stick there till the last house is transformed into a factory. You almost fall into his shop from the street, so steep are the stairs and tread-worn. He has the instinct of the born second-hand book dealer to find out-of-the-way books on out-of-the-way subjects. There is always something unusual in his shop and his prizes are within the reach of the poor man’s purse. He likes his books and he likes to sell them to good homes. And therefore he often fits his price to the purchaser’s purse. His hobby is Walt Whitman. He has the most famous collection of Whitman items in this country, even larger and more extensive than the one Horace Traubel has guarded. He has original manuscripts of Whitman, proof sheets of his books, everything that was ever written in any language about Walt Whitman, more than four hundred pictures of the “good, gray poet,” and you couldn’t buy one of those precious things for any money in the world.
Frank Bender, who is considered at present one of the leading second-hand book dealers of Fourth Avenue, and that means of the United States, is an entirely self-made man, and his career is unique even among book dealers. Only five years ago he started his shop, without books, without money, and without knowledge. In a short time he acquired all these three essentials, and here is his own story:
“I used to sell books to architects on the road, architectural year-books and magazines, and later I added books on decorations which I sold to decorators. It occurred to me one day that I could save rent if I opened a shop where I could sell enough books of all kinds to pay expenses. That was five years ago. I signed a lease for a little one-story building that stood where the new post-office on Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street is at present. I sold enough architectural books to pay my first month’s rent and to buy lumber to fix up my shop. I literally built up my own business. I laid the floors, built the shelves, the tables. My shelves remained empty because I had no money to buy books. One day a friendly print dealer came along who must have taken interest in and pity on me. “Why don’t you hang some prints around your shop to fill out the wall spaces?” he asked. “It will make it look better. I have a bunch of prints I will sell you for forty dollars and I’ll give you six months’ time in which to pay it.”
“I accepted his offer, and those prints netted me over five hundred dollars in a surprisingly short time. If one keeps a bookshop something unusual happens almost every day. It is the uncertainty of the book business that always attracts me. Of course every book dealer who wants to make a decent living must have a specialty of his own. Mine is architectural books. I have a large clientele of architects and decorators; I know these books well, and they were the backbone of my business. Chance and good luck are the great factors in the book dealer’s life. Let me tell you a few instances:
“A few months after I opened my shop at the time of the big auction sales, I felt very gloomy. Of course I needed cash in order to buy books, and I did not have it. One morning one of my best customers walked into my shop and asked for a copy of Canina’s Ancient Rome. I told him that the book was so scarce that there was no use to ask for it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am willing to give you two hundred and fifty dollars for it any time you bring me a copy.’ The very same afternoon I noticed a copy of the book in an auction catalog to be sold the next day. I went to the auction and sat there shaking like a leaf, waiting for the first bid after the book was put up. Nobody seemed to be interested to buy it. Somebody bid five dollars, and I got it finally for six dollars and seventy-five cents. I had it wrapped up, took it around the corner to my customer and collected two hundred and fifty dollars. That was the first real money I made, and it gave me a chance to acquire better books.
“Take only yesterday. I was very busy writing when a man who introduced himself as a rag paper-dealer, offered me linen-bound copies of a historical encyclopedia for seven and a half cents a volume. I didn’t even want to spend time talking to him, and so I declined abruptly. ‘I have many thousands of these books,’ the man insisted, ‘make me an offer.’ He went out and, strange to say, came back in a half hour with a cart-load of the books and said to me, ‘Here they are.’ The books proved good sellers and I made a pile of money. The people that come into my shop are my only source of information. They all tell me what they know about the books they are interested in. I love to talk to them, even if they seem to be cranks. No, I don’t mistrust them. They are welcome to make themselves at home in my place. I believe that everybody that enters my shop is just as honest and straight as I am myself. Only once, after I had lost a valuable book in a mysterious way, I became suspicious. I was busy talking to some customers as a man entered whose looks I did not like. He busied himself with some fashion books at the back of my store. I grew so nervous about him that I approached him quite roughly with a question, ‘What is it you are looking for?’ He answered, as I thought guiltily, naming the title of a certain fashion book that I happened to have in stock. I brought it out, he examined it and asked the price. It was seven dollars and fifty. The book had cost me five dollars. He said that he could not pay seven fifty for the book. ‘If he really wants to buy the book,’ I thought, ‘and didn’t come in here to steal, he will purchase it for three fifty.’ I firmly believed that the man did not have ten cents in his pocket. I offered the book for three dollars and fifty cents. ‘At this price, I take it,’ he answered. I lost one dollar and fifty cents, but regained my belief in humanity.”
On Thirty-fourth, near Lexington Avenue, Jerome Duke has opened a bookshop of a peculiar sort. It is not exactly a book shop because there are antiques and curiosities all over the place. The books are thrown together topsy-turvy, Latin authors, modern novelists, theological books, old French tomes and German philosophers. I asked the proprietor about his books and his answer was:
“I don’t know anything about them. I never read books and would not be bothered with them. I buy them at a certain price and I try to sell them at a profit. In fact, I intend to buy anything I can get cheap enough, no matter what it is. I went into the book game in order to gamble and I am going to gamble on anything that people bring in here.
“There is one thing I have just refused to buy because the man wanted too much for it. He said that he had recently returned from Europe, had been a soldier, and wanted to sell me the embalmed finger of a German general. I forget the name of the general, but the man said that it was authentic and that he would sign a document before a notary public, swearing that he had been present at the time the finger was cut off of the general’s hand. Now, if he had asked fifty cents or a dollar, I would have been willing to take a chance, because it would make a good window display in this time of war; but he wanted five dollars, and I couldn’t see my way clear. That’s too much of a chance, to stake a five-spot on an embalmed finger of a German general. So I bought a slipper instead. It belonged to a Madame Jumel, and she is supposed to have worn it on the day that she got her divorce from Aaron Burr. I paid a dollar for it and I consider it a pretty sound gamble.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well,” he answered, “because Aaron Burr was the second Vice-President of the United States.” Of course that argument was final, and I wished him luck with his purchase.
Strange to say, most of the bookshops in New York with individual appeal are modern places only recently established, and their proprietors young, often very young people. Most of them are up-to-date business men who had their training in different lines. They were lovers of books, they realized the possibilities of a “bookshop with a soul,” they opened shops after their own hearts, and are meeting with success.
Alfred Goldsmith’s is the youngest of New York’s book shops. This is to be found on Lexington Avenue near Twenty-fifth Street, in an old-fashioned basement, with pillars and nooks, near some of the oldest auction rooms in the city, just the place for a book shop.
Shelves all around the walls filled with a few thousand well-selected books, comfortable chairs to sit in here and there, a sacred case of first editions, all other books well dusted and in neat rows, modern authors mostly, scarce translations of authors whose names, perhaps, you have never heard before, but who will be your good friends when once you have made their acquaintance.
Mr. Goldsmith is a young man, a college graduate with a successful business career in the print paper industry behind him. He always was a great reader and buyer of books. One day this fall he decided to open a book shop, and to get married. He did both, and is well satisfied with both ventures.
Book collectors are gifted with a sixth sense. It is not necessary to send them announcements. Some day they are sure to drift in, and if the atmosphere is congenial they come again and again.
“I love books,” said Mr. Goldsmith, who is a great philosopher and an excellent talker. “Book selling is a game. The sort of books I am selling are hard to be found, and quite easy to sell. My great pleasure is to go about town picking up my books. Once I place them for sale on my shelves they quickly go. It is wonderfully interesting to observe the people that come in here to buy books. Of course you know all about the peculiarities of collectors. But since I have opened my shop I have discovered some new species of book shop habitues. Let me tell you about them.
“There is Mr. Pimple, a big, stout, uncouth man of about thirty, who looks like a butcher and pretends to be a highly educated lover of books. His specialty is the autograph game. He writes letters to living authors which read something like this: ‘In a treasured niche of my favorite book shelf in my library, is a volume that I prize more than any other book. It is your novel. You would earn the eternal gratitude of an old book worm if you would have the goodness to autograph it for me.’ The author receives the letter and imagines some old devoted book crank, autographs the copy, and returns it to Mr. Pimple at his (the author’s) own expense. Mr. Pimple makes the rounds of the book dealers and sells his treasured autograph copy to the highest bidder. Worse than that, he throws the very letter which he received from the author, promising the book, into the bargain. Gertrude Atherton, Richard Le Gallienne, Katie Douglas Wiggins and many others have autographed whole sets, forty and fifty books at one time, for Mr. Pimple, who went so far as to take advance orders for such sets.
“How little he really thinks of the authors to whom he sends his stock admiration letter the following story evidences: One day he asked me if eight books of Upton Sinclair, first editions, would bring good money if autographed by the author. I answered in the affirmative. Pimple looked up the address of Sinclair, wrote him, received a favorable reply and found that it would cost forty cents to send the books by parcel post to Pasadena, Cal. ‘Too much money,’ he remarked. He tore out the fly leaves, sent them on, Mr. Sinclair autographed them, Pimple pasted them carefully back into the books and sold the whole set on the very day.
“But the best trick was the one he put over on the publishers of Ambrose Bierce. After Bierce’s disappearance, collectors were hot after his first editions and autographs. Bierce’s publishers had a good many letters and presented one to each purchaser of the author’s collected works. Mr. Pimple paid them a visit, talked for more than an hour of his admiration for Bierce, mentioned once or twice that circumstances did not permit him to purchase one of the sets, and finally declared that the ambition of his life was to own a letter in the handwriting of ‘the greatest writer and artist in the world.’ The sincere enthusiasm of Pimple, his insistence, the pleading of poverty, finally induced the publisher to give him a short letter of Ambrose Bierce as a gift.
‘I will never part with this treasure. I will always carry it in my portfolio, near my heart,’ were his parting words. He came directly to my shop and told me the story. We were talking about Bierce as a customer entered and soon took a hand in the conversation. ‘I’d like to get a letter of Bierce,’ he explained. ‘I would be willing to pay seven dollars and a half for a short note in his hand.’
“I hardly believed my eyes! Mr. Pimple took out his portfolio from near his heart and offered his treasured letter of Bierce for the seven dollars and a half.
“This man is known to every rare book dealer in the city. And he isn’t the only one of his clan. He is tolerated because he produces inscribed copies of authors that are hard to get.
“Then there are the habitual book thieves, whom I love to watch. I once had an occasion to do a friendly turn to one of these gentlemen who are on our blacklist. He calls himself Van Southall, and in an outburst of gratitude he made the following confession: ‘I like you, Goldsmith. You don’t need to be afraid of me. I’d never take anything in your shop. It is quite different with other dealers. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of them. If I can slip something in my pocket it is my own business and their lookout. But you can feel quite safe. I know that you are an ambitious young man who loves books and I should never harm you.’
Mr. Goldsmith reads a great deal, books as well as human nature. He rarely makes a mistake in suggesting books to his clients. He likes people who write books, he likes their personality, and no author can find a better apostle than Mr. Goldsmith, provided he is congenial. If you wish to know what authors Mr. Goldsmith does not like, look at his ten-cent stand in front of the shop. Extraordinary values can be had there for one dime, because Mr. Goldsmith does not like the books.
Just a while before the time when certain people got the ambition to own a tea shop in Greenwich Village, the very same people thought it the aim of their lives to be the proprietors of book shops in the vicinity of Washington Square. Still more ambitious were they. They wanted to print their own books. The Boni Brothers (now Boni and Liveright) started their Glebe magazine there, and published pretty little books by all sorts of authors; Kreymborg here printed his booklets; and many others, whose fame was too short lived to be recorded, half a dozen of them. One sold out to the other and finally Egmont Arens purchased whatever there was left from pretty Renee LaCoste. His became the bookshop of the neighborhood.
Arens is a born publisher, a litterateur, himself, a connoisseur of good books, and an excellent business man, to boot. So he became the first successful business man in Greenwich Village. His shop is crowded with intellectuals from the whole town. He invites geniuses as well as buyers of books. His series of plays—there are seven of them published to date—are the first plays of men who are making their way in the great theatrical world, and who gave life for a time to the Little Theatre movement in New York. Arens is a good business man, as I said before, and so he recently purchased a printing plant and is printing his own books. His Whitman book is the best on the market, and his next publication shows his daring spirit.
To publish a verbatim translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s famous “Reigen,” is surely a courageous undertaking in our times of Comstockery, Sumnerism and superprudery. These ten dialogues caused a considerable stir throughout the civilized world. They were translated into every language, including Japanese, but excluding English. No English or American publisher cared to give these exquisite silhouettes of real life to the reading public.
Some months ago a young writer who is known for his imbroglios with the vice censor (from which he invariably emerged as victor) gave a private reading of the plays before an invited audience. Arens was there and at once decided to undertake the publication.
“The publisher ought to be a book seller and should spend most of his time in his book shop. That is the only way to feel the pulse of the reading public,” is Mr. Arens’ motto.
It isn’t a bad maxim for a modern American publisher.
High upon Lexington Avenue, near Fifty-seventh street, is the book shop of Mr. E. Weyhe. His specialties are books on art, rare prints, etchings and books on laces.
“I am a German,” said Mr. Weyhe. “I can’t do anything about it. I simply have to make the best of it in these times of war. I always have been a bookseller. I was an apprentice to a bookseller in Germany, and I learned the trade in the old German way. I worked from six o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night for three long years. I loved to travel and was employed in shops in Germany, Italy, and finally I settled in London. There I opened a shop. Unfortunately for me the war broke out. I had to close up and the next best thing to do was to come over here. The British Government most courteously gave me permit to leave, and I will never forget the kind words of the policeman who took me to the steamer. ‘I hope you will soon come back and not stay in America’.”
Mr. Weyhe caters to moneyed collectors exclusively. People who buy books on laces for $250.00, or a history of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ work for $350.00, people who want rare things and to whom money is no object. He is a friend of the artist and writer, who are welcome in his shop, to whom he lends books on chance acquaintance, because he believes in human honesty and has unbounded faith in his fellow-men.
“People trust me. Why shouldn’t I trust them,” was his simple remark. It seems quite wonderful to think that Mr. Weyhe came to America four years ago as a refugee and without funds, and owns today a choice stock of the rarest books, the confidence of his clients and credit wherever he desires it.
Opposite the library on Forty-second Street, high up in a medium sized sky-scraper, is Mr. Gerhardt’s den. Christian Gerhardt is a specialist in out-of-the-way books by out-of-the-way authors. He issues catalogues every month, and these catalogues are indexes of curiosities of literature. Pamphlets by well known authors, perhaps their first literary products, books by fanatics, and by poets whose songs were never known by the world. Individualistic magazines of whose existence you have never heard, fill long rows of his book shelves. But whenever I think of Mr. Gerhardt I remember that unhappy singer of our East Side, of Zoe Anderson, who called herself the “Queen of Bohemia,” who founded the Ragged Edge Club, and presided for years at its unique sessions in the “old Maria.” Miss Anderson struggled for years with printers, paper dealers, and news companies in order to give us her little magazine. The East Side, a fearless free-lance sheet, in which she attacked everyone and everything. The champion of the outcasts and sweatshop workers of the East Side, living among them, writing about them with greater understanding than any contemporary writer, poor Zoe ended her own life as cheerfully as she had lived after telling all about it in the then current and last issue of her magazine. Zoe Anderson had been a well known newspaper woman on the staffs of many metropolitan papers, including the New York Times.
Gerhardt was her lieutenant, the moving spirit of her Ragged Edge Club, master of ceremonies of the jolly dinners she used to give, and master of ceremonies at her funeral, where they carried out her last wishes: The same band that had played merry dances for her while alive, played the same merry dances during the burial ceremonies. “The East Side is mournful enough. I have always tried to make them happy. Let them be merry to the tune of gay music while they are burying me,” were her own directions.
Gerhardt became her literary executor and her few books, together with bound copies of her magazine always occupy a place of honor in his den.
FORTY-SECOND Street loses its brilliance on Seventh Avenue and shows all the way down to the West Side ferries the sad degeneration of a New York street that was once a fashionable residence section. Glaring electric signs from Fifth to Seventh Avenues. High life after dusk. Eighteen theaters. Cabarets galore. The amusement center of the metropolis around Broadway. The seat of learning in one whole block on Fifth Avenue. The moment you cross Seventh Avenue, cheap rooming houses, tenement dwellings, sweat shops. Wealth and poverty rub elbows. Puritanical decency on the borders of the city’s mire. Lunch rooms, garages, plumber shops, dirty Jewish and Italian groceries, loan brokers’ offices, everywhere signs “Rooms to Let,” gaudily dressed women emerge from dark house entrances on whose stoops laborers read their evening papers. Children everywhere, ragged, uncared for children.
In the midst of this typically American panorama, pinched in between a repair shop and a restaurant, is Mr. Lawson’s book store. He sells books, too, but I would rather call his place of business an “intellectual exchange.”
“How can you sell books in this neighborhood?” I asked of Mr. Lawson on my first visit to his shop. I knew him a dozen of years ago in Chicago. He’s a book man of the old school. He knows books, is well read, well known among the members of his guild. Americana had been his specialty and many a scarce and rare item had he discovered in days gone by.
“What a strange place you have selected here in New York.”
“Stick around for a couple of hours and you will see yourself that book stores of my brand are actually needed in this sort of neighborhood in New York,” was his off-hand answer, while he continued counting green and yellow tickets, assorting them by their colors.
“Coupons,” was the answer. “All these people in my neighborhood insist on getting coupons with all their purchases. So-called profit-sharing coupons. They get them with their cigars, with their soap, with their butter, with most of their victuals. Each of these coupons represents a certain cash value. Here in this catalogue,” and he showed me a voluminous book with many pictures, “you can see what they can exchange for their coupons if they choose to save enough of them. Here lies the point. They never save enough of these coupons. Most of my customers live from hand to mouth, often they are in actual need of ten or fifteen cents. I buy their coupons. At other times, again they come down here to buy coupons in order to complete the needed number of the slips and to exchange them for some household article, but mostly for ‘gifts.’ You would be surprised how they like cheap bric-a-brac, phony jewelry and most of all, cut-glass—imitation cut-glass, of course. Most of my business is done after 6 o’clock in the evening.
“See the music rolls over there? A player-piano concern established some time ago a branch in this section and got rid of hundreds of instruments. And whenever the people need money they bring me their music rolls. I pay a few cents for them. But that’s just what they need. They sell them on Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, after they receive their pay checks, they buy new ones. It is a part of their life’s routine.”
An old woman came in with a bunch of magazines, Mr. Lawson bought them for a few cents.
“She keeps a rooming house,” he explained. “Her roomers are cheap comedians, who never stay longer than a couple of days or so, and always leave magazines when they move. She sells them. She also sends her roomers down to me to buy magazines if they get lonely in the evening and inquire for something to read.
“You see that man?” and he pointed to an old fellow who was examining carefully a big heap of magazines. “He’s the news dealer from the corner. He runs in several times a day and buys lots of magazines. The American News Company grants him the return privilege on certain magazines for 30 days and others for 60 days. He buys any standard magazine of the current week here for a nickel, some even cheaper, and then he returns them to the news company at full value. For instance, he buys a 20-cent magazine for a nickel and the American News Company credits him with 15 cents upon its return.
“There is nothing on earth that you can not sell in this neighborhood, and on the other hand, you would be constantly surprised what people will offer you for sale.”
The store was crowded. Boys wanted detective stories, women dream books, foreigners dictionaries, somebody was trying records on an old phonograph in the back of the store. A woman who still showed traces of great beauty wanted to get rid of hundreds of photographs of herself, showing her in exotic stage costume.
“But how about these oil paintings?” There were some magnificent pictures in one corner and really good books right next to trashy novels. “That’s the other side of my book business,” answered Lawson. “Dealers come in from all parts of the country and I have the whole day to myself to attend auctions, to visit collectors. A good many gems have drifted in here. Doesn’t it look like a junk shop? And I dare to say that very few dealers in New York have such valuable books, autographs, prints, paintings and etchings as I have at times right here among all this junk.”
A procession of strange people continued to pour in. Everybody bought something, sold or exchanged something, half a dozen languages were talked simultaneously and the cash register rang merrily through the noise and constant chatter.
“There must be lots of money in this novel game of yours?” I asked of Lawson. “Of course there is,” he answered cheerfully. “The individual purchases are small, but judge for yourself how many people are coming in and then don’t forget that every one of them is a steady customer, coming down here almost every other day. Buying or selling, but I am always the winner. And I dare say that these people would miss me. I provide for them amusement, pleasure, and even education, and do they not come to me in their need?”
Book stores, like mushrooms, never grow solitary. Only a few doors south is another book store. Nothing but books and magazines. Mr. Casement is the proprietor. Somebody told me once that Mr. Casement is a second cousin of Sir Roger Casement. But Mr. Casement denied any relationship with the great Irish patriot. He could not deny, however, his Irish origin. “I sell magazines mostly to my neighbors here, detective stories to the boys and Meade’s books to the girls. But the dealers from all over town come here and pick out whatever they want.”
All his books are alphabetically arranged and I don’t wonder that many a scarce book can be found amongst his stock. Mr. Casement is a solitary figure among the book dealers of New York. Very silent, always kindly, smiling, obliging and unassuming. Often in the twilight, when he drinks his cup of coffee, and eats his herring with rye bread, I love to drop in and watch his self-content and real satisfaction with his life and with his lot. He is the only happy man among all the book dealers in New York—from hope and fear set free—content among his books.
The only uptown book shop that keeps open in the evening. The visitors here are quite different from those on 42d street. But I guess they are as lonesome and often as helpless as the people who come to Mr. Lawson’s shop. There are the strangers from the big hostelries on Fifth avenue, the girls from the Studio Club, and a good many physicians from the nearby clinical buildings. Mr. Alexander A. Salop is the master of the mansion. A young man, studious looking, perhaps because he wears eye glasses. A shrewd business man but books are not only merchandise to him. He reads much in several languages, has his likes and dislikes in literature and keeps always a great variety of modern German and French books. A little room in the back of his shop is consecrated to the bookworms. A few comfortable chairs, reading lamps, library tables, it looks very homey and too inviting to simply buy and go. Peter Stammer, who calls himself “The Original New York Book Hunter” and who knows the book if it was ever printed anywhere and at any time in this world, comes here often in the evening to pick up books, but mostly to chat, to “swap” experiences.
Mr. Stammer ought to write his memoirs for the benefit of contemporary literature. Here are a few interesting bits gleaned from him several days ago:
“Did you ever know,” he asked, “that Henry James had a sister? She must have been a literary woman of great ability. About 40 years ago I was a typesetter in an English town. I remember the most curious job I ever had to do was a book by Miss James. It was a sort of autobiography most extraordinary. A big book of several hundred pages, very intimate and outspoken. Only three copies were to be printed. The type was destroyed and even the proof pages had to be returned. I wonder what ever happened to that book. I wish I could have made a copy of its contents. I set up the first edition of Oscar Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ That was in Boston while I worked for Benjamin Tucker.
“You would naturally think that a book printed in many millions of copies could never become scarce. I thought so, too, until I ran across a poem by Bret Harte, his Excelsior. I didn’t find the poem among his collected works. Bret Harte collectors didn’t seem to know of its existence. I started inquiries to investigate and I found that this poem had been written as an advertisement for a well known soap, had been printed in millions of copies, distributed free of charge all over America. Curious enough, my copy was the only existing one outside one in the files of the soap concern.”
Mr. Stammer knows books and people so well, has met so many writers, he really ought to retire from business for a year and write his reminiscences.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.