LINES WRITTEN UNDER PORTRAIT OF F. M. M.:
1888.
No, there is no accident, no riot on the corner of Clark Street, opposite the City Hall. The scrambling mass of people are simply book lovers and book collectors, and Powner’s has got in a new consignment of books. Such scenes occur every Saturday. The big stalls in front of the shop are filled with all sorts of books, old Roman antiquities, books on sports, old poetry, collected by someone who had disposed of his books, or who had left his treasures behind him. Mr. Powner used to be a school teacher in Greensburg, Indiana, and he started his book business about twelve years ago with the thoroughness of a school master. Rare and valuable books are his own special department, and he leaves modern books entirely to his clerks.
His shop today is the center for the Chicago collectors. The human interest he takes in his customers is that of a real antiquarian. Everybody is at home in his shop. He doesn’t begrudge anyone finding a gem on his “quarter counter.” Last week, for instance, some lucky chap found a first edition of Rousseau’s “Emile” with Rousseau’s autograph presentation inscription to the King and the royal coat of arms on the binding, and bought the book for seventy-five cents. “Such things may happen,” was Mr. Powner’s remark when he heard of the transaction. “I am glad he got it.”
Saturday is the great book day. In the back room upon empty book boxes men of all walks of life sit around, prosperous business men, millionaires, who are just enjoying living, students, newspaper men from the nearby newspaper offices, but they all are linked by a common love. They are all ardent book collectors.
There are a good many other book shops in Chicago. There is Hill’s, who caters to the extravagant wishes of Western millionaires. Then there is McClurge’s, the Model Book Store, conducted like a modern department store.
But then there is the unique product of the Chicago book market, the peripatetic book-seller. Half collector, half merchant, these men are constantly nosing about shops, picking up books in Powner’s, for instance, for twenty-five cents and selling them at once for two dollars and a half to Mr. Hill, who they know has an inquiry for that particular copy. They love the uncertainty of their daily bread. Setting out in the morning upon their rounds, they look forward to their finds of the day. In a junk shop they, perhaps, will run across one of those scarce items which are found once in a lifetime, and again they may find nothing but worry about the needs of the day.
1916
In Memoriam Julius Doerner
JULIUS DOERNER is dead. He had been a book dealer after his own heart. Living among his books was his delight. He bought constantly, sold little and read much: a man who valued his books by their contents. He was as simple as a girl of sixteen, a bad girl of sixteen.
He wore an alpaca coat and panama hat winter and summer, in snow and shine. Both were bought ten years ago at a Salvation Army store. Cats were Julius Doerner’s only companions; stray cats picked up on dark nights in alleys and doorways. They were named after the days of the week on which he found them. He never had more than fourteen. “Friday Afternoon” was a black tom-cat with six toes on each paw. It could talk. Doerner said so and he was very truthful. He hated women who were unwomanly, thought policemen incompetent, and lived on seven cents a day.
He loved his mother, who sent him a fried chicken every Christmas, half a turkey on each Thanksgiving day, and who brought him into this world fifty-seven years ago.
He loved her so much that he wanted to give her a gift which no money in the world could purchase—exclusive, unique. So, he bought an old Washington hand press, rusty and prehistoric type, and wrote a book for her; he set it up letter by letter, word by word, line by line, page by page; distributing the type after he had made only one impression. It took him three years to complete his book. It took him another year to illuminate it with rare wood cuts by Durer and Kranach, with miniatures taken from old hand-written cloister books. He bound it with his own hands, and tooled the leather of its covers with exquisite golden arabesques.
His old mother in Pennsylvania could not read a word of English, though born and brought up in America. She used Pennsylvania Dutch exclusively.
Julius Doerner never slept in a bed but was accustomed to sit up all night in a Morris chair in the back of his shop. His most exquisite pleasure, and only recreation was to play Bach, Mozart and Beethoven on an old spinet.
He wore the same celluloid collar for twelve years, and washed it every Monday morning with sapolio. The same cake and collar were purchased from a starving peddler on a very cold night, as an alternative to giving the peddler two bits for a night’s lodging.
Goethe and Franz Lieber were his favorites; Whitman, Poe and Wilde, his vaudeville stage.
He cooked vegetable soup in a big tin kettle each Tuesday, and drank it cold for the rest of the week, until the kettle was empty.
He knew what was great and beautiful in art, letters and life. To him Jesus was the greatest of men, and Rockefeller the meanest. Money was as unreal as people who buy books according to auction catalogues and bindings.
He died in his Morris chair with a book on his knees. There he was found, rigid and cold, several days afterwards by the grocer, who came to dun him for last month’s bill, which amounted to one dollar and eighty-five cents.
Julius Doerner had a big heart, a fine mind, was a Spartan by nature, German in sentimentality, a Yankee in shrewdness, a lover of truth, an enemy of hypocrisy and idleness; a friend of outcasts.
He knew books and men, and therefore could not make a success in selling books to men.
Chicagoans who met him on the street saw his long hair, his alpaca coat and his straw hat, and called him a freak; others who had met him thought him a queer one; the chosen few to whom he gave his friendship, loved him.
He was five feet, eight inches tall, wore locks and a beard that hadn’t been touched by shears for twenty-five years, didn’t give a damn for conventions and appearances, lived his own life, subservient to no one, lording over no one.
The world thought him poor. He was rich.
Requiescat in pace!
Kroch’s International Book Store on Michigan Boulevard is to the West what Brentano’s is to the East. Shopkeepers have become teachers and publicity agents. Their clients don’t know what they wish to purchase. They are too tired or too ignorant to read literary reviews. They let Mr. Kroch tell them what to read.
Mr. Kroch is an interesting little man. He wears a toupee and a broad kindly smile. He has the demeanor of a man who has risen from the ranks and is proud of it. He has kept pace with his success. Money has not turned his head. He knows that he owes gratitude to the authors whom he sells. The quainter his find, the more exclusive seems his taste, the more he pleases his clients, the greater will be his cash receipts. And so he has an open eye for authors who are not popular.
What greater boast for a book salesman in Chicago than to have disposed of more than two hundred copies of Oscar Wilde’s Life and Confessions by Frank Harris? To have induced more than one hundred people to buy each month Pearson’s Magazine? And his clients are the very rich; he doesn’t tire showing them the other side of life.
Frank Morris is still on deck, issuing catalogues, selling rare books, delighting his many friends and clients with the charm of his personality. The man with a literary past is a most amiable companion, presuming that his heart is filled with love, and that his compassion overlooks the faults of men. Frank Morris played an important part, if not a central one, in that lurid period of the early nineties, when Chicago was the literary Mecca of America.
Powner’s Book Store is the gathering place of book hunters and collectors.
“Gems can be found here,” seems the unwritten motto that attracts antiquarians, as a lighted candle attract moths. Young Mr. Powner is in the Service, somewhere-in-France. Mr. Powner, Sr., had to leave once more his ranch in Arizona, and assume the responsibilities of a Chicago shopkeeper.
And then there is Janski, the old assistant of Frank Morris in his late Adams Street shop, established in a store of his own, selling books as ever, happy and contented to contribute his part toward the elevation of Chicago’s literary taste.
On Van Buren Street, near the Boulevard, is also a new and important book store. Mr. Chandler, for more than thirty years of McClurge’s Publishing house, has set up his establishment there. Very few books are in his place, but each is a jewel. He is a sort of a George D. Smith of Chicago, but minus gambling inclinations. Books for him are not objects for speculation, but gilt-edged values.
And, of course, I paid a visit to my friend, George Engelke. He is a great occultist, who has not eaten meat for thirty years. He believes in the powers of Hanish of lamented memory and is a sincere follower of his cult. Engelke is like Alfred Stieglitz of 291 Fifth Avenue, N. Y. His soul seems to walk three steps ahead of his body, or three steps behind his body. His life is an eternally undecided race, between soul and body.
The Radical Book Shop is right around the corner. It is a co-operative store with a large stock of ultra-radical pamphlets and magazines, the meeting place for all sorts of Bolsheviki, pleasant Bolsheviki, who want to intoxicate themselves with words rather than with deeds, who are more eager to have a good time under present conditions than to be martyrs for a new and better world. And when they want to amuse themselves, and be real radicals, they go around the block, to the Dillpickle. Mr. Johns, who is one of the co-operatives of the bookshop, is also one of the proprietors of the Dillpickle, a sort of restaurant, public forum, dance hall, and at present “the slum of Chicago,” because some of its hangers-on were arrested as supposed bomb manufacturers during the recent I. W. W. trial.
It is a sort of debating club, a la Greenwich Village, with automobiles in front of it after ten p. m. when the rich come to see the poor, the law-abiding want to have a peek at the lawless, the properly married to see the free-lovers.... Chicago is very young, you know! It is in its bootees. All these “new ideas” are here in flower of springtime.
I once said, “Were there no Greenwich Village, one would have to be invented.” Chicago invented its own. The Dillpickle will have many competitors soon, under the signs of flowers, vegetables and animals. In a couple of years they will become stale canned goods. And then the empty cans will be consigned to the ash can. Greenwich Village all over again!
1919
BOOK stores are the intellectual barometers of our cities. Show me where people buy their books and I will tell you what sort of life they lead. Book stores always were and are mirrors of the habits and intellectual preferences of men and women.
The private library has ceased to be the pride of the home. Homes have given way to apartments and flats with only little space to spare for book shelves. The garage has taken the place of the library. We see our friends in hotels and clubs, we spend our evenings only rarely at home. Our Age of Electricity and rapid transportation facilities does not permit us to acquire the placid habits of book collectors and of book lovers. Sure enough we read books, because we want to know what their authors have to say. But the author remains a stranger to us, the book once read is done with forever. We speak about automobiles, we look forward to owning a machine, we are building garages with the same enthusiasm that our fathers used to expend on their libraries and their books.
New York is different. But New York is not an American city. It’s so near to Europe and its population so distinctly foreign that the change of the last 50 years is hardly noticeable yet in its book shops. Detroit, the old French settlement, which only ten years ago was a tenth of its present size, has no second-hand book shops at all. The Detroit book dealers mete out light summer fiction which fits into people’s lunch baskets in the summer and sentimental Christmas carols in the winter. Technical books, automobile literature are their specialties. This is only natural. Ninety per cent of the people are building motor cars in order to make a living; they are the buyers of the technical books. The minority live in order to buy cars and make motor trips, and therefore they need light fiction.
The character of Albany is most truthfully portrayed in its book stores. Our legislators have so much time on their hands that they actually read historical books, books about Dutch New York, about the Wars of the Revolution, law books, old state records. It is considered good form to collect a historical library after being elected to office and residing in Albany. But curiously enough in these same serious book stores loads of that sort of fiction can be found which smuthounds of the Vice Society are eternally trying to banish from earth. Philadelphia, of course, specializes in Quaker literature; Buffalo, infected by the spirit of near East Aurora, is swamped with the things Elbert Hubbard used to love. Chicago discloses the peculiar love for art, literature and philosophy that its great percentage of German workmen brought over from their fatherland and left as inheritance to the second and third generation. It is almost incredible, yet true, that laborers, coming home from work in the stock yards, stop at the book stalls and buy an add volume of Kant, or Heines’ “Ballads and Poems.” Chicago always had the finest German books in the country, most likely brought over by the immigrants.
San Francisco has a touch of the East. Books on mysticism, have the honor place. Curious books of all kinds are bought eagerly. Indeed, the book stores here tell you the story of California’s strange cults, of its mystics, its prophets and its thousands and one seekers after the hidden truths of the universe.
The last ten years have wrought an astonishing change in the book stores all over the country, but nowhere a sadder and more lamentable one than in Boston, Mass.
This oldest street of Boston, the Cheapside of New England, once an important center of city trade, gave Boston its literary charm. In the dilapidated old-time queer buildings, half a dozen book stores invited the lovers of literature. Here was the favorite haunt of the men who gave Boston a literary reputation. It was here in Cornhill that Thomas Burnham founded the first second-hand book shop in the United States in 1825. Young Burnham went from here day after day, with a basket of books on his arm, to the wharves to trade with sea-faring people. Almost one hundred years have elapsed and the shop is still there. Oliver Wendell Holmes had his chair and desk in “The Old Corner Book Shop,” and in Colesworthy’s was a hidden nook where Whittier used to hide for an hour or two, reading newly arrived books, but only rarely buying. “Littlefield’s” was next door, where Lowell, Longfellow and Emerson used to congregate, talk and occasionally buy additions to their libraries.
But alas! Boston is no more the Athens of America. The book stores on Cornhill have shrunk to the number of four. New buildings have invited modern business to invade the neighborhood. The remaining book dealers, still following the traditions of half a century, are very old men. Their days are counted and soon Cornhill will be remembered as one of the landmarks that have been swept away by the modern spirit and are gone forever.
Richard C. Lichtenstein, fifty-five years ago an apprentice to old Mr. Burnham, is now the proprietor of the shop. He has many memories of great book days in Boston.
“The most interesting of all my ‘finds’ since I entered the second-hand book trade in the late sixties,” he said (he’s a good and entertaining talker), “was the copy of Poe’s ‘Tamerlaine,’ which created a great sensation among collectors. This small pamphlet of forty pages, published by Collin F. Thomas in Boston in 1827, had escaped the searches of the keenest of book collectors. I usually spent my noon hour in other second-hand stores, and one day I found this small pamphlet which I purchased for 25 cents. I had a good many opportunities to dispose of it, but didn’t sell it before 1892, in auction. It was knocked down to Dodd, Meade & Co. for $1,850. ‘Tamerlaine’ has remained unique among all the books, being today the most costly American book known. I understand a New York bookseller is holding a copy at $15,000.
“One day, I was offered a small volume which lacked the title and two leaves. There was nothing specially attractive about the book, but the same intuition for which I never could account and that guided me through my whole life as a bookseller, urged me to offer the owner $2.00, which was readily accepted. Later, I found out that the book was a copy of the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in New England, Cambridge, 1640. Bishop Hurst bought the book for $1,000, and after his death, it fetched $2,500 in the auction of his library. But I have also met with great disappointments. The greatest one was on a visit to an old Boston family residing on Beacon Hill. An elderly lady, the only surviving member of this family, wished to dispose of her library, and I found her seated between two piles of books busily engaged in tearing out the fly leaves wherever they contained any inscriptions. Nothing could induce her to stop this barbaric atrocity. I begged of her to let me examine the fly leaves and titles before she threw them in the open grate. I saw to my grief, John Hancock’s inscriptions, and George Washington’s presentation to some lady contemporary, revolutionary persons of the first importance. Another opportunity I missed was years ago when Mr. James J. Blaine happened to drop in our shop, selecting a copy of Count Grammont’s “Memoirs,” asking to have the volume laid aside for him. He wrote his name on the title page and was to call and pay for it on his return to the hotel. The incident must have slipped his memory, for he never returned for the book, and I was foolish enough to erase his signature from the fly leaf. Especially in our days, where “Association books” were so very much in demand, Blaine’s name in the “Memoirs” would have been a sought after curiosity.”
A sort of Brentano’s in Boston. The gathering place of society, of students and of scholars. They carry everything from the rarest book to some new Parisian magazine, whose first number appeared four weeks ago. Mr. Weber, the head of the firm, looks like Napoleon III, and has the most splendid contempt for everything new in book lore. Mr. Braithwaite was in his shop during my visit and it was astonishing to hear the anthologist of six volumes of new poetry talking a sensible everyday language.
Boylston street faces the big park, is a lively promenade, a good deal of shopping is done in its neighborhood, a street always densely populated. The Garden Side Book Shop hung out its shingle here, which consists of a huge garden gate.
Women have a good deal to do in public life in Boston, and women are determined to be the intellectual guides of Boston book buyers, at least of such as wish to be “modern” and “up-to-date.” The Garden Side Book Shop is conducted by women exclusively. I dare say women must also be the chief buyers. The most marvelous and costly bindings on rows and rows of shelves. Books of poetry, novels, anthologies that were never heard of and what is still worse, will never be heard of, are beautifully dressed like brainless women, who wear gowns of Worth or Lady Duff-Gordon. Mrs. Bertha Beckford, one of the proprietors, approached me with the charm of the reception lady in a fashionable hairdressing establishment, and invited me to inspect “some darling little books, the sweetest ever, just arrived from Paris.” I followed her to a little salon done in pink and canary and viewed little miniature books, bound in French crepe, a wallpaper effect. There were French anthologies of bits of poetry and of war sentiment. Dowagers, with grown-up granddaughters, and studded lorgnettes went into fits of ecstacy over the “darling books,” and I shouldn’t be surprised if they bought some and took them “as much appreciated gifts” to some home for convalescent soldiers and sailors.
“Splendid,” I thought, seeing the sign next door. The shop where boys and girls can come and choose their reading. It’s located on the fourth floor of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. It looks like a pharmacy. There wasn’t a boy or girl in sight. A few old ladies, who must have left the sewing circle on the third floor, were sitting about, reading. I looked around the shelves and I wondered if all the Boston boys and girls lack red blood and the gift of fancy and actually read the books I saw. Miss Alma Howard, one of the dispensers of this shop, told me that all books are being carefully censored and selected by one Bertha E. Mahoney, the director of the Book Shop of the Union. Bertha seemed to be the ruling spirit. She has forbidden such and such books, she has placed others on the blacklist, but she also selected books that ought to be read by boys and girls. I asked what literary qualifications Miss Mahoney had to qualify her for the censoring. All I could gather was the fact that Miss Mahoney is Miss Mahoney, a whilom superintendent of the food shops of the union on the floor below. Needless to say, the union is a highly aristocratic place, frequented exclusively by the flower of Boston’s ultra fashionables. Why doesn’t someone start a real book store for boys and girls? Accessible to everyone, where second-hand books could be had for ten cents or a quarter?
Every other old building in Boston, and many churches bear honor tablets, telling us that here assembled revolutionists of 1776. The Boston of today, with all its laws of restriction and of censorship, is proud of its ancient rebels. How paradoxical! In talking about laws, a new one has just been enacted. The police apply to the sale of second-hand books the same rule as to the sale and buying of second-hand clothing. A dealer, purchasing books from anyone, has to report the purchase to the police, describe the article purchased and has to wait thirty days before he can sell it. The law requires that each book dealer must pay five dollars for a license. A similar law had been enacted 60 years ago, as a civil war protective measure. Oh, Athens of America! Selling books with a second-hand clothes dealer’s license!
Opposite the Copley-Plaza, in a fashionable little building of its own, is the Dorado of America’s rejected poets and poetesses, essayists, novelists, free verse artists and of everybody else Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound would press to their bosom. Here is the book shop of the Four Seas Publishing Company, and never was there a greater collection of literary atrocities in one room than in this airy, inviting “Hall of Fame.” The soul of Amy Lowell greets one uncannily articulate from the page of each book.
A very ambitious clerk praised the authors of the books higher than genius has ever been praised in America. “We have bought 81 titles from the Badger Publishing Company only recently and have not spared any expense to print the most attractive title and jackets for this new addition to our stock.” Everybody knows the Badger books. The Badger Publishing Company gladly accommodates authors of novels and extends to them the privileges of their printing establishment, provided they are willing to pay for publication.
I descended to the basement to see the enormous stock of books the Four Seas Company had acquired. The store must have been occupied by a wholesale florist previously, and the most tremendous ice box I ever saw in my life filled the whole basement. The Badger books, thousands of them, were neatly piled up in the ice box. They were in the proper place, indeed.
On Washington Street is a very attractive book store, conducted by a blind couple. Man and wife about thirty years of age, both totally blind. The shop is scrupulously clean. If you ask for a book, the proprietor will find it in a miraculous way, provided it is on the shelves. If you are browsing about, picking up a book here or there, he will ask you to read off to him the title, and then tell you the price. Both look happy, contented, and seem prosperous.
I wondered how it had happened that they started in the book business, that both of them were blind; had they been blind before they married or had misfortune overtaken them after their marriage? They’re in a strange and mysterious place, but peaceful and harmonious.
1918
WHAT is the mysterious power directing the fates of small town inhabitants? Who is it who sells them the same style of clothes, induces them to furnish their homes so that they resemble one the other like one egg resembles another egg? Who is it who makes the people talk and think alike? Never permitting an individual thought, or an expression of individual opinion?
Everything and everybody seem to be cut after the same pattern. Unessentials are the important things in their lives, and they miss the joy of living. They have not learned to be their real selves. They have not been given a chance. Someone told me once: “America is a young nation. We are about a hundred years behind Europe. Our people have not developed yet the sense for beauty and art.” It is not so. America of the fifties of the last century knew the best in life, letters and art. But with the first great fortunes made during the early railroad boom some mysterious powers perverted the minds of America systematically; created in them the lust for sensation, for things of the minute. And today people are being fed with theatres and newspapers and libraries and music and styles, that they really do not want.
They are not given a chance. They must take what these mysterious powers somewhere on Wall Street think good for them, or they can stay at home, lose prestige among their fellow-townsmen, suffer in business and be decried ultimately as “bolsheviks,” or “reds.”
A few weeks in Milwaukee or any other town of its size will open your eyes. Milwaukee has grown incredibly since 1914, produced several hundreds of war-millionaires and has the aspects of a most thriving, prosperous city.
The people crave for good entertainment, good reading, a glimpse of art. There is an Art Institute heavily subsidized by the city. Its permanent exhibition is not worth while talking of. Any third-rate dealer in New York can produce such masterpieces from his stockroom. They are hung on the staircases and kept in boxes in the cellar of this Art Institute. The traveling exhibitions are displayed on walls that need cleaning. There is not the atmosphere of appreciation in this building. The main space is occupied by a sort of “rummage exhibit” consisting of all sorts of souvenirs lent by Milwaukeeans, who became members of the Institute. Articles that can be purchased often in ten-cent stores are here on exhibition with a card of the proprietor.
The Layton Gallery, next door, is a noble opposite to the Art Institute. Bequeathed to the city by the late Layton, millionaire packer, his hobby during his lifetime, it is a real temple of art. In an imposing purely Greek structure, wonderful masterpieces, collected from all over the globe, almost every known name well represented. Its curator, Mr. George Raab, an artist of fame himself, has never permitted commercialism or provincial small tradesman ambition to enter into his sanctuary. Mr. Raab, who himself selected the greater part of the collection, has the rare sense of the antiquarian. His lectures have aroused a good deal of comment and, incidentally, interest for his gallery. He wishes to make the artist live again in his work. He has given up hope to convert the present generation. His hope is the coming generation. In children and students he tries to arouse a love of beauty and sense of harmony and color.
There is only one bookstore in the real sense of the word in Milwaukee, Des Forges’. Its owner is a bookman of the old type, knows values and authors, has studied his profession in England and France and caters to the collectors and lovers of the printed word.
“The young people don’t care for books,” he told me. “They do not wish to accumulate libraries. The women-folk come in and ask for ‘something nice to read,’ and take my word for it. And on occasion they buy nicely bound books for gift purposes.” Again here, the mysterious powers behind the throne. The books that are featured in movie theatres, in installment novels, and in daily papers are the best sellers.
The New Era Shop, that had recently unpleasant introductions to the police department, endeavors to sell radical literature only. Its proprietors are young and therefore hopeful. They may gain, in the course of years, knowledge of books and then select the right sort of stock. It is not radical to lend out George Moore’s “A Story Teller’s Holyday” for $5 for a reading, because ... well radical does not mean immoral or lascivious. The New Era Shop could inaugurate a new Era for Milwaukee book readers if its proprietors would inform themselves about the sort of books worth while introducing to the public. But even to this shop thanks are due. It may lead to something bigger and better.
The department stores advertise their book departments extensively. Here is the great hunting ground for the Chambers and Chesters and Nick Carters and psalm and hymn books. Rosaries are also carried in these book departments.
The public is not given a chance. David Graham Philips and Susan Lenox have just reached Milwaukee and everybody is excitedly discussing the fall and rise of Susan. Several societies for the uplift of poor working girls have been organized as the direct result of the book.
The theatre buildings are magnificent. Modern, airy buildings with comfortable seats and all new improvements that make the sojourn in a showhouse delightful. But the moving pictures shown are again on the level of newspaper fiction stories, of church sermons and of best-selling novels. The millionaire, who is a villain and becomes an honest working man, the poor woman who marries a millionaire, despite his upstart mother’s protests, the cowboy who “cleans up” a mining camp and kills a dozen rowdies in order to sink exhausted in the arms of his boyhood sweetheart whom he had deserted years ago ... and men, women and children sit through all this.
To have dinners by the light of orange-colored candles while sitting on the floor or on the pillows gracefully grouped about an anaemic poet, who reads ephemeral languid stanzas, belongs to the good taste required in the best circles of Milwaukee.
Smocks and bobbed hair have just made their appearance, and an Art Magazine will soon add the final touches of estheticism.
Small gift shops have been opened by enterprising dealers from Chicago, and there will be food for amusement for years in Milwaukee.
But who will come to this one and to hundreds of other towns and give these good helpless people what they want?
Good books, good plays, good movies and a chance to express their individualities in a healthy, pleasant way?
1919
“If I were rich,” said a well-to-do broker to me recently, “I’d spend a few hours every day in one of those book dens on Fifth Avenue. Their proprietors are delightful people; the surroundings are as comfortable as a club library. Only it is so intimate there, and they always seem to have the very things that one wants—and they are so darned expensive. They seem to be in touch with the whole world, and the mere fact that they always have new things whenever I drop in is sufficient proof that the genus of book-worms is not on the dying-out list, and that people buy costly books even in our times of so many other lures.”
Of course, there are book buyers today who expend thousands and thousands of dollars for rare books, but whom we would not class with the enthusiastic broker who wished to be rich in order to be able to follow his hobby. Rich men often buy their books as investments. They have their brokers who attend auctions for them, and one day we read that Mr. So-and-So bought such-and-such a book for a staggering sum of money, and six months later we receive a catalogue from an auction house telling us that the very same “book lover” will dispose of “duplicates” from his library at auction. And, lo! we find the very same much-advertised rare book in this catalogue. If we compare the price he receives with the price he paid several months ago; we will invariably understand why a stock gambler was induced to become a book-lover.
But, as I said, we still have antiquarians of the old school with us, and we also have book-sellers who have preserved Ben Johnson’s spirit in the book dealers’ guild.
It is not so very long ago that Mr. Wells did not occupy his palatial suite on Fifth Avenue, and the enthusiasm he then had for his books and for their authors is his today. Fine sets of well-known authors and also of the minor lights, are his specialties. Printed on beautiful papers, wonderfully bound, marvelously extra-illustrated, inscribed by their authors, they are there on his shelves. They seem alive, they seem to talk to you, they seem to smile to you a welcome—if Mr. Wells feels you a friend, a brother lover of books. The whole world knows about Mr. Wells’ beautiful sets of books, and whoever wants a rare, unusual edition comes to Mr. Wells, or writes to him, or wires to him, or cables to him, dealers as well as private buyers. And if he has time, he may ask you to view the original manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” or of Victor Hugo’s “Ninety Three.” Or he will show you a bundle of letters written by Thomas Payne, the draft of a speech in Lincoln’s own hand ... he could fill a museum with the material wrapped up in his safe. And the most delightful thing is the free air of hospitality in his den. I don’t know another place where one can lounge around more comfortably ... and not to forget his assistant, Mr. Royce, the Balzac enthusiast, who compiled the only Balzac bibliography in existence.
Opposite the library in a white stucco house with a narrow stairway and gothic arched windows is the sanctum of Mr. James F. Drake. He is a jovial old gentleman who knows more about the first editions of English and American authors than any other book dealer. It is his pride to be the first in New York to specialize in first editions, and he is as well known in London as on this side of the ocean. First editions inscribed by the authors line the book cases along the walls, and rare prints and pamphlets nod and invite you behind their shining glass cases.
Some day (I hope in the near future) some one will write a true appreciation of Mitchell Kennerley, the great Pathfinder in the American publishing field. He has done more for us here than any other English book dealer ever anywhere, with the exception perhaps of Heineman in London. In America, Mitchell Kennerley remains unique. Endless is the list of English and American authors he introduced to his readers for the first time. We know, for instance, that Dutton’s sold in one month the complete first edition of Leonard Merrick’s collected works, and thousands of copies of his books since. But Mitchell Kennerley introduced him to us twelve years ago, when no one knew his name. Or Hergesheimer, a best seller ever since the Saturday Evening Post placed him among its regular contributors, but Mitchell Kennerley published his best seller of today many years ago. He gave us the tragic poets Middleton and Davidson, and no one has printed them since. The first part of his catalogue is a roll of honor of the English nineties. He always kept a sharp eye for American contemporary authors, and usually got the best of the work they had done and, I am sorry to say, ever will do. There is Harry Kemp, for instance. He didn’t beat his first book yet, published by Kennerley a half dozen years ago. Horace Traubel found his life’s dream materialized when Mitchell Kennerley published his diaries With Walt Whitman in Camden. Not to forget Alexander Harvey’s masterful short stories. One of them (The Toe) is worth a whole bookshelf of short stories. And dear Michael Monahan, whose charming books he published, whose magazine, The Papyrus, he gave a temporary home.
Mitchell Kennerley also claims the honor of having introduced Frank Harris to America.
A new type of bookseller has developed during the last twenty-five years—a man who combines part of the knowledge of the antiquarian of yore with the qualities the modern collector and book buyer will request from his agent. Books and literary property have become commercial values equal to stocks which are listed upon the stock exchange; subject to corners created by shrewd buyers and holders, to fluctuations caused by selling en masse. The successful rare-book dealer of today must operate with his wares like a stock broker. The banker who starts his business with a limited capital and operates on a legal interest basis has very little chance to become rich. But if he succeeds in acquiring with his limited capital the entire stock of a mine which proves a success after he acquired it has equal chances to make money as the rare-book dealer who has had the good fortune to buy for a farthing the entire literary property of a man who proves a celebrity after his death and whose manuscripts are worth a hundred times their weight in gold.
Harry Stone is a book dealer of the new type. He acquired his knowledge here and there. The desire to wander from his earliest youth made him pass the entrance exam into the university of hard knocks. He always loved books. He was always buying books. Eagerly he absorbed books on books, articles about books and authors and ... Auction Prices Current. After he had acquired a collection of curious books which would fill the shelves of a good-sized store, he started his shop on Fourth Avenue, that avenue that once led to the Astor Library and that was lined with bookshops on both sides.
He not only appreciated the commercial value of books, but he read them. Especially those that were scarce and more valued than other works by the same authors. And he learned to respect the men who wrote these books. His shop became the gathering-place of literature. Wrecked hopes of authors and publishers found in Stone’s shop a safe harbor. He paid a fair price for everything of value offered him and soon he was known as the dealer in quaint and curious books and pamphlets.
Good fortune knocked on his door. One rich find came after another. He was able to supply collectors and other book dealers with long-sought-after items.
Recently he acquired the most complete collection of American drawings by magazine illustrators that was ever gathered under one roof. Sixty thousand specimens of American and foreign artists whose works have appeared in American illustrated magazines he bought from the files of leading publishers.
In an astonishingly short time he made himself acquainted with his new field. He became a walking encyclopaedia of American illustrators. He searched libraries and other resources for biographical data of lesser-known artists whose works are included in his collection. He studied the different periods of art development in America and again he made his shop not only the gathering-place of his customers but an interesting meeting-place of artists and of connoisseurs.
He is very young—not thirty yet—a bright young fellow with a keen sense of appreciation; because he knows that only the good will stand the proof of time and will last and will eventually become a good investment. He knows the border-line between artist and businessman; he never transgresses into foreign territory, and therefore one can call him justly an idealist, at times—when he talks about art.
1919
MR. HARTPENCE seems to be the moving spirit of Daniel’s Gallery. He is a poet and close associate of Alfred (Mushroom) Kreymborg. He is tenacious, he has convictions of his own and he is silent. “What’s the use of convincing others? It is sufficient labor to keep one’s own self convinced.”
It is a red letter day in the Daniel gallery. Hartpence is behaving nicely to Mr. and Mrs. Davies. The great master is trying to give every man a show. He is studying attentively the electric bells, wires, flags, etc., etc., picturesquely stocked on the canvases. Hartpence points timidly to a canvas apparently depicting five extensions of a town pump done in many colors.
“This is his wife,” whispers Hartpence, pointing to a prune-colored pump.... “This is his friend,” pointing to an olive green one.
“There is considerable realism, I see,” sighs Davies, quite unconscious of being funny. Mrs. Davies is murmuring something behind her catalogue and trying to live up to her husband’s reputation.
Daniel’s Gallery is never complete without a primal man walking around. This man is invariably an artist with long hair and a primitive neck. The charming shepherd of the hills is his ambition. Every modern gallery must have long-haired men with big Adam’s apples and short-haired women with long necks and pale faces standing around in interesting groups or gazing at a picture in a remote corner in solitary confinement.
The Coady family is usually found sitting alone at home with their pictures. The only sound heard is the grinding of mechanical devices hanging in their frames. No’isms and no’ismisms are Coady’s specialties. Confusion outside harmony inside are his themes. He is an excellent talker. He does it kindly and patiently and seldom will he be interrupted by his listeners.
Stieglitz is trying in vain to make a carping friend believe that the pictures on exhibition are a step up from Cezanne or Matisse. If he doesn’t like this one, well, here is one not so modern. Why shouldn’t he like that. And here is one not so modern even as that one.
Walkowitz is always there agreeing—if he didn’t agree he wouldn’t be there.
Stieglitz had had a hair cut last week. Stieglitz always has a hair cut when the cold winter winds start to blow.
It is a historical moment each year when Alfred Stieglitz, “specialist of work of all kinds,” feels the approach of the cold winter breezes and knows that the time has come to have his hair cut again. Ha! how it will grow until next year, until it has to be cut again. But the Fifth Buddha isn’t born yet and Stieglitz’s soul still walks three steps ahead of its body.
There they are simply quiet and awfully Batik. Another art shop for art’s sake where the returns more than justify us in being artistic. “See this Batik dress, isn’t it expressive, why won’t people dress like that all the time?” Nobody but a Bahaist or a Rosicrucionist or a Greenacre disciple would be seen dead in it. Then there are books, lots of nice books by nice people and bought by nice people.
The room is decorated in the scheme of a musical chord. A rope would be more appropriate for those who are responsible for its decoration.
It is like stepping from Churchill’s on Broadway into the Fifth Avenue Cathedral, if one has spent the forenoon in the modern art galleries on the Avenue and then walks into Ehrich’s. Here is a good healthy commercial atmosphere dealing in the Renaissance. Whether the lights are turned out out of respect for the Annunciation which holds the stage with footlights before it or whether Mr. Ehrich recognizes that where people speak with more than bated breath and hushed voices as they do in museums, the lights ought to be lowered, is the question? Here you not only lower your voice, but you study the art of tiptoeing. Madonnas, saints’ pictures, and other pictures which will be sainted by virtue of their purchase prices are on the walls.
Please pass the incense pot.
1916
THE fad of false Bohemia in Greenwich Village has passed. The purple and orange brand of tearooms and of so-called gift shops where art lovers and artistic people from the Bronx and Flatbush assembled, have gone out of existence. The designers and manufacturers of astounding atrocities who called themselves “modern artists” have disappeared. True there are a few short-haired women left, who parade the streets in their unusual clothes, but they, too, will soon move to other parts of the city with the return of the soldiers, and will reassume their real calling in life.
Workers and ambitious strivers have taken possession, once more, of the sacred grounds, where memories and hopes are holy possessions, where so many have worked and toiled and spread an evangel, now accepted universally.
New places have sprung up where idlers find themselves isolated, where enthusiasm and sincerity is written on walls and faces. And people are doing things once more in Greenwich Village. Commercialism seems to have disappeared, and men are willing to help men.
Mrs. Williams has opened an art gallery, the Paint Box, where anybody may exhibit, anybody who wishes to hang his or her pictures. Everybody is welcome to view the exhibits; who is willing to pay an obolus of ten cents. But it is worth it. And Mrs. Williams has to pay rent and light. Her idea is not new by any means. Five years ago I came to Washington Square and opened what was later called Bruno’s Garret. “Here are my walls,” I said. “Come and hang your pictures, if you are an artist. Here is my magazine, voice in it your opinion of any subject you may choose, if you are a writer. Here is an auditorium with comfortable chairs; come and recite your poems, face your critics, if you are a poet....”
I charged nothing for all of this, no admission fees, no wall space rates. I did not sell or try to sell anything. But I believe that Mrs. Williams’ plan is better. The small admission fee will not interfere with the number of visitors, and the altruistic motive therefore less evident, and more ready acceptance by the people. Her galleries are spacious, light, airy rooms in No. 44 Washington Square. The walls are hung with pictures. Pictures everywhere. Small and large. In oil and water. Miniatures and life-sized paintings; cubist and conventionals; foreign and familiar; so many pictures on each wall that there is not enough space for the proverbial pin to glide through and fall to the floor.
We met old acquaintances on the walls. There was Glen Coleman, in our estimation the best of the younger artists in America. He is painting in oil now. My readers will remember my frequent references to Coleman’s pen and ink sketches, to his street scenes, especially his sketches of Greenwich Village. There is so much peace and life in his work. His houses tell stories. His old lantern lighting the corner of a narrow street somewhere on the East Side becomes familiar and we grow really attached to it.
Coleman has a genius for depicting the eternal in the fleeting moments of life. He seems far above men and things. His brush is dipped in love. He is the only American artist who gives grandeur to the poverty of every day life on city streets.
Stuard Davis has some of his latest works there. A cemetery. I have forgotten where it is situated, very appealing with its crosses and stones, on a sloping hill bathed in sunrays. This cemetery is perhaps unique in the world. No remains of weary travelers repose beneath the crosses. They were erected by loving hands, while the loved one perished in some strange land or on the sea. And nothing but the sad news of their death has come as a last message to friends and relatives.
He has a musician there whose nose is bleeding. We sympathize with the stricken musician.
Bobby Edwards, the singer of the village, hung a few ukeleles and some very eye-fetching pictures.
Have you ever heard of that master of the lost art of wood engraving, Gustave Baumann, and his incomparable scenes of cities from all over the Union. “Gloomy Gus” he was called in the West, this untiring artist who wanders from city to city cutting his own wood blocks, printing them on his old hand press, always independent, always free, an eternal traveler. He struck New York and the Village and left his card in the shape of a few leaves that attract attention the very minute we enter the room.
Howard Heath’s pictures, which remind so very much of the work of Acton Davies during the cubist craze, are right near Ezra Winter’s “The Philosopher.” The Philosopher is a gentleman commonly called a bum. He is seated near a beach, taking a foot-bath in the splashing waves, and staring meditatively at a tiny daisy in his grisly, awkward hand.
And fifty other artists of whom the world will hear some day (or never) have accepted the invitation of Elvin Williams and have joined her happy family in the Paint Box. And she, herself? No, she has not short hair. She is not an old maid, not eccentric. Nothing wrong with her. A charming young woman, even dressed as any other one above Fourteenth Street. She had an idea, she said. The idea seems to work out all right.
1919
PRESIDENT-ELECT HARDING was, and is, a newspaper man. Thank God for that. He knows life as it is, and as it appears to be in the press. The man who knows how to read our newspapers has won half of the battle. And newspaper men are generous and excellent judges of men.
Harding smokes cigarettes. This puts him in a different class. Look out for the man who warns you against cigarettes. Who tells you (on offering him your case) with a superior smile: “Thanks, I don’t use them.”
Sometimes I will sing a song of hate against those black cigars of the sedate and of the respectable. I loathe the cigar of the habitual smoker, so justly characterized by Schopenhauer as a stimulant of thought for people who do not think. Not one smoker of cigarettes ever arrives at that low level of enjoyment.
To smoke a cigar is not much more than a hobby. The cigarette is a passion, a vice.
The cigarette is intoxicating. If one inhales the aromatic smoke, draws it deep into one’s lungs, into blood and nerves, one feels that this narcotic wonder-poison liberates the soul from a profane pressure, and one’s spirit is lured to lighter and brighter regions. Intoxication is the sweet magic of the cigarette, and, therefore, the cigarette is inseparable from all extravagant enjoyments. The cigarette is in the gambling den. It can be found always where they drink champagne. It is a part of frivolity, of sin, of the poetry of enjoyment. Its aromatic fragrance, the tender rings that vanish swiftly into grotesque figures.... The cigarette is the perfume of the boudoir.
The cigarette smoker never looks for a stronger brand, as the consumer of cigars, who methodically tans his tongue with his weed. The cigarette smoker increases his daily ration, and finally smokes between the courses of his meal, between his kisses.... In the green room of theatre and concert room, you can see him hungrily reaching for his silver case, the gift of his beloved. He awakens in the night and lights his cigarette, and what peace and joy after each long draught of the sweet redeeming bewilderment. That’s quite different from that brown, ill-smelling butt, chewed from one corner of the mouth to the other, lighted again and again, until it has happily dissolved itself into ashes. A bedroom filled with smoke: a long story of enlightenment to the one who knows. The cigarette fits in our nervous times. A nervous pleasure for a nervous people. We smoke cigarettes because we are nervous. We are nervous because we smoke cigarettes.
How beautiful they look, golden, tender threads enclosed in fragile rice paper, like a lovely woman’s beautiful hair, fragrant and tempting. Compare them with the most beautiful box of cigars. Those black, strong-smelling cigars, carcasses of leaves transformed into mummies. Think of the men who smoke them, and tell me isn’t there some similarity?
In some Sunday paper, I read that Mr. Harding’s favorite book was written by Edgar Saltus. You rack your brains? You don’t remember Saltus? Twenty years ago, he was hailed as the coming American novelist. At least twenty books of his appeared in short succession. Today he is known almost exclusively to the booklover. First (often the only) editions of some of his books are in demand and sell at fancy prices, while others can be found at the book bargain counters of Liggett’s Drug Stores at twenty-five cents a copy. His Magdalene appeared at the time of Oscar Wilde’s visit to America. Both men met here, in London and Paris. Critics contend that Wilde received from this book his inspiration for Salome. There are pages and pages of great similarity in both books. Saltus’ Magdalene is a fine contribution to the world’s literature of Magdalenes. In all his books there is a touch of the French eighties, and a resonance with the English nineties. If Saltus had not been a scholar, he would be another George Moore. Only a connoisseur can take a fancy to Saltus, a man who has a fine sense for literature and for life.
I love to think of the newspaper man with literary inclinations smoking his cigarette, while reading one of Saltus’ books, in his study in the White House.
1920