Looking Ahead

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis.



Writing politics is physically wearing, so I intend to return the T&V Country topics, history and culture as much as possible.

Today, when hardcopy books imprint are under a threat from e-books and Google-printed older works, it may be of interest to recall the days, up until the 1980s, when Fourth Avenue below 14th Street, low rent district then , was the Booksellers’ Row of America, with dozens of antiquarian booksellers active. Then the rising rents and new construction forced these low dollar volume cultural oases to dry up, until we only have The Strand left. These stories now updated were covered in my column nearly 20 years ago.



These stories, now somewhat updated, are about life about half a century ago, when I was friendly with a group of book scouts, who met for lunch at the old Luchow’s Restaurant on Saturdays, the traveled up and down the East coast looking for “sleepers,” valuable underpriced books. It was an adventure. Our leaders were Jack Brussel, who published daring material, imported British classics and Japanese Ukiyoe woodcuts and collected Aesop and Napoleon material, Dr. S.R. Shapiro, a bibliographer who dealt in collections for libraries , and Sunny Warshall, who created the Business Americana collection for the Smithsonian (more names to come).



How does a Fourth Avenue book scout like the notorious Bruce (of whom you will read in more stories) acquire his superior knowledge of scarce editions? Is it long exposure to books? If so, then the bookdealers of Fourth Avenue would never throw a rarity, such as H.L.Mencken's "Ventures Into Verse" (Baltimore, 1903), out on their 50c tables, for a scout to snap up. I was actually there when this book was picked up by "sleeper" hunter, on the West side of 4th Ave, outside one of the smaller stores. I tried to offer the finder a premium if he'd let me buy the book. If recollection serves, he simply stuck his tongue out at me, speechless in the face of the enormity of his good luck. (Mencken, incidentally, was so prolific that he wrote under 44 pen names, from George W. Allison in the Baltimore Sunday Herald, 1902, to Robert W. Woodruff, in his Smart Set magazine. One was the exotic Seumas LeChat, not to be confused with the Monsieur LeCoq of George Simenon's - who wrote under 17 pen names.)

The answer is that the scout learns constantly, by reading, talking and lifelong enthusiasm. Book scouts devour antiquarian bookdealer sale lists and auction catalogues, they study author and subject bibliographies and may even visit the Berg Collection of Rare Books in the NYPL. Many antiquarian bookdealers are too busy to do that kind of studying.

I remember having a strange copy of Robert Browning's anonymously published "Pauline, A Fragment and a Confession" (1833), in a beautiful binding, with the Ex-Libris of H. Buxton Forman, a XIX Cent. authority. I bought it at the value of the binding from a New York dealer, who knew books. I knew that it had to be a spurious edition, particularly because Forman had been associated with Thomas Wise, the great bibliographer and forger of Browning and other first editions, and acquired it as a curiosity. There might be a story behind it.

There almost was. I brought the book to the 42nd Street Library, signed it through the guards at the entrance, and took it to Dr John D. Gordan, then librarian of the Berg Collection, where they have two of the real first editions. We agreed that my copy was a forged first, and Dr Gordan very kindly permitted me to take pictures of the title page of the real first edition with my precious Honeywell Pentax single-lens reflex, while he held the book - and then the book got lost! It had been signed out by an attendant, I gave it back to the good doctor - but somehow it disappeared. Dr Gordan became truly excited and called for help. I could not help to overhear that "this man came it, took pictures with his little snap box (what an insult to my best camera), and now the book is gone!" I was politely asked to remain in the reading room, I think they put a guard, discretely, outside the door. In a short while the embarrassed librarian found the book, I was given a perfunctory apology and left Berg Collection feeling that I had exhausted my welcome in these quarters.

I did not return to researching the source of the forgery for a few years, when Marjory Wynne, a rare book expert of the Beinecke Library at Yale offered to help. She asked me for photocopies, and determined, in short order, that my book was a part of a known reprint. The venerable Buxton, or more likely someone else, had taken a Browning Society pamphlet, a near facsimile, reprinting the text of the even then rare book of poems, then stripped off the front matter, and had the poems expensively bound. Who was behind the the charade is moot, but since the pamphlet was printed by Thomas Wise in 1886, ahd he had had passed off other pamphlets printed by him as first editions, it may be that this copy was meant to fool, and the Buxton Forman bookplate helped.

Any time this book surfaces, I look at it with cutriosity and thank the late Marjory Wynne (1917-2009) for identification. Please feel free to comment or question, writing to wally@ix..netcom.com. More to come.

Wally Dobelis and the staff of T&V wish their readers a Merry Cristmas, Happy Channukah and a Joyful Kwanzaa!