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The Adventures
of a
Treasure Hunter
The Adventures
of a
Treasure Hunter
A Rare Bookman in Search of
American History
by
CHARLES P. E.VERITT
Little, Brown and Company Boston -1951
COPYRIGHT 1951, BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK IN EXCESS OF FIVE
HUNDRED WORDS MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT
PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER
FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously
in Canada by McClelland and Stewart Limited
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
For my wife, Elizabeth
Publisher's Note
The manuscript of these professional adventures of the late
Charles P. Everitt was finished and delivered to his publisher
before Mr. Everitt's death on March 4, 1951. The final script
had the benefit of the author's corrections and revisions. The
one missing portion of the manuscript as planned by Mr.
Everitt was an Acknowledgment in which he intended to ex-
press his appreciation to those who had helped him in the
preparation of his book. These are Mr. Barrows Mussey, Jr.,
who, as editor and friend, participated extensively in the prep-
aration of the manuscript; Mr. Michael J. Walsh, who read
the finished script with the eye of a friend and a fellow book-
man; all of the bookmen, scholars and collectors whose friend-
ships Charles P. Everitt found so rewarding and whose
experiences and adventures help make up the body of this
book; and his wife, Elizabeth Thompson Everitt, to whom the
book is dedicated.
The Adventures
of a
Treasure Hunter
PART I
Americana What and
So What?
G^^Q^^Q^^Q^^Q^^Q^^
THE LAST Saturday afternoon of September, 1890, at seven-
teen years of age, I was up in a haymow in Scarsdale, New
York, forking away the hay as my father pitched it up to me. It
had been a bad day. When I came out of the haymow, I said to
my father, "111 milk my stint of eight cows tomorrow morning,
and after that I'm finished. 111 never milk another cow nor pull
another weed."
As was always his way, he said that was fine with him.
After services at the Methodist church Sunday morning, I
asked the minister if he could find me a job.
The very next day he took me down to New York, and
introduced me to Wilbur Ketcham, in Cooper Union, who
dealt exclusively in religious books. At that particular time
it made no difference to me whether it was a grocery store
or a bookstore. At first the work was pretty much the same,
too. Ketcham paid me five dollars a week for lugging in any
books he bought and lugging away others he had sold, plus
twenty-five cents if I worked until 9 P.M. One of his standard
fast-moving items was the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia
[ 3 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Britannica, in twenty-five quarto volumes. He had a rule that
within eight blocks I could walk or pay my own transporta-
tion. Beyond that radius he paid my carfare one way.
One of my almost daily calls (no carfare) was a book-
bindery run by an old German over east of Third Avenue. One
day the binder shoved a tattered bundle of old almanacs at
me.
"Somebody left these here so long ago I have no idea who
it was," he said. "Give me a dollar for them."
I happened to have a dollar on me, and I handed it over.
My boss told me with considerable severity that I was hired
as an office boy, not a buyer; but he finally returned my
dollar.
A few days later Bishop John F. Hurst, the great collector
of Americana, was in the store, and the boss ( as I later heard
from his secretary) improved the opportunity to sell the al-
manacs. They were Poor Richards Almanacks, and Ketcham
felt pretty cute to get $250 for them. ( He did not live to see
the same almanacs fetch $3200 at Bishop Hurst's auction. ) As
you may imagine, I was left wondering how long this had been
going on. I started reading catalogues and everything else
about the subject that I could lay hands on. Then a customer
of Ketcham's I wish I could remember his name advised
me to read volume one of Justin Winsor's Narrative and Criti-
cal History of America. That was, and is today, the best
reference book relating to the discovery and early exploration
of America.
As I read Winsor, I stacked him up against all the catalogues
I could find. Little by little I discovered that the books in his
bibliographies were ones that you never see. I doubt whether
I have handled a dozen of those titles in sixty years. But I did
make a beginning at learning what to look for.
[ 4 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
In October, 1891, at the end of a year's service, I found six
dollars in my Friday pay envelope. My boss (being a clergy-
man's son) had taught me how to swear, so I walked in and
said, "What the hell does this mean?"
He asked if I didn't want my salary raised.
I said yes I did, to twenty-five dollars a week.
"Get the hell out of my office," observed Mr. Ketcham.
I asked him if he wanted two weeks' notice, and he an-
swered yes.
Two minutes later he was down at my desk, flinging down
two five-dollar bills. "Get the hell out of this place," was his
parting benediction.
Next day I went to Summer-field MacLean, who was a book-
seller next door to Ketcham's. "Mac," I said, "how about hiring
me for twenty-five dollars a week?"
"Sure," he said. "Come in Monday."
On Sunday Mr. Ketcham drove over with a team of horses
from Yonkers to Scarsdale. He said he thought he had been a
little bit hasty, and would be glad to give me twenty-five
dollars a week. When I told him I already had a job, he smiled
and said, "Well, I'm wrong again." He was my friend for the
rest of his life, something for which I have always been ex-
tremely grateful.
Americana is a word that has been thrown around very
freely and very carelessly in the last twenty years, so that it
may mean the Mayflower Compact or a hoop skirt or a whisky
label or just nothing in particular.
When I first devoted my life to the subject, fifty odd years
ago, Americana was the name for a restricted class of rarities
dealt in by a few slightly eccentric booksellers. Even fewer
and even more eccentric dealers were gathering American
[ 5 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
furniture by the wagonload; Currier & Ives prints were still
things the cook might be forgiven for admiring.
In passing through the first half of this century I have finally
reached a definition of Americana that seems all right to me.
At any rate it will tell you partly what this book is about.
Americana means to me anything showing how and why
people came here, and how they lived after they got here. In
booksellers' catalogues it generally covers printed material
alone, but I see no reason for any such limitation.
For instance, in 1922, when I appraised the contents of the
office of Henry Bacon, the man who designed the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, I found in one portfolio a letter from
Royal Cortissoz, written at 3 A.M. of a morning when the
entire committee were busy trying to find the right inscription
for the Lincoln Memorial. The letter read:
DEAR HENRY:
I couldn't sleep last night and at three A.M. I wrote
out the following words, hoping you would find them
suitable:
IN Tins TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER
In the same portfolio was a note from President Taft, who
was chairman of the committee. He suggested a change of one
word in the inscription. Still in the same portfolio was a second
note from Mr. Taft: "I completely fail to understand how I
thought I could improve on a perfect thing."
In other portfolios were a number of letters from Abraham
Lincoln's son Robert to Bacon, describing his father's ears,
[ 6 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
nose, and chin, with sketches. I saw all this material where it
still is, in the Henry Bacon Room at Wesleyan University in
Middletown, Connecticut. Cortissoz's note, hardly more than
a scrap of paper, I consider the most inspiring bit of Lincolni-
ana I have ever seen although I have been quite carefully
through many large collections of Lincoln letters and docu-
ments.
If you do not agree with me that this is Americana at its
best, remember that no other inscription in this country, with
the possible exception of that on the New York Post Office,
has been seen and reverently studied by so many Americans.
I have long thought and the opinion of historians seems
to be coming my way now that a book like old William
Livingston's volume on how to raise sheep had more influence
on American life than such a supreme and famous rarity as
George Washington's diary of his Western trip. You can buy
a copy of the Livingston without much trouble for $7.50, but
you would have great difficulty in finding someone to take your
$7500 for a Washington diary.
I have made a life, a living, and a hobby out of discovering
and selling rare, expensive Americana, but honesty forces me
to tell you that some of the most interesting and most im-
portant books in the field of Americana can still be had by
anyone with a dollar and enough sense to go looking for them.
For instance, there is no more vivid picture of the real
South before the Civil War than Fanny Kemble's Life on a
Georgia Plantation, which is still a very common book.
I will say flatly that the best picture by far of American
social life before the Revolution is Mrs. Grant's Memoirs of an
American Lady.
Walter Edmonds has written nothing that compares in ex-
citement and sustained interest with Mrs. Grant's story of life
[ 7 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
on the Schuyler Manor near Albany. And her book is so plenti-
ful that I have had to give copies away to my friends in order
to convince them of its merits.
But not all good Americana is that plentiful. Some of it in
fact is not only excessively rare but actually is "discovered" in
the most unusual and outlandish fashions. Sometimes the rarest
item is found among worthless junk, in bundles, as odd lot
batches of books and pamphlets sold at auctions are known to
the trade.
Certainly one of the most famous bundles that ever existed
was one bought by Dauber & Pine when I was working there
in 1926. Or at least the discovery was made in that year. God
knows how long the bundle had been around. The great
authority on that episode is Mr. Dauber himself who tells the
story as follows:
Whenever books or collections or pamphlets turned
up in the various auction rooms, it had been our practice
to examine them individually; but when they were tied
up in bundles or large containers so as to prevent close
inspection, we just followed our flair and gambled heavily
to buy them.
Frequently, as soon as the material was looked over on
our premises, we found it of no value and discarded it.
At other times we picked out the most important pam-
phlets at once, and just accumulated the minor stuff.
One evening in 1926, I knocked over a pile of these
pamphlets, gathering dust for years and coming from
heavens knows what sources, and as I stooped to pick
them up, there fell out of another, contemporary but
valueless, pamphlet, wherein it must have lain for years,
the famous item!
I recognized it at once and the next morning I put it
on Mr. Everitt's desk.
[ 8 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
It was the grandfather of all detective stories, Edgar Allan
Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue. Perhaps four or five copies
now exist in the world. The pamphlet was originally an off-
print from a magazine, made up as a salesmen's sample in an
edition of possibly fifty or sixty, and the salesmen had not
been able to get any orders.
I picked up my pencil and lightly marked our price on the
corner: $25,000.
Mrs. Gertrude Hills, another of Mr. Dauber's associates at
the time, wrote a note that brought Owen D. Young promptly
to the store. He had come straight from the Morgan Library,
where he had been looking at Mr. Morgan's copy of the Mur-
ders. The Morgan copy, the only one ever recorded at auction,
had brought $3900. But it lacks the back cover.
"Nice book you've got there, Everitt," said Mr. Young.
"I thought so," I said.
"I'd like to show this to Mrs. Young," he said.
"Put it in your pocket," said I. That was on a Saturday;
Monday he telephoned that this was the nicest book he had
ever bought. A few days later came a check for $25,000. That
copy is now in the New York Public Library, one of the great
prizes in one of the world's great collections.
I might have had a hand in the selling of the Morgan copy
of the Murders in the Rue Morgue, too, if I had not thought
it imprudent. Up around Amenia, New York, there was a
book scout and antique picker whom I knew, Louis Cole.
One day just before closing time he came into my store on
23rd Street, and showed me the first copy of the Murders I
ever saw.
"I want two dollars for this," he said.
Buying stuff like that is always risky, particularly from a
person who might not remember our transaction later. I said,
[ 9 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Til give you your two dollars, but you come back tomorrow
morning and I'll give you a lot more money."
He was most indignant. "I don't want any goddamned
charity. I want two dollars," he said, and left the store.
At that time there was a certain secondhand bookstore that
stayed open evenings. Cole somehow made his way over there
and apparently thought he had concluded the sale for two
dollars without any insulting offer of more money. A few days
later the New York Times ran a note that Frank J. Maier, the
great Poe collector, had bought a copy of the Murders in the
Rue Morgue for $1250. This would have been a record-break-
ing price except that no other copy had ever been discovered
to set a record. Someone showed Cole the Times, and the
upshot, after some backing and filling, was that Cole got
another $625 out of the affair.
Cole used to take me with him to auctions around Amenia,
and once he called me up and said he had arranged an ap-
pointment for me to see and, if possible, buy the famous library
of Benson John Lossing, the wood engraver, illustrator, and
American historian. Lossing had put up a fireproof building at
Dover Plains, New York, to house the library.
Lossing's heirs, his two sons, had not followed in their
father's interests and knew little about books. Anyway, they
showed me around the library, and I started taking samplings
here and there. George Washington's will, signed in his own
hand, was simply slipped into the front of a copy of Lossing's
Mount Vernon. I tripped over one stack of books, and picked
off the floor a nice little duodecimo that proved, on inspection,
to be the second edition of the Bay Psalm Book. It so hap-
pened that Wilberforce Eames, down in the bowels of the
New York Public Library, had showed me another copy only
a few days before, remarking that he didn't know what this
[ 10 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
would fetch at auction but that it was rarer than the first
edition. (The last sale price of the first edition that I happen
to remember was $151,000. ) The two heirs wanted to sell me
the lot for $8000.
Cole, at my elbow, could hardly restrain his impatience. "Go
on, what are you waiting for? It's cheap enough," he kept say-
ing. I had trouble shutting him up.
"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Let's go down to Dover
Plains."
First, I stopped in at the general store. "Did you know a
local man named Lossing?" I asked.
"Sure, knew him well," said the storekeeper.
"I hear he had a bunch of old books," I said. "Are they any
good?"
"I certainly hope so," said the merchant. "I have a chattel
mortgage on them."
At the grocery and the butcher's the story was the
same.
"This is no place for a minister's son," said I, misleadingly.
And I went back to the wicked city without disturbing the
Lossing library.
My first call was on Arthur Swann, then of the Anderson
Galleries. Ultimately the library was prepared for sale by the
Galleries, for which they made an elaborate catalogue.
Promptly the Library of Congress, the state of Virginia, and
heaven knows how many other public authorities, wrote in to
say that they had loaned such items as George Washington's
will to the deceased historian, and please could they have
their property back.
Even after every questioned item had been returned to its
claimant, the remainder sold for more than $50,000.
Lossing was not alone among historians in borrowing unique
[ 11 1
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
material and then being unable to remember where it had
come from. The heirs, of course, had no way of knowing
about chattel mortgages or the actual ownership of some of the
items.
I remember once I had a chance to buy the library of the
leading historian in an Eastern state, which I knew was full of
priceless things.
On my way to inspect the books, I asked one of my friends
and competitors in a neighboring city whether he had been
down to see the library.
He said he had.
"What*did you offer them?" I asked.
"Eleven thousand dollars."
A scout friend and I put in four days going over the library,
which contained rarities that would make your hair curl. I had
a very strong feeling that the executor was uneasy, and I finally
concluded that getting the books out of the state was an im-
portant consideration in the sale.
I suppose that was why I succeeded in buying the library
for $6500. One of the courtesies of the trade is that when a
man reveals his bid on a lot you are both after, the successful
buyer kicks in 10 per cent. I sent my friend a check for $650,
and still had a few dollars' profit left over.
Louis Cole's boon companion, best customer, and fellow
souse was an omnivorous collector named Frederick J. Skiff.
For some reason or other both of them simultaneously decided
to change their mode of life, give up liquor, and go west. They
wound up in Portland, Oregon, where Skiff became treasurer
of the department store of Olds, Wortman & King. Cole was
soon a very successful book- and print-seller. You have prob-
ably read Skiffs Adventures in Americana, a book describing
many of his scouting expeditions. I was with him on a good
[ 12 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
many of these trips, and you may care to know that his book
is not only one of the most delightful volumes about collecting
but it is truthful as well.
Skiff was always writing to me, boasting about his eighty-
acre island in a lake in the Cascade Mountains. My wife and
I found ourselves in the Thousand Islands, trying to fish and
getting exceedingly bored. I said I guessed I would try the fish-
ing in Oregon, and she decided on the White Mountains. Skiff
collected not merely books and prints but pistols, silver, North-
west Indian antiquities, bedspreads, Indian baskets, and colo-
nial furniture. His library, quite aside from the marvelous lot
of Western manuscripts, contained over fifteen thousand
presentation copies of contemporary authors.
You may remember that Kipling's From Sea to Sea described
some of his experiences in Portland. These experiences did not
include the fact that he tried to abolish alcohol in Portland
by personal action, in the company of a lady about whom I
know nothing except that she must have been a delightful
companion. Fred Skiff came home one day with a bundle of
forty-one books that Kipling had presented to the lady, quite
indiscriminately first editions, reprints, anything that came to
hand. Each volume was inscribed in a fluttering and largely
unrecognizable hand that later caused me much trouble, but
luckily there was also a letter saying, "Dear : I want you
to have these books," followed by his more or less recognizable
signature.
Fred sold me the forty-one books for $500, which was only
a fraction of their value in my eyes. (After two years' negotia-
tion, I succeeded in driving the final sale price to my customer
up to $150. )
You may think it funny that a collector like Fred would sell
his prizes. The explanation was simple: he was so avid that he
[ 13 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
could never resist selling one lot in order to buy something
else.
One morning he told me he guessed he would get rid of his
collection of Northwest Americana.
I said, "111 buy them, on one condition: 111 put a price on
each volume, and you aren't to look at a single one. Neither
you nor I have seven months to spend on this job."
So I would pick out a Meares's Voyages and say, "Forty
dollars."
'What's that?" Fred would ask.
"None of your damn business," I would reply, laying the
book face down out of his reach.
In this way I arrived at a figure of $5000, for which I gave
a check. Not long afterward his son wrote: "You know what
dad did with that money? He spent it to buy $5200 worth of
other books."
He was, as I said before, connected with the Olds, Wortman
& King department store. I had known Mr. Wortman for a
good many years; he had formed a really important collection
of primary Western travels, and he occupied a most respected
position among Western collectors.
During my stay in Portland he asked me if I could have
lunch with him, alone. At lunch he said, "Everitt, Mr. Olds is
going to have a dinner party for you and Skiff and a few
others, and I just wanted to tell you one thing. Please don't
laugh at Olds's library."
As a matter of fact, I already knew Mr. Olds's reputation for
buying anything between covers so long as it was expensively
bound and came in more than one volume.
The dinner was absolutely delightful. We ate, drank, and
talked until late in the evening, and then adjourned to the
library, a room fully twenty by sixty, completely lined with
[ 14 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
books, every single one in full levant binding. I happened to
notice, for instance, seven sets of Dickens, all in levant.
About one-thirty I said, "I'm pretty well worn out; I've got
to go home."
This was the signal for a general exodus. As the guests were
getting their coats, Mr. Olds took me into a corner.
"Everitt," he said, "I want to thank you very much for not
laughing at my library. This is the story. I came west across
the plains with my father when I was eleven or twelve. At one
of the abandoned camps we stopped at, I found a defective
copy of David Coppcrfield.
"I read it, and reread it, and reread it. I had daydreams, as
any kid does, and I would tell myself that if I ever had enough
money, I was going to buy all the books I wanted. Now,
whenever a salesman calls with a set, the only question I ask
is, 'Where do I sign?' "
Mr. Olds died not long after, willing his estate to his
nephew, an army officer. The executors wrote to ask whether
I could come west and appraise the library, and inquired what
I would charge.
I wrote back: "I don't need to come west, and there will be
no charge. The books are worth $25,000."
The executors were outraged. "Why," they wrote back, "we
have receipted bills for $650,000."
I replied in a one-line note: "The books are worth $25,000."
The upshot was that the library was sold, and brought in
$24,500, less commission; but the satisfaction Olds had already
had from his collection would have been dirt cheap at a
million dollars. I call that a happy ending to a collecting
story.
During my stay in Portland Fred and I went around to a few
junk shops (junk shops is the word). In one of them I did
[ 15 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
happen on two copies of a guide to Montana. It was the first
book written and illustrated by Charlie Russell, the great
Western illustrator. They were marked five cents each. At the
time I did not feel that I got any more than a rare bookseller
regards as his money's worth, because the craze for collecting
Charlie Russell had barely begun. Anyhow, I took the books
back east with me.
They were lying on my desk one day when I had a visitor,
Dr. Philip Cole, whose medical discoveries had supplied him
with the wherewithal for an estate at Lake Placid and the
best Remington and Russell collection in existence. (Another
one of my collector friends paid the doctor's estate $300,000
for the lot. If you want to see the collection now, go to Tulsa,
Oklahoma, and have a look at the Thomas Gilcrease Founda-
tion.)
The doctor picked up a copy of the Russell book. "How
much?" he asked.
When you get to be as old in sin as I, you have a feeling
about buyers and their attraction for a given book. "Oh," I
said, "I'll sell you one for a hundred dollars."
The doctor thought that over. "No, I won't pay that for one."
Pause. I began mentally running over other people I could
make the sale to.
"But I'll give you two hundred for both."
And the joke is that no other copy of the book has ever been
found.
Marcus Whitman, the missionary, either did or did not save
Oregon for the United States, depending on which school of
historians you believe. However, neither school denies that he
was the central figure in Oregon history.
At all events, the missionary societies of the time were so im-
[ 16 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
pressed with Brother Whitman that some of them asked a
portrait painter named J. M. Stanley to go out to Walla Walla
and paint the pioneer's portrait.
Just before Stanley got to Walla Walla, on November 30,
1847, a friendly Indian halted him and said that the Indians
had just massacred Marcus Whitman and all his associates. Not
unnaturally, Stanley told the news in a letter to a surviving
fellow worker of Whitman's in Portland.
My last transaction with Fred Skiff consisted of a parcel
containing Stanley's letter and some other material, with a note
from Fred: "Charlie: I don't want any check; I want a money
order for $250."
The Stanley letter is now in the William Robertson Coe
collection in Yale University.
Unquestionably the world's finest collection of material re-
lating to the American Indian, as well as the finest collections
of Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell paintings and
sculptures, is the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation in Tulsa, Okla-
homa.
Thomas Gilcrease is an Oklahoma Indian. The majority of
the Oklahoma Indian oil millionaires profited by the discovery
of oil on the Indian reservations. Gilcrease, however, went
down to Texas and found his own oil. He is extremely con-
scious of his Indian heritage, and his one interest in life is the
assembling of material that will serve to inspire the Indians of
the present day. The collections at the Gilcrease Foundation,
therefore, portray the Indian from his own point of view, not
as an anthropological curiosity.
I first heard of Thomas Gilcrease through an air-mail re-
quest for a copy of my catalogue. No one had ever asked me
for a catalogue by air mail before, so I reciprocated by air
[ 17 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
mailing my catalogue of the Putnam collection of anthro-
pology. This was the first time I had ever spent thirty cents to
send out a catalogue.
Most such high-pressure sales efforts are wasted, but Mr.
Gilcrease sent by return mail an order for several hundred
dollars' worth of books. He kept on ordering from successive
catalogues, and finally a bronzed stranger walked into the
store and said, "I'm Gilcrease."
He had with him a list of books he wanted for his library. As
he handed it to me, he said, "Mr. Everitt, I want you to re-
member that when you sell me a bock, it must be not only a
first edition but a fine copy."
I said, "Mr. Gilcrease, evidently you don't know very much
about books."
"Just what do you mean by that?" he asked, bridling.
"Well, Jonathan Carver's Travels is one of the great books
of western American history. The first edition is of no conse-
quence at all. It's only when you get to the revised and en-
larged third edition that you have a real cornerstone book.
Or take Kendall's Santa Fe Expedition. You know the book,
of course?"
"Yes, naturally."
"All right. The first edition is a fine book, but the seventh is
worth ten times as much to anyone who looks past the price
mark."
"I guess I shouldn't have said first edition. I should have said
best edition," Mr. Gilcrease admitted with a smile.
One of the great Western paintings is Carl Wyman's The
Buffalo Hunt. The picture has been famous for many years,
and has been many times reproduced. Finally it turned up in
the window of a 57th Street art gallery, marked five thousand
dollars.
[ 18 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
After some argument, I bought it for $800. I sent Mr. Gil-
crease a photograph of it, and a quotation for $1250.
He happened to be in town a few days later, and handed
me a check. As he was turning to leave, he said, "This may
entertain you. I saw that painting in the gallery for five
thousand, and was just about ready to buy it when the sales-
man got nervous and said, 'Possibly I can get this for you for
three thousand/ I kind of lost interest then, not knowing
what kind of place I might be in. Anyhow, I'm delighted to
have the picture, and I hope you made a good commission."
Sometimes the only dependable rule I know about the values
of Americana is that there is no rule of thumb. Perhaps the
greatest delusion of all is that age has a bearing on value. Or
that rarity has any relation to cash value.
A very large proportion of the earliest printing in America
consisted of sermons and religious controversy, with an oc-
casional schoolbook. Almost none of it has more than its scrap-
paper value, and the few exceptions are valuable because the
author, or perhaps the printer, was important, not because the
text is worth reading.
I hope (though not very confidently) that you will not come
to one of my fellow booksellers with a pamphlet "printed in
Boston in the seventeen hundreds, with the s's like f s," and feel
aggrieved at an actually generous offer of twenty-five cents.
As for rarity, single copies of most old newspapers are ex-
cessively rare, because people seldom take much care of last
week's paper; they are also practically worthless in the rare-
book trade, because they do not form a connected whole. Com-
plete "runs" of newspapers are the prime examples of the rule
that any collection is worth considerably more than the sum
of its parts.
[ 19 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
In this as in everything else about the rare-book business,
the rules are like French irregular verbs an inch of rule and
a yard of exception.
I once paid a brother dealer a decent price for a John Adams
letter, and he, perhaps partly relying on the rule about old
newspapers, handed me a copy of the Boston News-letter for
November 6, 1710, and said, "With my compliments." I did
not throw it away because it had twelve pages instead of the
ordinary four, and was entirely devoted to a British expedition
against Canada. These oddities made me curious enough so
that I wrote to the great authority on American newspapers for
information.
He replied that he lacked this particular issue but that he
made it a principle never to compete with a leading neighbor-
ing institution, which also lacked this issue. He suggested
that his neighbor might be glad to pay as much as ten or
fifteen dollars for the paper.
So I sat down and catalogued the Boston News-letter quite
elaborately at eighty-five dollars.
The morning after the catalogue went out, Michael Walsh
of Goodspeed's, Boston, telephoned to be first with his order.
Once this formality was safely out of the way, he told me that
the only other known copy was in the Public Record Office
in London. It contained the first printing of Francis Nichol-
son's Narrative of the Expedition against Port Royal, which in
itself is so rare as to be unrecorded.
Even the rule that you should collect Americana for the
interest to be found in reading the books has many excep-
tions. I have had a lot of fun, and a lot of money, for example,
out of imprints.
The "imprint" of a book is the information at the bottom of
the title page the publisher's name and the place and date of
[ 20 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
publication. In the book trade, imprints are books whose in-
terest lies in the circumstances of their publication. Imprints
are the basic and often the only foundation stones for the
history of printing in America. The first publication in each
state, territory, city, or even hamlet is interesting on its own
account, and often very valuable as well.
The slow westward spread of printing in this country pro-
duced what seems like a fantastic disproportion in the values
of imprints. Many New England imprints of 1750 are common
as dirt, and not worth a quarter unless you want to hollow
them out for a cigarette box. Southern imprints, which came
somewhat later, were mostly laws and newspapers. Philadel-
phia imprints of 1800 are almost innumerable, yet those from
Pittsburgh of that date are extreme rarities.
But the real rarities don't begin until you get past the Mis-
sissippi.
When I was helping in appraising William R. Coe's collec-
tion of Western Americana in preparation for his giving it to
Yale, I came to a quarto broadside dated August 12, 1868.
I appraised it at fifteen hundred dollars, and thought after-
ward that perhaps I should have doubled or tripled the figure.
The sheet was titled: "Green River City Ordinances. Procla-
mation in Promulgation of the Laws and Ordinances passed by
the Trustees of Green River City." The imprint reads: "Green
River City, Dakota Territory." The broadside is one of two
known items from the "press on wheels" of the Freeman
brothers, who hauled their equipment in a wagon ahead of the
Pacific Railroad construction gang. When the Freemans got to
the railhead at Green River, the place was thus described by
Hubert Howe Bancroft: "Shootings were frequent and every
manner of vice abounded. The inhabitants were the scum of
society and the accommodations for their shelter being tents
[ 21 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
and dugouts. A canvas saloon would answer as well as another
for gambling, drinking and the practices of the dives. Nefari-
ous men and women made the place intolerable. The city
authorities were powerless, and robberies and assaults with
deadly weapons were of daily and nightly occurrence. . . ."
The pillars of Green River society tried to clean up the
place by issuing the laws found in the broadside.
The sprightlier elements wanted no laws of any kind, and
they expressed their feelings by smashing the Freemans' press,
thus making the Green River City Ordinances worth whatever
price anyone wants to put on them. The Coe collection, in-
cidentally, contains more unique imprints than any other col-
lection in the world. I say this even though I am quite aware
that the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Massa-
chusetts, one of the great assemblages of Americana, was
founded in 1813 by Isaiah Thomas, a great printer and the first
historian of America's printing, with the gift of all his collec-
tion. The Antiquarian Society has been steadily, purposefully,
and skillfully enlarging its collections for more than a century
and a quarter. But it made the decision to collect no American
imprints dated after 1820; consequently Mr. Coe, during part
of his lifetime, was able to outrun the Society in the matter
of unique imprints.
But remember, there are still no rules. West longitude alone
does not account for all really rare imprints. One day in
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, I saw a store with a sign: ANY
BOOK TEN CENTS, THREE FOR A QUARTER. Not Wishing tO be CX-
travagant, I bought three.
One of these was an unexciting-looking pamphlet called
Miles' Overland Expedition to California, printed in Chambers-
burg in 1851.
As I read the pamphlet on the train going home, I found
[ 22 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
it an exciting original narrative; and then I began to wonder
why it was not listed in any of the bibliographies of Western
narratives. Then I remembered from my Civil War reading a
book on the burning of Chambersburg. The place was entirely
destroyed by the Confederates. I now think that Miles's pam-
phlet must have been stored in the back room of some printing
shop, and practically all the copies must have gone up in
smoke. Only two others have ever been found.
I sold my first copy to Henry R. Wagner (who described it
for the first time in his famous bibliography, The Plains and
the Rockies) for a thousand dollars.
I was still feeling quite pleased with myself for my dis-
covery when I got a letter from Baltimore, offering me a long
list of trash. Tucked away in the list, as casually as you please,
was Miles' Overland Expedition.
I need hardly say that I was in Baltimore as fast as the first
train would carry me. I went solemnly over all the books on
the list, and then, pointing to the Miles book, remarked as
casually as I could, "By the way, I don't see this thing here."
"Oh/* said the owner, equally casually, "that's in the safe
deposit vault." After some hours of high-level negotiation,
during which I ceased to feel quite so smart, we settled on
fifteen hundred dollars as a fair price.
Sometime on your travels, keep an eye out for a little im-
print called Three Years among the Indians, by James, printed
in Waterloo, Illinois, in 1846. I hope you will have as pleasant
memories of your discovery as I have. A librarian friend in
St. Louis let me know that the author's nephew was still living
in Waterloo, that he had a copy of the pamphlet, which a scout
had tried to buy from him, but he had said he could not bring
himself to sell his uncle's book.
On the strength of this I went out to Waterloo, an inacces-
[ 23 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
sible small town east of St. Louis. I was directed to a bunga-
low where an extremely nice old man asked what he could
do for me.
"I've come to buy a book you don't want to sell," I said.
"We're just sitting down to corned beef and cabbage.
Wouldn't you like some?" he asked. "How're you going to buy
it? I'm just not going to sell it until I can get another copy."
"I don't know, but I'm not leaving without it."
"Well, how are you going to buy it?"
"I'm going to leave you a signed blank check," I said. "After
you fill in the amount, and the check doesn't bounce from the
bank, you mail me the pamphlet."
The old man looked at me with rather a twinkle. "What
would you do," he asked, "if I filled that check in for three
hundred dollars?"
"Try it, and you'll see," said I. I handed him the blank
check, thanked him for the corned beef, and went back to
St. Louis. Five or six weeks later the check had still not
cleared, and I began to worry about Three Years among the
Indians.
At last a letter came from the nephew, in which he said he
had decided to open a bank account with the amount of my
check, but had not cared to do it in a small town where every-
one knew everyone else's business. So he had opened a new
account in St. Louis, my check had cleared, and he was send-
ing me Three Years among the Indians by express, insured,
collect.
Another thing that lends spice to the pursuits of the im-
print collector is the fact that one imprint may be dear at five
dollars, and the same title, printed the same year but in a dif-
ferent place, may be worth five hundred. There is an Indian
treaty printed in London in 1756 that you can find almost at
[ 24 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
will for about fifty dollars. It is almost impossible to set any
price on the identical treaty, printed the same year in Williams-
burg, Virginia, because only two copies are known. The first
one appeared in the famous Brinley sale in 1881, and the
second passed over my desk at a great bargain for some hun-
dreds of dollars a few years ago.
As you will learn if you read to the end of this book, I have
very little patience with people who say that all the killings
and all the discoveries have been made. But I must admit that
the collecting of imprints has grown up like a mushroom in the
last twenty-five years; you could hardly do now what my
partner Adolph Stager and I did at the old Stan V. Henkels
auction rooms about 1925. A bundle of forty-five pamphlets,
worth from five to fifty dollars each, was up for sale. Stager
nervously telephoned me just before the sale to find out how
much money we had in the bank, in case we should have to
reach for this prize.
Right after the sale he telephoned again, almost equally
nervous with relief: he had bought the lot for forty-five
dollars.
We thought it was a pretty good haul until the morning
after, when we really began scrutinizing our loot. Then we
found that it included a copy of the first Mormon Constitu-
tion, printed in Kanesville in 1849. This, like the Green River
Ordinances, was printed on a migratory press, and not only the
press but the town had long since ceased to exist.
After some digging around, I priced the pamphlet at a
thousand dollars. George W. Cole, the librarian of the Hunting-
ton Library, San Marino, Calif ornia, thought the price was
ridiculous; but when I put the pamphlet in the American Art
Association's auction soon afterward, Mr. Huntington's agent
bought it for $1010. Counting the buying agent's commission,
[ 25 ]'
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
it cost him $111 not to buy the pamphlet from me in the first
place.
United States government documents are probably the most
forbidding-looking lot of publications you will find anywhere.
Most of them are badly printed, festooned with certificates,
letters of transmittal, and mysterious code numbers. Probably
more than 50 per cent are also pure hot air speeches by
members of Congress happy to get their names in print for the
one time in their lives.
The funny thing is that literally nobody knows what gold is
buried in those hills of paper. The most vital sources for our
history are to be found nowhere else.
You might naturally think that a person could go to the
Library of Congress and say, "Here, fetch me the Government
documents on so and so."
But you would be wrong. There is no complete record of
what documents were published. A versatile old character
named Ben Perley Poore put out a bibliography in the eighties,
covering perhaps 75 per cent of the items now known. There
have been some later bibliographies, but none even so full as
Poore's.
Here are a few documents that pop into my head as I sit
here.
The first American treason trial, that of William Blount, of
Tennessee, in the 1790's, is known to us only through a Gov-
ernment publication.
The Government published the first record of the Lewis and
Clark expedition.
The only existing records of the Old Northwest are in dusty
government folios.
All we knew about Japan for fifty years was contained in the
[ 26 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
three fat volumes of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's
report on his expedition that opened up Nippon to the west
(Among the numerous plates in the first edition was a picture
showing Japanese men and women bathing together in a steam
bath. This was the only thing the Japanese government ob-
jected to, and it was omitted from later printings. )
So far as I can see, the subject of Government documents
will always remain a Chinese puzzle, yielding a nugget here
and there to those persistent enough to dig for it.
My interest was first aroused thirty or forty years ago, when
several hundred folio documents were bundled and offered
for sale at the American Art Association. William L. Clements,
of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent me a substantial bid, remarking
at the same time that he wanted to complete his files of Gov-
ernment documents printed before 1800. I bought in the lot
for a mere fraction of his bid. Before I shipped his purchase,
I looked through the collection and decided that it was prac-
tically hopeless for me ever to learn anything about American
history. Even now I don't know whether the Clements collec-
tion is finished up to 1800. For that matter, I wonder if the
Library of Congress has a complete file.
Recently I have had a phone call from the Southern Book
Company in Baltimore, asking me to guess at the value of a
Government document on the Bill of Rights, of which the
only other known copy is in the Library of Congress.
All I could say was, *Tm damned if I know. It's all a ques-
tion of how far your imagination works, with a minimum of
five thousand dollars."
One of the great sources for the history of the Northwest is
the report of the expedition under Commodore Wilkes. It was
first printed in five volumes, plus an atlas, then reprinted
several times in five volumes with the maps bound in. Ed
[ 27 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Eberstadt found out somehow that there had been an edition
of a hundred sets printed the year before the well-known
edition. There were also innumerable volumes of scientific re-
ports in folio from the various experts who accompanied the
expedition. These too were printed in an edition of one hun-
dred.
I have never seen the edition that Eberstadt discovered; but
I have, I am sorry to say, seen two sets of the scientific reports.
The first set was in the duplicate room at Cornell University.
The librarian, Mr. Harris, asked me, "Shall I put these along
with the wastepaper?"
Here was one of the insoluble dilemmas in a bookseller's
work. If I offered ten dollars, I would unquestionably get
them and be remembered forevcrmore as a robber of widows
and orphans and librarians. Whatever I said was wrong.
So I made the other mistake. I said, "I hardly think I would
do that. I can give you five hundred for the set."
Mr. Harris said, 'I'll have to let you know." As soon as I had
waked him up, he remembered that the books were not
duplicates but simply bulky, dreary-looking tomes that he had
got tired of giving shelf space to.
The only other set I ever saw was in the basement of the
Rhode Island Historical Society. I had practically the same
experience, was equally sure I could get away with them for
ten dollars, and offered five hundred. Later, hoping against
hope to get some action out of the librarian, I wrote and
offered a thousand. This was some ten years ago, arid so far
I am still waiting for an answer.
To my great regret I am forced to confess that my own
book is a sad example in one respect; if I had kept a diary
during my sixty years, instead of just trying to remember back
[ 28 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
now, the story would really have meant something. Old men's
recollections are plentiful enough among historical books, but
the real nuggets are the things that were scrawled down at the
time. From a historical standpoint you can easily see why this
is, and I have had experiences enough to show that it is also
true in respect to money values.
Fred Skiff showed me a tiny notebook, not altogether un-
like those you buy in dime stores now. The inside was scrib-
bled in pencil. Every attic has a dozen of them, usually con-
taining notes on the weather and the price of eggs.
"Charlie, get me twenty-five hundred for this," said Fred.
"Why?"
"Look on page fifty-nine."
Page fifty-nine showed that the diarist had got lost in the
California mountains in January, 1848. To his considerable re-
lief he was rescued by some Indians working for a man named
Sutter and brought into Sutter's Fort on the twenty-second,
two days before the man came in with the first gold nuggets.
About three lines of the diary were devoted to the excitement
when one of Sutter's employees, named Marshall, came back
into camp with some gold nuggets he had found. I had the
diary on my desk when Dr. Rosenbach's assistant came pros-
pecting around, as he frequently did. He looked at the book.
"How much?"
"Oh, I don't know."
The usual procedure was scrupulously followed: he went
home, and Dr. Rosenbach telephoned to ask if I would come
and show him the diary. He sent his Rolls-Royce.
We talked for a while about nothing in particular.
"How much for this?" the doctor finally asked.
"Three thousand five hundred."
"If you'll give me 10 per cent off, I'll write you a check."
[ 29 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"Oh, go peddle your newspapers, Doc." I went out and down
the marble stairs.
"I suppose you think I'm being foolish not to buy this," said
Dr. Rosenbach, patting me condescendingly on the shoulder.
"No, I don't think you're being foolish. I know you're being
foolish. It's just a question of whether I sell it to Henry E.
Huntington for five thousand or you sell it to him for ten
thousand."
He laughed, and swung me around to face upstairs again. I
suppose my price must have been ten times the value of any
nugget found the first day of the Gold Rush.
A Midwestern librarian friend of mine was looking busily
for a copy of Larned's Literature of American History (one of
the most useful books any bookseller can own, incidentally ) ,
and could not find one.
I had just been an underbidder for a Connecticut library
in which was a copy of the Larned, so I suggested that the
librarian write to the successful buyer, a woman in Hartford.
He did so, and she surprised me very much by selling him the
book for two dollars. This pleased me only moderately because
I would have been glad to give her twenty dollars, but, any-
way, my friend had his Larned.
Shortly afterwards he sent me a book with a note: "Please
take this with my compliments; I found it out here on a ten-
cent shelf." The book looked quite unpromising. It was Recol-
lections of a Woman of Eighty-five, by Mrs. Nye-Starr, Chi-
cago, 1881. When I looked at it, I discovered that along with
the recollections of an octogenarian was a diary she had kept
as a young girl on her way out to join her brother, who was
governor of Nevada. She had met Mark Twain in his Western
days, and her diary told all about it. The book wound up in
the Coe collection at Yale. Perhaps because a Chicago book of
[ 30 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
1881 looks so commonplace that you would pass it by on a ten-
cent counter, no other copy has ever been unearthed, though I
have advertised twenty times and canvassed all my librarian
friends around Chicago.
Some high-powered papers are really too hot to handle. At
the time of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty in 1901, we had an
ambassador in London by the name of White, who came from
Englewood, New Jersey.
Years afterward, Sam Dauber went on a fishing trip to the
Salvation Army in Englewood and returned with a letter book
containing copies of all the secret correspondence regarding
the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. After looking through the papers,
you could not escape the conclusion that this treaty was one
of the great scandals in American history.
Sam was feeling pretty pleased with himself. "We ought to
make some money out of this," he said.
"Sam, youVe got an elephant by the tail, and you can't let
go. If you catalogue it, the Government will claim it, sure.
What else can you do with it?"
At length someone from an Eastern university came into the
store, and I showed him our firecracker. "What would you do
with this?"
He did not know, any more than I did. Finally he and Sam
Dauber and I sat down and after arguing for an hour, I said,
"Well, we'll sell this to the university if they'll promise not
to let anyone see it for twenty years/*
That was the deal; the twenty years are not up yet
A president of the Theosophical Society, Claude Wright, dis-
appeared, leaving two trunks behind him. They were finally
auctioned off by a University Place gallery for storage charges,
[ 31 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Sam Dauber, a good gambler, bought them in for thirty
dollars.
When we broke the trunks open, about all we found was
something that had been a dress suit before the moths moved
in.
Sam is also a great hand for the follow-up. He went over to
the auctioneer's, choosing a moment when the great man was
absent, and asked one of the boys around the place if there
had not been any papers in the trunks.
"Oh, yes," said the boy. "We put these over in a corner."
"Thank you very much," said Sam, peeling off two dollars
for future protection.
When we started rooting through the papers, we found that
they recorded many of the vitriolic quarrels among Annie
Besant and Madame Blavatsky's other followers. "I am the true
successor to Madame Blavatsky," wrote Annie Besant. "You
are, like hell," replied somebody else. "I have her ring, which
I took off her finger when she was lying in her coffin." And
so on and so on.
"Well," I told Sam, "we've got thirty-two dollars in this; let's
see if we can get fifteen hundred out of it."
I was just preparing to catalogue the lot when a six-foot
stranger came in the store and downstairs to the rare-book
department.
"I hear you have some theosophical papers," he said. "How
much do you want for them?"
"Well, I was just getting ready to catalogue them," I said;
"but to save the trouble and expense, Til let you have the lot
for a thousand dollars."
"What? Trying to blackmail me?" shouted the stranger.
"Do you see those steps?" I shouted back. "You get up them
in a hurry, you son of a bitch, or HI throw you up."
[ 32 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
An hour or two later he was back, perfectly placid. "I've
been asking around to see what kind of fellow you are. I'll
give you a thousand dollars for the papers, if you'll tear them
up in my presence/'
"I'm letting you off fairly easy," I said, "because before you
came in, I had just about decided to ask fifteen hundred. But
youll still save my cataloguing the papers. It's a deal."
I carefully blotted his check, and then set to work tearing
the theosophical papers into small snippets.
On the corner of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury
Avenue is a famous pub. When I was in London about 1925,
a number of my dealer friends and I used to go there regu-
larly after the shops closed at seven.
One night I noticed a young man in the corner who looked
as if he lacked the price of a drink. In Yankee fashion and
British phrase I said, "Won't you join us in a spot?"
The young man said he would be delighted, and introduced
himself, saying his name was Falconer.
English drinking parties run to about one drink per hour.
He had put away one spot when we all decided our time was
up. He thanked me again, and started to leave.
Something put it into my head to ask, "By the way, are you
any connection of Judge Falconer, the one that traveled around
New Mexico with a tin bathtub, and kept falling off his
horse?"
"As a matter of fact, I'm the last living descendant of Judge
Falconer, and I even have his papers."
Trying not to look as excited as I felt, I said in what I hoped
was a steady voice, "How about a spot of lunch at the Horse-
shoe tomorrow?'*
"Gladly," he said, and so we parted.
[ 33 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
One of the great books of Western travel, which was re-
printed several times in its own day and has lost none of its
value since, is George W. Kendall's Narrative of the Texan-
Santa Fe Expedition. In it he refers several times to the ec-
centric Englishman, Falconer, with the tin bathtub. As a
steady reader of Kendall, I remembered Falconer; hence my
question to the young man.
Back at the hotel that night, I tried to calm myself. "Look,"
I said to my wife, but really to myself, "you don't just stumble
onto things like this. This is too easy; there's something wrong
with it/'
In the morning I rushed over to see Leon Kashnor at the
Museum Book Store. "Do you know a young fellow named
Falconer, Leon?" I asked.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Charlie, you stay clear of that," Leon
said. "I've fifty pounds in the man now, and I haven't the
slightest idea whether he owns a single sheet of paper."
I went to lunch at the Horseshoe, carefully chatted about
everything in the world except the Falconer papers, quietly
dodged an attempt by the lineal descendant to put the bite
on me, and went about my business. I had finally convinced
myself that it really was too good to be true, so I could keep
my disappointment within bounds.
Three years later Leon Kashnor welcomed me at the door of
his shop with a small handful of papers. "Well, here are the
Falconer papers. They stood me eighty quid, and I certainly
hope you can think of some way to get me out whole."
When I went through the bundle, I found two items that
looked valuable from a money standpoint. One was a two-page
letter from Falconer telling about the Santa Fe expedition.
The other, also in Falconer's own hand, was a bibliography of
his writings. (After he got back from America, he became a
[ 34 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
judge, and wrote a great many legal pamphlets.) The rest
of the papers showed that Falconer had been a British secret
agent on the Mexican border at the time he was with the Santa
Fe expedition.
The bibliographer remarked that Falconer's own account of
his New Mexico trip had been printed in New Orleans. This
Leon and I already knew, because the Falconer pamphlet is
among the rarest of books. But then he went on to say that the
same material had been added also to the seventh edition of
Kendall. Since no bookseller ever glances inside late editions of
a book, this was complete news to us. The seventh edition
of Kendall, of course, was very much looked down on by all
the people who wanted a first edition, and the price of the
seventh stood at about five dollars.
A lawyer friend of mine, Lanman Crosby, has always amused
himself by spending his spare time in bookshops. I told him
about the seventh edition of Kendall, and between us we dug
up seven sets in the next three years, which we \vere able to
sell at fifty dollars a set instead of five. We must have done a
thorough job, because I haven't seen a seventh edition of Ken-
dall in the last five years.
The letter that was the other prominent item among the
Falconer papers I sold for five hundred dollars to a Texas
collector. Leon and I both came out more than whole from the
transaction.
While the collection was intact in my hands, I called up Dr.
Frederick Hodge and asked if he would like to edit the Fal-
coner letters. He said he had been meaning to do it for years.
So Dauber & Pine issued The Falconer Letters and Notes in
an edition of 250 copies, printed in 1930. This little book is now
quite as rare as the seventh edition of Kendall's expedition.
* * #
[ 35 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
One of the most famous professional book-hunters of the
period around 1910, who worked a great deal for me, hap-
pened to be traveling through Connecticut, where he en-
countered a Civil War collector named Eldridge. Eldridge's
collection was unrivaled in its time, but it simply could not be
bought. The book-hunter, while unsuccessful in buying the
collection, made the acquaintance of Miss Eldridge and later
married her.
Among the gems of the collection was a set of Civil War
photographs by Matthew Brady, easily five times larger than
that of any contemporary. After Eldridge died, his son-in-law,
as executor, took the Brady photographs to Lanier of the Re-
view of Review and sold them to him for thirty thousand
dollars. Lanier rounded up some lesser collections, and poured
them all into the Photographic History of the Civil War.
He made a splendid job of it, and sold so many thousands of
sets that for ten years afterwards a bookseller seldom bought
a private library that did not contain at least one set of the
Photographic History of the Civil War.
Naturally this drove the price down; I have seen many sets
sell for $3.50.
It was a really good book, and times have changed. Some-
time when you have nothing else to do, go hunting for a
Photographic History under $50 a set.
In the process of preparing the Photographic History for
publication, the editors tossed out some three thousand photo-
graphs as not being originals that is, they were photographs
of photographs. This lot was put up at auction and sold for a
small sum.
The great backer of the Western Reserve Historical Society
in those days was president of the American Steel and Wire
Company, William P. Palmer. His main interest was enlarging
[ 36 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
a collection at the Historical Society which covered both sides
of the Civil War. At the time, I knew he had spent about
$30,000 on it.
I happened to be in Cleveland, so I went to call on my chum
Wallace Cathcart, the librarian of the Society. He said, "Come
on upstairs. Mr. Palmer wants you to see his Civil War stuff."
I looked over the material, and Mr. Palmer asked what I
thought of it.
"Well," I said, "I think youVe made a fine beginning." He
grinned a little at that "Now," he said, "I want to show you a
collection of Brady photographs that I bought at a bargain
recently for several thousand dollars."
Sure enough, it was our old friends.
Mr. Palmer showed me a letter from a book man whom well
call John Doe: "This is unquestionably the finest lot of Brady
photographs ever offered for sale, and I am prepared to
guarantee that each and every one is an original."
To my friend Cathcart's chagrin, I said, "I'm willing to give
you a different guarantee. I will personally guarantee that you
do not have a single original Brady photograph in the entire
lot."
Mr. Palmer just grinned, and said, "We do get trimmed a
lot, don't we?"
Not all Clevelanders were so good-natured about it. I was
in Cathcart's office when an elderly lawyer came in with a list
of books he wanted to sell. "Doe offered me twelve hundred
and fifty," he said.
"Here, Charlie, you take a look at the list," Cathcart put in.
"Oh, I don't need to do that. If John Doe will pay twelve
hundred fifty, I'll give two thousand without bothering to look
at the list," I said.
"No," the lawyer said, "I won't take that offer. What I will do
[ 37 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
is to sell you the lot for twelve hundred fifty, and I will pack
and ship them at my expense, just so that son of a bitch doesn't
get them in Cleveland."
My last transaction with John Doe, the dealer, was a fairly
complete joke on me. While I was at Dauber & Pine's, I cata-
logued an extraordinary copy of Doddridge's Indian Wars at
seventy-five dollars. I showed it to Sam Dauber and said,
"Take a look at this, because you'll never see another copy as
good."
John Doe wired for it.
Three months later a copy came back, with no covers, library
discard stamps smeared all over it, and a note from him, say-
ing, "Charlie, what do you mean by cataloguing this as the
finest copy you ever saw?"
For want of any other excitement, I decided I would sue
him. A Western lawyer happened to be in the store, and I said,
'Til give you half of the sixty-seven fifty if youll collect this."
I reached into my pocket and found three ten-dollar bills.
"Oh, that's plenty," said the lawyer. "I'll collect it."
That is the last I have heard of Doddridge or lawyer.
One of the first things I discovered when I began to read
American history seriously in 1891 was that everything in my
school history books was at least questionable. It took me
twenty years to unlearn everything that had been stuffed down
my throat.
Perhaps my hypersensitivity to some of our well-advertised
historical monuments is a drawback that goes with dealing in
the stuff of American history, but it also has its compensations.
My Labrador retriever, like anyone else, enjoys a comfort stop
now and then on a long drive. I have always found great
pleasure as we pass through Tarrytown, New York, in accom-
[ 38 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
modating him by a stop at the monument to the captors of
Major Andre.
The facts of the famous capture are well known, though
perhaps not in all their details. The three great patriots who
captured Andre really did capture him, but they were sutlers
and, not to put too fine a point on it, bootleggers. Andre
offered them a large bribe to let him go, and their first instinct
was to escort him safely to the British lines. Halfway there,
however, they began to think they would not look very good
if they were captured; so they decided to go down in history as
heroes by taking him to the American army.
It is barely possible that the members of the D.A.R. and
the S.A.R. will not approve of this last paragraph; but then, I
am not looking for them to read this book, anyway.
The bulk of the legends printed in our schoolbooks are
about as accurate as Emanuel Leutze's famous painting of
Washington Crossing the Delaware. Some years ago one of
our best sellers was a book called 1776; the thing I remember
best about it is the author's statement, concerning the painting,
that in the first place Washington knew far too much to stand
up in a rowboat and that in the second place he would
probably have been facing the rear, shouting at the 250-pound
General Henry Knox, "Move your fat ass, and trim the
boat."
The late Mr. Frank Reynolds, who was a partner in the travel
*firm called Ask Mr. Foster, made a hobby of Florida history.
Probably no one has ever known more about the subject. He
wrote the standard history of St. Augustine, and in the course
of his research spent some years on the "Oldest House in Amer-
ica." Perhaps as a relaxation from his larger history, he wrote
and published a pamphlet characterizing the Oldest House as
f 39 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
undoubtedly a fake. He used to give the pamphlet away by
the hundreds at his various offices, and he would send me four
or five hundred at a crack for free distribution.
A St. Augustine tourist organization threatened to sue him;
he told them he wished they would. The only thing that ever
happened was a letter from Chauncey M. Depew, the New
York Central Railroad magnate, who was also an active figure
in the Florida Historical Society. "Why destroy pleasant leg-
ends?" said the old robber baron.
What makes me mad is that the writers of the history books
on which our children are brought up seem to prefer Chauncey
Depew's attitude to Mr. Reynolds's and mine. Not only the
capture of Major Andre and the Oldest House but the heart-
stirring stories of Betsy Ross and Barbara Frietchie are
practically pure products of folk imagination. If any reader of
mine can produce the slightest evidence that Betsy Ross ever
saw an American flag, I will willingly send him a genuine Bay
Psalm Book, with a presentation autograph by Stephen Dave,
who printed it.
For a good deal less than that, I will find you part of the
Book of Mormon that was printed some months before John
Smith received the communication from on high.
All the orthodox accounts tell us that the golden plates on
which the Book of Mormon was inscribed were found in a hill
near Palmyra, New York, in the spring of 1830. (They were
written in a foreign tongue, but the angel obligingly provided
Smith with a magic crystal through which he could read and
transcribe them in English. )
I have never investigated the matter of the discovery, but I
did once chance upon a magazine called The Reflector that
began publication at Palmyra in 1829. The November, 1829,
issue contained an early section of the Book of Mormon
f 40 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
which, incidentally, the newspapers of the time regarded and
criticized as a political pamphlet.
Perhaps the pleasantest thing about The Reflector is that it
reminds me of my many years' friendship with Herbert Auer-
bach, the greatest collector of Mormon books who has ever
lived. The connection is a trifle roundabout.
My friend and factotum, Harry Alpern, once spent an ex-
tremely discouraging week in his long round of attics, antique
and junk shops. All he had to show for six days of unremitting
labor was one forlorn volume of The Reflector. As a matter of
course, I offered it first to Mr. Auerbach, who thanked me,
but said he had a copy.
(He told me later how he had come by his. A penciled
post card arrived in the mail from Palmyra, listing some old
books that an elderly lady wanted to sell. Mr. Auerbach did
not write, he did not wire, he did not telephone; he went in
person to make sure of that haul. The old lady was very much
astonished when Mr. Auerbach gave her fifty dollars for a
dog-eared old magazine. )
My next move was to write a careful description of the book
for Mr. Littel, of Chicago, with a $175 tag. He bought it.
When later his books were sent to the Parke-Bernet Galleries,
the auctioneer picked out all the better items to be catalogued
and sold separately. The odds and ends were being bundled
when a cataloguer happened to find my description stuck into
the volume of The Reflector. He thereupon catalogued it very
elaborately by itself, and the Scribner Book Store bid it in for
$450.
The Auerbach copy was sold later for $400. In the same sale
was a run of a weekly newspaper called Tlw Valley Tan,
named after a cheap brand of whisky made in Utah. Some
eccentric launched the paper to attack the Mormons. He kept
[ 41 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
going for a full year, fifty-two numbers, and Mr. Auerbach had
forty-nine. I ought to know; I sold them to him.
One day, in response to a note, I called at a broken-down
Southern mansion near Charlottesville, Virginia. The lady of
the house welcomed me at the door. "Before I come in," I said,
"I want to tell you that I'm fed up with you Southern ladies."
'What's the matter with us, Mr. Everitt?"
"It doesn't matter what book I try to buy below the Mason
and Dixon's line, it always belonged to Grandpappy and isn't
for sale."
"You won't have that trouble here," she said. "You can buy
anything in the house."
I went into a large library, which was almost entirely filled
with junk. The only exceptions were the lady's husband, who
was sitting in the corner, and three volumes of Ben Franklin's
newspapers, sitting on the floor. She said, "Mr. Everitt, what
are you going to give me for those?"
"One hundred fifty for these," I said.
"Oh, is that all?" '
I turned to her husband. "Listen to the woman," I said. "She
knew I was going to offer her three dollars, so when I offer her
a hundred and fifty, which is halfway honest, she say's Is that
all?"*
"Mr. Everitt," he said, "you could have bought those for two
dollars."
"Now," I said, "I am going out in the woodshed."
"You can't do that," she told me. "It's getting dark."
I repeated that I was going into the woodshed to see what
she had thrown away. After some argument she got me a lan-
tern.
"Don't worry," I said. "I've been in a lot dirtier places than
your woodshed looking for books."
[ 42 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
In a wood-basket, ready to start the next morning's fire,
was this file of The Valley Tan, the only approximately com-
plete one yet traced.
I went back into the house. "Now," I told the lady, "I'm going
to rob you. If these had been in the library, I'd have given you
fifty dollars for them. Because you were going to burn them up
in the morning, I'm going to give you ten."
"Don't you think you're being pretty cruel?"
"I think it serves you right," her husband put in.
A letter came in one day from a perfect stranger in Bruns-
wick, Maine, with a list of books he wanted to sell. He had a
three-volume Bishop's American Manufactures (worth $30 or
$40), for $3.00; Hodge's Handbook of American Indians (a $15
book), for $1.50; and twenty or thirty other books of about the
same grade, similarly priced.
I wrote back and said I hoped he had not sent out other
copies of his list, but in any case I would be happy to pay
him $15 for the Bishop; $7.50 for the Hodge; and so on through
the list. My offer was about double his total.
He answered that this was the only list he had sent out,
that he felt a bit uneasy about it, and that he would gladly
accept my offer, or his own original prices. So I sent him the
full amount of my offer.
Not long afterward he telephoned me from the Plaza Hotel
in New York. After telling me that I had paid for his visit, he
went on to say that he had some old letters he wished I would
look over. When I got there, he had a sort of sea chest full of
thousands of letters and manuscripts from the first American
missionary to Persia. There were manuscripts of the first
translation of the Bible into Persian, and heaven knows what
else.
[ 43 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"I paid a dollar for these," he said. "Do you want to give me
a hundred?"
I said, "Fine, how do we get them to the store?"
"I'll take care of that."
He hoisted the sea chest on his shoulder, tipped someone a
dime to help him into a cab with it, and off we went.
Going over in the taxi, he said, "There's one stamp in this
envelope that I think is pretty good." The stamp was a New
York Provisional of 1845. Later one of the largest stamp dealers
in town dropped in, looked the stamp over, and exclaimed
plaintively that it had been folded. The most he could pay
for it was thirty dollars.
A friend of mine who does not share my detestation for
stamps took this one down to Nassau Street, went to fourteen
dealers, and emerged triumphant with $57.50.
The box of missionary letters I catalogued at $450. The
Library of Congress asked to see them on approval. This was
before my little private lobby had finagled through a law
prohibiting them from keeping approval items more than
seven days, and their habit was to hang on to things from six
months to two years. So I said no thank you to the Library of
Congress.
Some weeks later the librarian of a theological seminary in
New England telephoned, asking if she might have the letters
on approval for sixty days, until the Oriental scholars on the
faculty came back from vacation.
Some two months later she phoned again to say that their
scholars all agreed on the great value of the material, but with
all their efforts they had not succeeded in raising more than
four hundred dollars.
"I think it is so important for the right institution to have
these letters," I told her, "that I should like to contribute a
[ 44 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
hundred dollars to your fund myself. The letters are yours for
three hundred."
My friend from Brunswick had other treasures of the same
sort in store for me. I went to see him at his bungalow in
Brunswick. He showed me a bureau drawer full of letters from
the golden age of New England Alcott, forty letters from
one of F.D.R.'s Delano ancestors, describing his adventures in
California, and enough more to fill the drawer.
"Everitt, I won't sell you these," he said.
I had just discovered that he was a teetotaler, so I was un-
doubtedly in disgrace. I tried to put a good face on it. "All
right. I've never committed suicide yet because I couldn't buy
anything. So what did you get me here for?"
He poured us each a Coca-Cola. "I won't sell them to you.
What I want is that you take them and give me half of any-
thing you get."
( I forget whether it was two or three thousand dollars that
we finally split. )
Then he told me he had a barnful of books down in the
village. My train was due to leave in two hours.
Pushing to the utmost my eagle eye for shelf-backs, I
snatched a hundred odd volumes off his shelves. One of these
was a small morocco folio in Sheraton style, with lettering on
the front cover: "The Secretary of State."
"Would you like me to give you a hundred dollars for this
lot?" I asked.
"Hell," he said, "you can have the whole barnful for that."
But I stuck to my offer and made up an express package
out of my choice. "Who pays for the express?" asked my
friend.
I said I would. When the package reached me in New York,
I grabbed hastily for the small folio. I had carefully refrained
[ 45 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
from looking inside it in Brunswick, but I was sure I had
recognized it as Laws of a Congress of the U.S., New York,
1789. There is nothing very rare about the title, but a binding
especially lettered for the Secretary of State is another matter.
The Secretary then was Thomas Jefferson.
Before I glanced at the cover, I had decided that this was
one of the most valuable books ever to pass through my hands.
Here was my year's overhead in one neat package.
Then I looked inside. Some Yankee from the state of Maine
had torn out every second page, and had pasted on all the
others such items of prose and verse as seemed to his peanut
brain worth preserving.
As I was inspecting this glorious scrapbook, a dealer looked
over my shoulder. "I'll give you a hundred dollars for it, as
is," he said.
I was so disgusted that I instantly wrapped the book up and
sent it, with my compliments, to my old friend Dr. Randolph
G. Adams, of the William L. Clements Library at Ann Arbor,
Michigan.
Later he sent me a careful description of the book. The gist
of it was as follows:
Not only was it bound specially for the Secretary of
State, but that Secretary, Thomas Jefferson, actually used
this copy, as is evidenced from a brief marginal manu-
script note on p. 15 which is unmistakably in Jefferson's
hand. This came to light upon the removal of some
awful poem.
BIBLIOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING: This book was
originally issued in marbled paper covers. But appar-
ently copies were especially bound for Federal officials
as this one for "The Secretary of State." There should
be 53 leaves, of which our criminal has removed 26.
[ 46 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
There probably were other copies in this rather fine
early American binding, Sheraton style, for other Fed-
eral officials. George Washington's copy, which Griffin
& Lane in their description of Washington's Library said
was missing in 1897 when they made their checklist. It
was appraised at $.75 at the time of the settlement of
Washington's will.
This book disproves Dr. Rosenbach's story as to his
book (mentioned in the Book-Hunters Holiday) being
the only book which survived the fire of 1814. This one
obviously did also. Perhaps I should use an early nine-
teenth-century hand, and write in it "Picked up by me
during the conflagration incident to the burning of Wash-
ington, 1814, C.P.E."
Morton Pennypacker, the great Long Island collector, came
into Dauber & Pine's one day with an abridged juvenile edi-
tion of Robinson Crusoe, printed in New York by Hugh Gaine,
the celebrated Tory printer, in 1774.
"Half the frontispiece to this is gone," said Pennypacker, "so
I'd be happy to take ten dollars for it."
Considering how many editions of Robinson Crusoe there
are, you might have hesitated to pay ten cents; but I happened
to know that this was one of the possibly two or three Hugh
Gaine imprints that the New York Public Library lacked. I
called in my friend R. W. G. Vail, who worked there at the
time, and asked him to offer it to Mr. Eames at sixty dollars.
Mr. Vail later wrote me a letter about the transaction.
Mr. Eames was quite excited about it, never having
heard of a copy of this, the first American edition of
Robinson Crusoe. He said that the price was very mod-
est, so sent me on to Dr. V. H. Paltsits, head of the
American History and Rare Book division. Dr. Paltsits
willingly approved the purchase and sent me on to H. M.
[ 47 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Lydenberg, then head of the Reference Department,
for final approval. I had just convinced Mr. Lyden-
berg that we should buy the book, since we had a fine
collection of Gaine imprints and also of early American
juveniles, when the Director, Mr. E. H. Anderson, hap-
pened in and wanted to know what the book was we
were discussing. I explained the case to him, and he, not
being a book man and having little interest in rare books
as such, said: "We cannot spend our money for a little,
abbreviated, child's edition. We have many other com-
plete editions including the first English edition." I tried
to convince him that we should purchase it, and ex-
plained that it was the only known copy, but he refused
to let us buy it. I then said that, if the library would not
buy it, I would purchase it myself as a speculation. He
said if I could make anything after paying such a high
price for it, I was welcome to do so. Soon after, a woman
free-lance newspaper writer came to the library look-
ing for material, and I showed her the Robinson Crusoe.
She got excited about it and wrote a good feature ar-
ticle about it in which she said it might bring as much
as $10,000. A few days later Dr. Rosenbach saw me at
an auction and said: "I hear you picked up an early
Robinson Crusoe. What are you going to do with it
you don't collect juveniles/* I said that I had not de-
cided what to do with it and he suggested that I bring it
up and show it to him, which I agreed to do. A couple
of weeks later I went up to his office and spent a de-
lightful couple of hours haggling over it. I offered it at
$1200, and he began very low, probably around $50 or
$100, I don't remember the amount. The upshot of it
all was that I sold it to him for $600, then took his check
down and showed it to Mr. Anderson at the library, to
his great astonishment
[ 48 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
Some time later, I went to London, and was welcomed by
my old friend Ben Marks with a newspaper clipping that read:
"AMERICAN BOOKSELLER SELLS $5000 BOOK FOR $50."
"Hell ? Ben, think nothing of it," I said. "I do that every day."
The old rule held good again here: no sooner had Rosenbach
bought his copy than Yale bought a perfect copy.
Anyone who lives in Manhattan naturally dreads like the
plague having to go to Brooklyn. Nevertheless, during the
fifteen or twenty years that the bookshop of Neil Morrow
Ladd on upper Fulton Street was in existence, any dealer or
collector who did not fight his way to Brooklyn at least once
a week was very foolish. Fred Ladd had two men on the road
all the time, and several hundred new volumes always came
in every week. He had a corner where he used to stack any
Americana he was doubtful about until I could take a look at
them.
On one of my last trips to his shop, I had inspected what
he had, and was ready to leave, when he said, "You'd better
take a look at this, hadn't you?"
He pointed to a set of Shakespeare.
In my opinion, sets of Shakespeare are usually too thin even
to make good doorstops unless you pile several volumes to-
gether; but since Ladd asked me, I looked. Inside the front
cover of Volume I was an inscription to James Russell Lowell
from his loving parents on the occasion of his entering Harvard
College. Scattered through all the volumes were some twelve
hundred notes in Lowell's hand. Here, obviously, was the
source from which he had drawn much of the material for his
English Dramatists.
I quaked to think what Fred would want for the set. "How
much, Fred?" I asked.
[ 49 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"Well, I think if I put this set up at auction, it would prob-
ably bring me at least seventy-five dollars."
"You mean you'll take seventy-five dollars for it now, or
what?"
"Why, yes," said Fred. "I'd be glad to take seventy-five
dollars for it."
Naturally one of my first acts after closing the sale was to
write to Amy Lowell. She came down from Cambridge es-
pecially to see the set.
At the store she lit up one of her black cigars.
She sat there puffing, and finally came to the inevitable ques-
tion: "How much?"
"Twelve hundred and fifty," I suggested.
She barely interrupted her puffing enough to say, "Why,
hell's bells, you're the goddamnedest thief and robber I ever
heard of. But 111 take it."
Frank Dobie once very truly remarked that luck consists in
being ready for the chance. He also remarked that 90 per cent
of all the great discoveries are made by pure accident.
Among my closest bookseller friends is John Scopes, of
Albany, one of the dozen greatest living Americana dealers
in the world. On one occasion I spent several hours with him
and turned up a number of very nice rarities. As I was catch-
ing my breath, I glanced idly at a ten-cent counter near the
door, which I know is always a waste of time. For some reason
or other I picked up a little 16mo entitled Life of Louis
Tarascon. It said nothing to me, but I riffled the pages with
one motion, as I always do, and the word "Oregon" jumped out
at me.
I solemnly handed John Scopes a dime. "Oh, the hell with
that," said he.
[ 50 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
"No," I said, "the price is a dime, and a dime it is."
On the train coming down the Hudson I was finally reduced
to reading my ten-cent book. It developed that Louis Tarascon
was a man who lived in Louisville before the Civil War, and
he had a land scheme for colonizing Oregon.
On my next visit from Henry R. Wagner, the great bibliog-
rapher of the West, I had brother Tarascon lying on my desk.
His eyes lit up with no attempt at concealment, and he
actually seemed rather relieved when I consented to sell
him the book for $250.
As I was pocketing his check and he was pocketing his book,
he remarked condescendingly, "Of course you'll never see it,
but Tarascon put some of this stuff into a broadside that was
printed at Louisville the year before the book was."
Gratuitous insults like that, particularly when linked with
bits of information, have a way of sinking into my mind. Pos-
sibly six months later I was canvassing my friend Liebschutz's
bookstore in Louisville. He had a bound volume of pamphlets
that excited him very much because it contained three presen-
tation sermons from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
To me, these were just good standard merchandise, but I
gave the volume my customary riffle, and caught a flash of a
broadside signed by Louis Tarascon, For the sake of ap-
pearances I chaffered with Liebschutz, but finally gave him
his thirty dollars.
I broke up the volume, sold the Emerson pamphlets for
twenty-five dollars apiece, and lay in wait with the broad-
side for Henry Wagner.
I fear my face was not altogether free of a smirk when I
spread out the broadside before him. And I am sure I have
never seen V/agner so mad as when he finally gave me a
thousand dollars for one sheet of paper.
[ 51 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Mr. Wagner was not given to passing out free information
if he thought it could ever be used against him. I have often
wondered since whether he should have been annoyed that
his parade of knowledge had cost him money, or gratified
that it resulted in my finding the broadside at all.
I had a chance to feel this on my own hide fairly soon
afterward. Henry Stevens of Vermont, a great antiquarian
and a great bibliographer, founded a bookselling firm in
London that is still in business. Their present American
specialist, Roland Tree, is one of my close friends.
During my early visits to London they used to sell me
Western and nineteenth-century Americana for very little
money. I reciprocated by telling them everything I could
think of about the new vogue for Western Americana and the
books that were carrying it.
They in turn let me loose among the stacks on their laby-
rinthine third floor, which had obviously not been dusted
for fifteen or twenty years. I spent several days doing what
I hoped was cleaning them out of unusual Western items.
As far as I could see, I left the shelves stripped.
Years later, Roland Tree, back from one of his visits to the
London office, dropped in at my office and waved a copy of
Louis Tarascon under my nose.
"How the hell did I miss that, Holy?" I asked. "I thought
I cleaned you out"
"Well, we finally moved and dusted all the books on the
third floor, and this had fallen down behind the shelves. You
know, I think selling you that Western stuff cheap was one
of the best investments we ever made."
Here is a double stumble, one by a discoverer and one by
me.
[ 52 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
Among the most interesting tales of Western exploration is
James O. Pattie's Narrative, edited by Timothy Flint, one of
the most remarkable and certainly the most active literary
figure of his time in the Ohio Valley. For many years any-
one who had a copy of the book, printed in Cincinnati in
1833, congratulated himself upon owning a rare first edition.
Then ten or fifteen years ago Mr. G. Y. Barber, the promi-
nent collector, got hold of a defective copy with a title page
dated Cincinnati, 1831. Being a wise man, he rushed straight
to Wilberforce Eames at the New York Public Library.
Mr. Eames poked at all the copies of the 1833 edition that
he could lay hands on. What he found was that each one had
a "cancel title" the original title page had been torn out
and another one, dated 1833, had been bound in. This was
an expedient resorted to now and then by the publisher of
some spectacularly unsuccessful book, such as Thoreau's A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Nearly all of
the first edition would be left on the publisher's hands, so by
changing the title pages he would try to give the impression
that the book had run into a new edition.
After Mr. Eames's discovery, my little bit of luck is pretty
tame, though it did not seem so to me at the time. While
my son Tom and I were driving through the outskirts of Nice
I spied a bookshop.
"Stop, Tom," I said.
"Oh, hell, you can't ever get past a junk shop, can you?" he
replied, filially. He was quite right, too.
I asked the proprietor if he had any Americana. With a
voluble flow of "Ow, or//," he bowed us into the shop and pro-
duced three volumes. Two of them I have quite forgotten.
The third was Pattie's Narrative with the 1831 title page.
This was one of the times when the French did not think the
[ 53 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
franc could possibly fall any lower I believe it was worth
about three cents. Shrewd French dealers marked their mer-
chandise in pounds; the Italians were using the Swiss francs.
The price of three pounds for Pattie caused no difficulty, but
the dealer spent nearly an hour desperately trying to trans-
late that sum into francs so that I could give it to him.
(Absolutely the only difference between the 1831 and 1833
Patties, I might remark, is five hundred dollars.)
Three or four decades ago there were five librarians and
three private collectors vying with one another for items of
American poetry. Ten-cent doggerel became worth five, ten
dollars, almost anything you wanted to ask. One of the rival
librarians, a customer of mine, had charge of a large public
institution in western New York. His board of trustees was
getting uneasy about the amount of money he spent for such
poetry. He asked me to attend a meeting and back him up.
One of the trustees held tinder my nose a splendid ten-cent
book that I had sold to them for $7.50. "Now, Mr. Everitt,
don't you believe that we might have got this elsewhere for
twenty-five cents?"
"How much do you pay your librarian?" I retorted.
"Five thousand a year/'
"Well, if you want to give him six months and an expense
account, I am morally certain that he could find you a copy
for ten cents. Any other questions?"
The rarest piece of poetry I ever handled came to me
through my invariable habit of never giving nor asking for a
discount. I was wandering through Glasgow, looking for
trouble, and passed a little shop with stamps and odds and
ends in the window. I stopped in and asked my standard
question, "Any Americana?"
[ 54 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
The proprietor, a delightful Scotsman named Harrison,
said he had this and that. I poked through the lot, found three
or four pounds' worth, and laid my money on the line.
Harrison was so stunned by my not asking for a discount
that he said, "Would you like me to keep an eye out for this
sort of thing?"
I said I would be delighted, and never gave him another
thought.
Two years later I wandered past his shop and turned in.
Sure enough, be had saved me a couple of dozen things.
One was Samuel Groome's Quaker tract, A Glass for the
People of New England, 1676, that Henry Stevens catalogued
at two hundred and fifty pounds. Harrison had this marked
thirty shillings.
I had hardly laid that in the "take" pile when I picked up
a copy of Samuel Davies's Miscellaneous Poems, Williams-
burg, Virginia, 1751. The bibliography of early American
printed books by Charles Evans lists only the title from a
newspaper advertisement, under 1752. This was the first
time that an informed eye had ever looked on a copy.
"I'm sorry," said Harrison apologetically, "but I shall have
to ask you ten bob for that."
"Oh, that's all right," I said. "Just put it in this pile here."
Up to that time, Dr. Harry Lyman Koopman of Brown
University's library had made a proud boast that he never
turned down any item of American poetry lacking in his
collection. So when I got home I sent a quotation of $300 to
his successors.
Dr. Koopman's successor replied, saying that they had
adopted a new rule: no piece of poetry was worth more than
$75.
I was digesting this information, to which I am afraid I
[ 55 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
never replied, when Dr. Clarence S. Brigham of the Amer-
ican Antiquarian Society came in. I showed him my prize.
"How much?"
"Three hundred."
'Til take it, but I don't know when 111 pay for it/' Pause.
Tve got a better collection of American poetry than Koop-
man has, anyhow."
Some months later Dr. Brigham reported that he had found
a second copy on the shelves of the Boston Public Library and
a third at Princeton. It's the same old story: find one copy of
an unknown item and the rest start coming out of hiding.
While Adolph Stager and I were thriving on the American
poetry boom, we accumulated a huge lot of duplicates. Fi-
nally, in a frantic effort to find a new customer or two and
clear our shelves, we put out a catalogue listing over three
thousand items of American poetry.
For three weeks there was not a sound. We began to won-
der if our errand boy, like the famous colored maid, had
mailed the catalogues in a receptacle plainly marked "De-
posit Litter Here."
And then came a copy of the catalogue with twelve hun-
dred items checked, and a note from the Huntington Library:
"We will take all of these if we may have a 15 per cent dis-
count."
The one inviolable rule on which Stager and I had done
business was, as I have just mentioned, no discount to any-
one. Our colleagues in the trade were allowed 10 per cent;
everyone else paid the marked price.
In this particular case rules sagged a little; it wasn't the
principle of the thing, it was the money.
I once put a note in one of my catalogues to the effect
that I was not honest enough to give discounts. If I am
[ 56 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
cataloguing a $5 book, and know I shall have to give a dis-
count (I wrote), I automatically list it at $7.50, so the dis-
count buyer loses in the end.
Probably everyone has tried to get a discount at some time
in his life, but some people always try. In the course of years
I got increasingly fed up with horse-collared gentry who
would ask sanctimoniously for a clerical discount. Finally, when
a clergyman asked for a clerical discount on three volumes off
the three-for-a-quarter table, my patience gave way.
"Hell, no," I exploded. "I wouldn't even take your check!"
I have mentioned the Samuel Groome Quaker tract. Rather
inappropriately, Quaker items are a terrific game of chance.
Nine tenths of them are trash; the remnant are so scarce they
make your hair stand on end. Or at least they seem so until
you get into the swing of it. For instance, I had read the ad-
vance proofs of the Stevens catalogue, showing a reproduc-
tion of the Groome title page, That put me on the lookout,
and I was ready to grab Harrison's copy.
Then, very shortly afterward, an old lady came to my of-
fice at Dauber & Pine's with a bundle of Quaker tracts. She
said that the American Art Association had told her they were
worthless, but that Everitt would give her five dollars for
the lot. She said she would be very glad if I could do that.
Nearly all her whole lot were among the hair-raising remnant
of Quaker publications, and one was a Groome. I said no, I
could not give her five dollars because they were worth much
more than that, but I could give her forty-five. To cut a long
story short, within two years of my seeing the Stevens cata-
logue I turned up a total of seven copies of Groome, which
I sold to various collectors for a good deal less than Stevens's
price, but still at nice round figures.
Then I found an eighth copy. The peculiarity of this one
[ 57 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
was that it had an errata list, None of the others had any
such list.
I compared the mistakes with the copies I had sold and
discovered that all the changes had been made, so that no
errata list was necessary. Or, to put it crassly, all the copies
sold up to then were second editions.
Somehow or other, this first edition with errata list disap-
peared, and I am morally certain it is not to be found in any
collection I know of.
If we leave out first editions of fiction, which are largely a
matter of momentary whim among collectors, fashions in
collecting Americana have a special peculiarity: for thirty
or fifty or a hundred years you simply can't give away books
on a subject; then a craze for that subject arises, and you sim-
ply can't find the books. Fashions in Americana wear out, not,
as most fashions do, because people get tired of the subject, but
because a brisk demand for a very tiny supply pushes prices
beyond what any ordinary buyer can pay. In my time, for
instance, I have seen the craze for Washington material reach
the sky and come tumbling down. I don't expect it to climb
again, simply because there is too wide a variety available.
At the height of the Washington fashion, there were at
least twenty-five well-heeled collectors trying to get copies of
all the engraved portraits ever published of Washington. The
leader in the race was Hampton L. Carson of Philadelphia.
One day an answer to one of my advertisements in a Nor-
folk, Virginia, paper took me to a Negro hovel so filthy and
rickety that for almost the only time in my life I was really
scared. On the second floor were two or three hundred old
schoolbooks. They were so covered with filth that I dreaded
to touch them. I had to get out of the place somehow, so I
[ 58 ]
AMERICANA WHAT AND SO WHAT?
hastily opened two or three volumes. In one of them was a
small copper engraving of a portrait bust of Washington, signed
by Wright. Holding my nose, I proffered a quarter for it as
the quickest means of escape. My tender was accepted, and
I slid the engraving into my breast pocket, where it was no
larger than my wallet.
A portrait engraver named Max Rosenthal was Mr. Carson's
agent in buying Washington portraits. He dropped into my
store one day, and all I could show him was my tiny copper-
plate engraving. He made the inexcusable mistake of letting
his eyes light up at the sight. He didn't like me, and I didn't
like him, so instead of asking two dollars and settling for a
dollar I said, "Max, that will cost you three hundred and fifty."
I was stunned when he said. "I can only give you three hun-
dred."
*Tou bought it," said I.
He was not far wrong, as things went then. In the Carson
auction my print brought $450.
A few weeks ago, in 1950, I declined with thanks an oppor-
tunity to buy another copy for ten dollars.
Washington is a case of oversupply. Some rarities are in
very short supply, but in even shorter demand.
Two things that every American autograph collector wants
are a set of the signers of the Declaration of Independence
and a set of the presidents on White House stationery. You
can assemble a set of signers without too much trouble if you
have the price. You can also get a set of the presidents
except for William Henry Harrison, who died after one month
in office. No amount of money that you are ever likely to see
will tempt one of those Harrison autographs out of hiding.
Two signers of the Declaration of Independence whom you
will have to dig down for are Button Gwinnett and Thomas
[ 59 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Lynch, Jr. Twenty years ago there was a flurry of publicity
about the fabulous value of Gwinnett signatures, and Dr.
Rosenbach bought one for $38,000. I am inclined to think
he also had another one in stock. Later Henry Stevens, III,
brought me a schoolbook containing an unquestionably gen-
uine Gwinnett autograph. (I think the main reason Gwin-
nett's autographs are so scarce is that he never got much be-
yond the elementary schoolbook level as a penman. No letter
of his has ever been discovered.) "Charlie," said Stevens,
"maybe we can both make some money. I see Rosy just paid
thirty-eight thousand for one of these."
I took the book to Mitchell Kennerley, the head of the An-
derson Galleries. "This is beautiful," he told me, "but it's no
use. I can't put this in a sale unless Dr. Rosenbach says it's
authentic."
Although both of us thought he'd be willing to do it, we
didn't quite have the nerve to ask for authentication from a
man who already owned two high-priced copies. The best
authentication in my mind was the fact that Stevens had paid
a shilling for the book not enough money to justify much
trouble in forging it.
I had to send the book back to London.
While I was working for Dauber & Pine, a man dressed like
a laborer offered me a contemporary almanac with the name
Button Gwinnett written on it. It didn't look at all like the one
on Henry Stevens's book, so I said no thank you.
A day or two later came a telephone call from Frank Ben-
der, a Fourth Avenue dealer. "Charlie, I've hit the jackpot.
I just gave a guy two dollars for an almanac with the sig-
natures of Button Gwinnett and Thomas Lynch on the front."
"Frank," I said, "the last time I saw it, it was only worth
half as much; it didn't have the signature of Lynch on it yet/ 1
[ 60 ]
PART II
The Consumers
1 . JVho Buys Americana?
You MAY be a trifle startled to know that I am not much in-
terested in collectors. I have known fewer than a dozen real
ones in my sixty years of hunting rare Americana. Most of
the people who smirk bashfully and admit they are collectors
are really speculators.
Take two good examples of thirty or forty years ago. Jacob
Chester Chamberlain was the outstanding collector of Amer-
ican first editions of his day. Mr. Chamberlain was a true
collector: he cared only for books, not at all for their value
in dollars. I once sold him a copy of Hawthorne's first book,
Fanshawe, although he already had two good copies. Mine
was an eighth of an inch taller than either, and this point
made the book worth buying to Mr. Chamberlain, without
much regard to the price.
Mr. Chamberlain never questioned a bookseller's price, and
at least in my own experience he never passed up a book he
wanted because of the tag on it. Once in a while he might say
to me, Tm a bit overbought. Do you mind if I take sixty
days to pay you?"
[ 61 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
One of many happy experiences I had with Mr. Chamberlain
involved the famous Troutbeck House near Amenia, New
York, which once belonged to Marvin Benton. Benton was
an intimate friend of the great New England authors, par-
ticularly Thoreau and Emerson. After his death, his heir, his
brother Joel, took me up to look over the library.
What I found was several hundred volumes of our greatest
midnineteenth-century authors, with long, intimate presenta-
tion inscriptions to Mr. Benton.
My usual attitude toward inscribed copies is best shown
by the way I catalogued an autographed copy of George W.
Childs's Recollections. I listed it at $1.50, with the note: "I
make a standing offer of $2.50 for any copy of this book not
inscribed by the author." Benton's books were something else:
the inscriptions gave them a life of their own beyond what
was on the printed page. I wanted Mr. Chamberlain to have
those volumes.
Jolting up to Amenia on the Harlem Railroad, I had taken
the precaution of consulting my bank book, which showed
a balance of $375. I cannot say it was without a qualm that
I offered Mr. Joel Benton $3750 that afternoon for his brother's
books. He promptly accepted, and there I was.
I asked for the use of his telephone and got hold of Mr.
Chamberlain. I told him rny fix, told him he had to have
some of the books, and asked what I was to do next.
"Write him a check," said Mr. Chamberlain, "and 111 cover
it at your bank in the morning/*
When Mr. Chamberlain and I came to settle accounts, I
offered him his choice, at his own price, among the 2200 odd
volumes I had brought back from Amenia.
He picked out seventy-one and said, "There. I'm satisfied if
you are." I feel perfectly certain that the last thing in the
r 62 ]
THE CONSUMERS
world he knew or cared about was the fact that fifty of those
volumes were one day to bring just over four thousand dol-
lars at auction.
I had fun buying the copy of Fanshawe that I sold to Mr.
Chamberlain. My wife and I both come from Orange County,
New York, and old Judge Beattie once laid down a ruling that
no book could be sold in Orange County until I had passed
on it. The Judge tipped me off to a household auction that
was being held at Monroe, New York. The auction bill read:
SALE RAIN OR SHINE. I did not know whether this covered the
blizzard that was going on that morning, but I took a chance.
Very few other buyers were as grave as I, and none of these
showed any interest in the books except one man, Pliny
Earle, the millionaire painter. He had a large mansion on
the mountain near Monroe.
When the auctioneer got around to the book, he held up
two plump volumes and said, as country auctioneers always
do, "Here we have some real old books, maybe first editions,
printed way back in the ISOO's." Mr. Earle's eyes brightened.
I don't know whether mine did; they were bright enough
already to see that the books were a set of an American edi-
tion of Josephus, which any self-respecting bookseller would
be ashamed to expose on his ten-cent table.
I dropped out of the bidding in time so that Mr. Earle
did not have to pay over fifteen dollars for the set.
The auctioneer began to think there must be something to
this book business, and he proudly displayed a set of Rollin's
Ancient History, which is normally worth almost as much as
a fair Josephus. The difference was reflected in the price at
which I relinquished the Rollin to Mr. Earle $2.50.
Like most millionaires, Mr. Earle was careful of his money,
[ 63 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
and he came over for a word with me. "It strikes me books
are selling pretty high today," he said.
"If you'll go over in that corner and sit down and shut up,"
I told him, "111 make you a present of every goddamned book
in the house except one."
The auctioneer now found books a drug on the market.
Nobody would bid on individual items, so he finally had to
put up the remaining 340 volumes as a lot. He started calling
for a fifty-dollar bid. Silence. Forty. Silence. Thirty. Silence.
When he got down to five, I yelled, "I'll give you tliree-fifty!"
"Sold," said the auctioneer, banging his hammer.
I fished my one book, the copy of Fanshawe, out of the
pile, then paid my bill and handed the receipt to Mr. Earle.
This left the trucking bill on him.
While I was killing time waiting for my train, the auction-
eer put up a large and very beautiful silver luster cake dish.
"This is not solid silver," he explained conscientiously; "this
is plated ware." He swallowed when I opened with a five-
dollar bid. I think he was too surprised even to swallow when
Mr. Earle finally carried the dish off for $125.
A little later all the family flat silver was put up, and this
time my opening bid of five dollars was successful. I went
trudging down to the depot, walking lopsided, with Fanshawe
in my right coat pocket and some seventy-five pounds of solid
silver in an old telescopic bag in my left hand.
Mr. Chamberlain got the Fanshawe for $750, and Mr.
Gorham got the silver for $350.
Among collectors at the opposite pole from Mr. Chamber-
lain was William Harris Arnold, whose eminence among col-
lectors of English first editions equaled that of Mr. Cham-
berlain among American books. Mr. Arnold never paid me
[ 64 ]
THE CONSUMERS
$100 for a book without first asking himself if he could get
$200 for it ten years later, and very seldom without asking
me if I couldn't let it go for $75. In fact, he seemed more
interested in discounts than in books.
Mr. Arnold was unique in that he issued a very fancily
printed volume showing the price he paid for each item
in his collection, set against the price it brought when he
ended his collecting career with an auction. So far as I could
see, the underlying purpose, conscious or unconscious, of this
listing was to show how much cleverer Mr. Arnold was than
the dealers in rare books who had supplied him.
Actually the list was somewhat misleading because it took
no account of overhead or selling cost. Mr. Arnold should
really have known better than this: by profession he was the
buyer for H. B. Claflin, the largest book wholesaler America
has ever known.
Mr. Arnold's figures say one thing, but my calculations seem
to show another, which is that, all things considered, he just
about got his money back. He certainly did not make any
fancy profit.
In fact, my favorite axiom is that any rare bookseller will
happily pay for a taxi to bring a speculator into his store.
The late A. Edward Newton is justly famous for his The
Amenities of Book Collecting, the most charming volume ever
written on this subject. Nevertheless he was a prince among
speculators. In a later volume he tried to talk about rare-
book prices, and his misinformation cost the collectors among
his devout following many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
His nisinformation was due sometimes to what Dr. John-
son called "Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance," and some-
times to obstinacy. In one of his books he casually remarked
that a first edition of Huckleberry Finn in blue cloth was
[ 65 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
worth many times as much as one in green cloth. This I pre-
sume was ignorance.
Shortly afterward I showed him a canvasser's prospectus
from the American Publishing Company of Hartford, dated
1884, which said that the forthcoming Huckleberry Finn was
to be issued in green cloth but that it would also be available
in blue for purchasers wishing copies uniform with Tom
Sawyer. Mr. Newton never revised his original statement that
the blue had priority.
Although I am quite conscious of being an old crank, I must
remark that I am not wholly alone in my strictures on Mr.
Newton. Among the most famous bibliographers of early
medioal books were Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Crummer. Take a
look some time at A Catalogue of Mss. and Medical Books
Printed before 1640, Omaha, 1927. Mrs. Crummer was known
and loved by everyone in the old-book world.
Scene: E. Joseph's in London at 10:30 A.M.; Sam Joseph
at desk. Enter Mrs. Crummer: "Sam, I just must have a drink.
I spent about the most horrible evening of my life last night."
C.P.E. (butting in) : "You must have been out to dinner with
A. Edward Newton."
Mrs. Crummer: "How did you guess? Even worse, Gabriel
Wells was there. What a hellish three hours! Nothing but 1
bought a copy of this for so much: it's worth so much/"
The final sale of Mr. Newton's collection was an example of
what usually happens to speculators. Mr. Newton himself ex-
pressed the opinion that his collection would bring over a
million. A professional appraiser put the figure at $750,000.
I, being completely ignorant of the kind of books Mr. Newton
collected, had made a guess of $250,000.
The sale, naturally, was the towering event of the auction
season. I have heard that the catalogues and publicity cost
[ 66 ]
THE CONSUMERS
$50,000. Booksellers and Mr. Newton's admirers on both sides
of the Atlantic talked of little else for weeks beforehand.
When the auctioneer's hammer fell on the last lot, the total
take was around $300,000. This might have been bigger if
the auction cataloguer had not withdrawn several of Mr.
Newton's most famous items, which were discovered not to
be what Mr. Newton assumed they were.
As it was, the devout Newtonians, who made what prices
there were, would probably discover, upon trying to resell
their treasures, that they would not fetch a fifth of what they
had brought at the Newton sale. This is one more proof that
speculators get stuck in the long run. I hope most of the buy-
ers at the Newton sale (who were, incidentally very largely
unknown to the booksellers) were like the Midwestern man
who wired me to place bids of thirty dollars each on some
volumes of Conrad. I went down to the exhibition, and then
telephoned to my client that he would be ashamed to have
such bad copies on his shelves. "Hell/' he said, "I don't want
the books; I want the bookplates."
Sometimes, though, speculators are right. Some years ago
one of them was in my store and told me he was considering
buying a first edition of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans
in Boston for two hundred dollars.
"Joe," I said, "don't be a damn fool. I'll get you one for less
than a hundred."
"Charlie, you're always bluffing," was his reply to my kind
offer. He then left for his office.
Within three hours a scout friend of mine marched in with
the most beautiful set that has ever been seen to this day.
The paper labels looked as if they had just come from the
bindery.
"Twelve-fifty," said the scout, timidly.
[ 67 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
I pursued my speculator by telephone, and he hurried back
to the store. His eyes bulged.
"To you, thirty-seven-fifty," I said.
A few months later, in a moment of financial stress, my
friend decided to realize on his American first editions. When
I saw my Last of the Mohicans sell for $3250, I began to wish
I had not been so sensitive about being called a bluffer.
I put out my first catalogue in October, 1898. My first two
customers, no relation to each other, were Paul Leicester
Ford and James Ford of the United States Rubber Company.
Paul Ford came from a wealthy family of book collectors
and bibliographers; his father had probably the finest library
in Brooklyn at the time. Paul was a hunchback, a famous
popular novelist, author of Janice Meredith and other best
sellers. For all his money and background, he was undoubtedly
the meanest buyer I have ever contended with. Apparently
Paul inherited this trait from his father, because my friend
Alexander Thompson, who was studying law on nothing a
year, once went there for dinner. Mr. Ford, Sr., said very earn-
estly, "Alec, come over and use the library any time you want."
Slight pause. "Of course Paul will expect a little something
for showing you around."
James Ford, on the other hand, valued his time more than
his money. His first visit to me was for the purpose of inspect-
ing a copy of the first report of the Delaware, Lackawanna
and Western Railroad, priced at fifteen dollars. "Don't you
think I might buy this somewhere else for less?" he asked me.
"I imagine so," I said. "I paid a quarter for it."
"But don't you think maybe Fd save time by giving you the
fifteen?" he asked with a twinkle.
When Marshall Saville and Dr. Frederick Hodge were leav-
[ 68 ]
THE CONSUMERS
ing the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation),
Mr. Heye asked me to set a price on their private libraries,
for acquisition by the museum. I appraised the Saville library
at $50,000 and the Hodge library at $25,000.
When I told Mr. Heye the result, he said, "Now you go
on down to Mr. Ford and get the money."
He made an eleven o'clock appointment for me with Mr.
Ford for the following day. As I was going out of the door,
Heye called after me, "Don't get there at 11:01 or 10:59; get
there at eleven." I stood around, watching the hands of my
watch for a couple of minutes before I announced myself to
Mr. Ford's secretary.
"Mr. Ford," I greeted him, "George Heye wants seventy-five
thousand to buy the Saville and Hodge collections."
"Are they worth it?"
"It was my appraisal."
"Do you want a check or a bond?" Then he added, "You
picked a good day to come. I made a little money yesterday.
And I don't mean just two or three hundred thousand
dollars."
I have hardly ever known anyone who took such pleasure
in giving away books. Mr. Ford was very generous to the
library of the Museum of the American Indian, and the library
of the Explorers' Club owed its existence almost entirely to
him. He was the honorary president of the Explorers' Club,
though his asthma prevented him from acting, and whenever
anyone mentioned an important set of books that the library
lacked, Mr. Ford would lean over to me and ask, "How
much?" This was invariably followed by, "Get it, and send
the bill to me."
Once when I was the chairman of the Explorers' Club li-
brary committee, someone mentioned a publication of the
[ 69 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Champlain Society, Mr. Ford went through his usual routine,
and I told him the set would cost $250 or $300. I found a set
in London and bought it for $250, but when I got back, Mr.
Ford was dead. We held a meeting of the department heads
of the club, nine in all, George Heye presiding. "This is a
beautiful set," Mr. Heye said, "but all we can do is to send it
back, because we haven't any money/'
"I'd be glad to get it at that price," I said. "But how about
this: suppose each of us kicks in twenty-five dollars, and you
put up fifty, then we'll be able to keep the set."
They were all too shocked to say no.
Certainly no more genial or generous collector than William
F. Gable, of Altoona, Pennsylvania, has lived during the past
half century. He was known to every dealer, every important
collector, every professional book-hunting "scout." He bought
thousands of volumes that he did not want simply because he
thought the dealers needed the money.
The last time I dined with him, at the old Belmont in New
York, he told me that in a city like Altoona anyone who owned
more than ten books was considered queer. A business ac-
quaintance said to him at lunch, "Gable, I hear you have
some nice books. Why don't you come over to dinner some
evening and bring your books along? My wife is a great
reader."
"I wondered what his wife would do," Gable told me, "if
I appeared with twenty-two thousand books."
The auctioneer who catalogued and sold those books after
Mr. Gable's death should have been drawn and quartered,
preferably before he did the job. If any modern collector
should happen on a priced catalogue from the Gable auction,
I doubt whether he would buy another book. Hundreds upon
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THE CONSUMERS
hundreds of the association volumes Mr. Gable loved so
much were sold to a dealer practically as wastepaper.
One of my favorite customers and friends for many years
was Reverend Thomas R. Slicer, the pastor of the Unitarian
Church at 20th Street and Fourth Avenue. Its red and black
brick gave it the name of the Beefsteak Church. (Incidentally,
I have never forgotten the time when Mr. Slicer announced
a sermon on the Virgin Birth. The congregation, naturally,
were all agog. He had a splendid pulpit presence, and he
rose and calmly gave a text, not from the Bible, but from
Browning. Then he leaned confidentially toward his flock.
"What difference does it make? That's all I have to say about
the Virgin Birth.")
I published a bibliography of Shelley, compiled by Mr.
Slicer on the basis of the Harry B. Smith collection. He and
I had an agreement that if any royalties came due, they
were to be spent on a dinner at Dorian's.
One banner year he earned $28. To spend such a huge
amount, we had to invite two guests, both of them prominent
members of Mr. Slicer's church.
A few days before, Mr. Slicer had picked up in a bookstore
run by a man named Hamilton, at 38th Street and Third
Avenue, a first edition of Leaves of Grass, priced at one
dollar. Our guests, being active churchmen, felt uncom-
fortable about the ethics of this purchase. The book, even
then, forty years ago, was worth around $350 (I have seen the
time since when it would have brought $1500).
"Oh," I said, "don't give it another thought. Hamilton prob-
ably made ninety cents on the deal anyway."
This led one of the guests to ask what percentage rare-
book dealers usually work on.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"I don't know about the rest of them," Mr. Slicer put in,
"but Charlie doesn't work on percentages; he just works on
straight larceny/'
Later Mr. Slicer's health failed, and I got an unhappy tele-
phone call from Mrs. Slicer, who said they were going to have
to sell the books. Mr. Slicer was sick in bed, and to keep the
news from him, she wanted me to inspect the library, but not
to give away my presence by smoking.
I was familiar enough with Mr. Slicer's books so that it took
me very little time to set a figure of five thousand as the
amount they ought to bring.
As I started to leave, the maid said, "If you can spare a
minute, Mr. Slicer would like to see you."
Up on the third floor of the brownstone house Mr. Slicer
greeted me. "Well, Charlie, I've still got pretty good ears, I
hear they want to sell my books. You'll find a good cigar on
the mantel."
We sat and swapped stories about books for a while, and
then I departed.
A few days later the name Slicer caught my eye on the
obituary page of the paper. Mrs. Slicer had dropped dead.
After that, Mr. Slicer moved to a hotel. As part of the moving,
I got his books packed and shipped to the American Art
Association for auctioning.
Two or three months later Mr. Slicer's nurse called and said
that he had lost his voice; he was sinking, and hoped I might
be able to call.
When I arrived in his hotel room, he drew me down within
range of his voice. "I can't talk much any more, Charlie,"
he said, "so I thought I'd ask you to tell me a few stories. But
first I want it to go on record that you are probably the worst
appraiser that ever lived. You appraised my books at five
[ 72 ]
THE CONSUMERS
thousand, and all they brought at auction was forty-nine
hundred/'
Three or four days later he was gone.
Book collectors who have a tinge of speculation in the
blood often think they would make good booksellers. Some-
times they do. Ernest Wessen, of the Midland Rare Book
Company, started as a collector, and is now one of the great
dealers in this country. His catalogues over the last ten years
have been without exception the most interesting ones issued
in America. Probably there are not a dozen complete files
of his catalogues in existence, one of them mine. If Mr.
Wessen ever issues an index, it will be by far the best bibli-
ography ever printed on the Midwest.
Seymour Dunbar was an ink-slinger from way back; he
loved books, wrote several, including the unique History of
Travel in America , and made various collections to help in
his writing. When my lifelong friend Edward Eberstadt set
up in the business of dealing in Western Americana, he put
a sign on his door: SEYMOUR DUNBAR, BUYER. Dunbar was
also the cataloguer for the concern.
In one of Eberstadt's first catalogues, Dunbar devoted a
page of glowing description to John Gilmary Shea's History
of the Catholic Church in America. He put on a $65 price.
I called up to jeer at Ed Eberstadt because the set was in
print for ten dollars.
A week later he called back to jeer at me because he had
seven orders at $65 each.
(This proves that there are always at least seven librarians
who do not look up the U.S. Catalogue before they place an
order. )
Dunbar's first big killing as a buyer was of himself. A
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
storage warehouse called up, and Dun went over. In the
middle of the evening he came back and reported to Eber-
stadt that they had just made a fortune.
"How did we do it?" asked Eberstadt.
"Well, it was pretty dark in the warehouse, and I couldn't
see much, but there were at least five hundred big volumes,
and I got the man to take five hundred for the lot," he said.
Eberstadt went over in daylight to look at the books and
meet the owner. The unkindly sun revealed a display of Turner
Art Gallery, German Art, Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth edi-
tion, and similar gems. Eberstadt shuddered as he said he
didn't want the books.
"But Mr. Dunbar is your buyer," the owner insisted, "and
he offered me five hundred."
"I'm a good fellow," said Eberstadt. "I'll give you a hundred
if I don't have to take the books."
"Five hundred," the owner persisted.
"Two hundred, and you keep the books," said Eberstadt.
"Five hundred."
"Three hundred, and no removals," said Eberstadt.
"Five hundred."
"Four hundred, and you keep them."
"Five hundred."
"All right, damn it, five hundred, but I positively will not
take the books."
When Seymour Dunbar went to the office the next morning,
the sign read: EDWARD EBERSTADT, RARE WESTERN BOOKS.
On two occasions customers of mine have bitten off more
than they could chew; one of them fought on to the bitter
end, the other cried quits.
Shortly after the Lincoln automobile came on the market,
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THE CONSUMERS
I had a letter from Henry M. Leland, its manufacturer,
simply saying, "Send me a copy of every book that mentions
Abraham Lincoln."
I wrote back, cautious as always, that there was a consider-
able number of such books, and did he really want them all?
He sent back my letter with a message scrawled across the
face: "Can't you read English?"
In the course of the next three weeks I sent him thirteen
cases of books. Check by return mail.
During the next six months I sent six more cases. All checks
by return mail.
A few months after that, I sent him a shipment amounting
to $1082.
A day or two later I read in the paper that the Lincoln
Motor Car Company had folded and that Henry Ford had
got hold of it.
Well, I thought, I made enough on the other nineteen
cases to cover this lot.
The very next morning brought an envelope with Mr. Le-
land's personal check for $1082.
(It was just about this time that Mrs. Henry Ford's secre-
tary wrote to ask if I could supply a copy of a scarce seven-
teenth-century French cook book. I spent some twenty dollars
advertising for it in the London and Paris trade journals, and
at long last got a quotation from Paris at fifty. Wanting to make
a good impression on such a prized prospective customer, I
wrote to say that Mrs. Ford could have the book for seventy-
five. After a delay the secretary replied that Mrs. Ford won-
dered whether I could not get the book photostated for less
money. )
My other overenterprising customer was Ambassador Wal-
ter Hincs Page, then a partner in the book publishing firm
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
of Doubleday and McClure. Mr. Page's order to me read: "We
propose to publish the finest encyclopedia ever compiled.
Please send me two sets of every edition of every encyclopedia
ever published in any language, for the use of our editorial
department."
I called him up. "Mr. Page, you know you're ordering quite
a lot of encyclopedias."
His reply was apparently the conventional one for such
occasions: "Can't you read English?"
In the first six months I sent him three tons of encyclopedias.
The next six months yielded only two more tons. I was just
contemplating further tonnage when my phone rang: "This
is Walter Page. Stop!" If I had not been so rudely interrupted
in my shipment, Mr. Page might ultimately have assembled
enough encyclopedias to finish his task; but as it was, the
Doubleday and McClure encyclopedia never appeared.
Despite the rarity of certain Williamsbtirg imprints and
despite the fine English collections of persons like William
Byrd, of Westover, and George Washington, southeastern
books are pretty slim pickings, and Southern collectors are
even scarcer than the books. In the city of Lynchburg, Vir-
ginia, for instance, the only book collector I ever heard of
was the cashier of a local bank. He thought, perhaps cor-
rectly but anyhow illegally, that his need was greater than
the bank's, whereupon the bank got a chattel mortgage for
several thousand dollars on his library and threw him in
jail.
Senator Carter Glass's secretary, Mrs. Martha Adams, with
whom I had a good deal of correspondence, wrote to me about
this, and I came down for a look at the library.
The bank directors finally decided to accept my offer of
[ 76 ]
THE CONSUMERS
20 per cent of the chattel mortgage, which, I may add, was a
damn good price.
During this stay in Lynchburg I had my first meeting with
Senator Glass, one of the few great statesmen who have been
in the United States Senate within my lifetime. On my next-
to-last day in Lynchburg, Mrs. Adams took me over to see
two decayed Southern gentlewomen who had some books.
As we were driving over, she said, "You've simply got to
spend ten dollars because I'm sure these poor things haven't
eaten in three days."
I promptly pounced on three items from the near end of
a shelf, peeled off a sawbuck, and made good my escape.
On the way to the railroad station, I heaved the books into
a convenient vacant lot.
Before long I had a quavery letter from one of the indigent
gentlewomen, saying they had been unable to sleep, and
could I please let them have the books back, as they had be-
longed to Father.
I was constrained to write a letter of explanation, in which
I pointed out that on my high-pressure buying trips I would
come back with many thousands of volumes, and it might be
months before I could uncover the ones they wanted. I have
sometimes wondered what a truly ethical bookseller would
have done in my situation.
Lynchburg had only one collector, and he was in jail. Ro
anoke had three: Jack Hancock; Ed Stone, the state printer;
and Julius B. Fishburn of the local newspaper.
On my frequent trips to stay with Hancock, I got to know
the other two as well. Ed Stone, naturally enough, was inter-
ested in examples of the work of famous printers. He did not
care particularly whether he had the entire book; a couple
of pages would do.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
About this time there was a great flutter over a character
named Dr. Otto Vollbehr, a German who was willing, as a
charitable enterprise, to sell his collection of incunabula to the
United States Government for a million dollars. As a matter of
fact, Vollbehr had peddled his collection all over hell; nobody
in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or Chicago, dealers, collec-
tors, or librarians, would give him his minimum figure of
$250,000.
Then a tidal wave of publicity somehow got into motion,
all about this fabulous collection and the unique opportunity
for the United States to acquire it, how generous it was of
the kind Dr. Vollbehr, and so on and so on. As a result, when
someone introduced a bill to buy the Vollbehr collection for
$750,000, it passed practically without a dissenting voice;
any senator or congressman who voted against it felt himself
a boor and an ignoramus.
About this time I was in Lynchburg, and my old friend Mrs.
Adams told me the Senator was at liberty in his office at the
newspaper if I would like to see him. By way of making con-
versation, he said, "Everitt, you may be interested to know
that I was instrumental in getting the Vollbehr Collection for
the Library of Congress."
"I'm always interested in anything you do, Senator," I said.
"Tell me this: who split the five hundred thousand?"
Senator Glass blushed slightly, then said, "Tell me about
it"
"Well, Senator, it seems to me that when something is of-
fered at two hundred fifty thousand for two years with no
takers, and then the Library of Congress suddenly decides to
pay seven hundred and fifty thousand, somebody should
be entitled to a commission."
He grinned. "I bet you know who got me into it."
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THE CONSUMERS
"Sure," I said. "Ed Stone, who thinks any book two hun-
dred years old is worth two hundred dollars."
One day an extremely dapper gentleman came into my 34th
Street store and asked if I had anything on Louisiana. I said
I had a few things, and produced them.
He looked them over. "What's the discount?"
"Sorry," I said. "That word isn't in my dictionary."
He looked rather taken aback, and finally handed me a busi-
ness card: Sidney Swartz, president, Maison Blanche, Canal
Street, New Orleans.
We parted on good terms, without doing any business.
In a day or two he came down from the Ambassador
Hotel. "What became of those Louisiana books you showed
me?"
"Here they are."
He wrote out a check, then handed me a cylindrical package.
"What's this, Mr. Swartz?"
"Well, you're the only bookseller in New York that doesn't
give me a discount, and I'm beginning to suspect your books
are worth what you say they are. So I thought I'd give you the
best umbrella I could find. If you're ever in New Orleans, drop
in; we'll do some business."
A year or so after this I got tired of my quiet life and took a
boat for the Gulf. At New Orleans one of my first calls was
at the Maison Blanche. On the third floor I found a huge
bronze gate, guarded by a secretary.
"Could I see Mr. Swartz?" I asked.
"Have you an appointment?"
"Sorry, no."
"Well, in that case it will take about three days to see
Mr. Swartz/'
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"Are you Miss Delaney?" I inquired, forewarned by Swartz's
stories.
"Well, yes, since you ask. Might I ask your name?"
Tm Charlie Everitt."
"Hell, why didn't you say so? Walk right in."
In I walked, to find Swartz, a Catholic priest, and a reporter
seated at a desk bearing five assorted bottles of whisky. Swartz
glanced up quickly. "Say, you fellows, get the hell out. I want
to talk to Charlie."
After a certain amount of book chat, Swartz said, 'Tm going
to take you down to Cusack's house. He's a fur dealer. He
used to be president of the Louisiana Historical Society, only
he had a fight with them."
Cusack's house proved to be a residence of some forty rooms,
none of which bore any traces of a duster within living mem-
ory. The visit was passed entirely in civilities. As we were
leaving, Mr. Cusack said, "Mr. Everitt, Tm thinking of selling
my library. Could you get down here at eight tomorrow morn-
ing?"
The next morning he came straight to the point. "I don't
like Swartz, and I don't like any American bookseller. Every
soul in Louisiana has double-crossed me at one time or an-
other. What I want to do now is this. You can take any book
out of my library that you please, and tell me what you'll pay
for it. Ill write the figure on a sheet of paper. Then we'll
see."
After two days of this he had some forty sheets closely cov-
ered with figures. He tried to strike a total; I was no help
because addition is one art that I have never learned. Finally
he called his sons, and they tried.
"Well," said Mr. Cusack, "let's take an average of these four
different totals." The result of this calculation was $5247.
[ 80 ]
THE CONSUMERS
Then the boys took me outside to look for shipping containers.
The chief thing I discovered in this search was a decrepit
old shed, one collapsing corner of which was propped up by
a flat leather-backed volume marked "Music."
I got one of the boys to hold up that corner of the shed
while I removed the book. The shed then fell down in a cloud
of dust.
"Mr. Cusack," I said, "you can add one hundred dollars to
the total for this/'
He said, "If I'm fool enough to prop up a shed with hun-
dred-dollar books, I can't make you pay for them. It's yours."
The "Music" consisted of 181 pieces of Confederate sheet
music, and Mr. Wallace Cathcart of the Western Reserve His-
torical Society library was delighted at the chance to pay me
$250 for it.
I was studying a catalogue from Francis Edwards of Lon-
don one day when a man came into the store and wanted a
first edition of Arthur Young's Travels in France. This, of
course, is the book that did more than any other one thing to
develop and improve European agriculture.
I said I had no set but suggested that he buy this one from
London out of Francis Edwards's catalogue.
The inquirer asked permission to use my telephone. As it was
right at my elbow, I could not help overhearing.
He said, "Please phone the London office and have them
send a man over to this address with ten pounds and get this
set of books. Then call me back here."
Thirty-five minutes later my telephone rang, to report that
the complete writings of Arthur Young were in my new ac-
quaintance's London office.
"What do I owe you?" he asked.
[ 81 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"Oh, what are you talking about? Who are you, anyway?"
He gave me his card: Orlando Webber. Later, after he be-
came a steady customer, I discovered that he had probably the
finest collection in the country on economics, and certainly the
best lot of American Colonial pamphlets.
Mr. Webber would take a fancy to certain titles, such as
J. S. Gibbons's The Banks of New York, a good fifty-cent book,
and would buy every copy he could lay hands on to give away
to his friends. During his lifetime he ran the price of Gibbons
up to five dollars. (It is back now to $1.50.)
Another of his favorites was Colwell's Ways and Means of
Payment. When he started buying the book, it was fairly com-
mon, but as a result of his campaign I have not seen one in the
past ten years.
I was very fond of Dan Beard, for many, many years the
chief scout executive of the Boy Scouts of America. He could
eat more mince pie and throw a tomahawk better than any-
one I ever heard of, and he also did more for the kids of
America than anyone I have ever known. Although perhaps
they did not realize it, the kids showed their gratitude, be-
cause his Boy's Handbook supported him all his life. It still
sells in large quantities.
Once when he was living in Flushing, Long Island, I went
over to see him. Mrs. Beard had just bought a large light-blue
English platter. She was quite boastful about it.
I said, "Mrs. Beard, do you know the difference between
the light-blue and dark-blue English platters?"
"No," she said.
"Well, you do know that the English lords and ladies used
to eat at the same table with their servants."
"Yes, I had heard about that."
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THE CONSUMERS
"Well, to make sure they never mixed up the plates, they
had dark blue for themselves, and light blue for the servants."
Dan Beard told me later that he never saw that light-blue
platter again.
Everyone remembers Dan Beard as the grand old man of
scouting. Not so many remember that he began life as an
illustrator. One of his most important commissions was the
job of illustrating Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court.
I once had a copy of the book in which Dan Beard had
marked the names of the originals of all the drawings. The
only ones I remember are Merlin, who was drawn from Alfred,
Lord Tennyson, and the pig, who was drawn from Queen
Victoria.
Not long before his death, Mr. Beard called me over to
appraise his books arid pictures. He had a very fine collection
of costume prints, a splendid lot of autographs, a lot of
standard books relating to American Indians and the West,
and many sets of his own drawings. In the case of the Mark
Twain illustrations, there was usually a letter from the author
attached, in most cases heartily approving the drawing but
sometimes suggesting a slight change.
Mr. Beard told me he intended to give the costume prints
to Cooper Union and the autographs and original drawings to
his club in New York, and he wanted to sell the books. He
repeated this conversation at dinner in the presence of his
wife and daughter, adding that I was to have the disposal of
his literary property.
His death was quickly followed by the announcement of an
auction at the Kende Galleries. What became of his prints
and autographs I never knew. When I inspected the stuff at
the auction, I found that Gimbel Brothers' expert cataloguer
[ 83 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
had offered the items in broken sets and miscellaneous bundles
which, in my opinion, made it difficult for any reasonable
buyer. The collection brought less than 20 per cent of my
appraisal.
This was just one of the many instances that have proved to
me that both executors and widows regard any book collection
with suspicion and contempt.
I happened to spend one summer in Port Washington, Long
Island, and by way of amusement I ran an ad for two months,
announcing that I bought old books. Not a single reply came
in.
Five blocks from where I was, John C. Irving, Washington
Irving's nephew, had lived. The descendants paid a Roslyn
antique dealer seventy-five cents to remove the books. That
same summer I paid him two thousand dollars for a small
part of his haul. (Of course I doubled or tripled my money
within the next two or three months the kind of cheap
summer vacation I always try for. )
Speaking of Irving, his Astoria and TJie Rocky Mountains,
which is now invariably reprinted under the title of Adven-
tures of Captain Bonneville, are in high demand among col-
lectors of Western material. The Rocky Mountains was pub-
lished in 1837, which for some reason appears to have been
a bad period in bookmaking. All the copies I had ever seen
up to that time had been foxed, the maps had left marks on
the facing pages, and there were numerous other printing
flaws. I had concluded that it was just part of any copy of
The Rocky Mountains to look as if it had come from the press
of some woodshed amateur.
Then I got a catalogue from my old friend Louis Cohen,
owner of the Argosy Book Store. This catalogue listed a copy
of The Rocky Mountains, and described it as "mint" In the
[ 84 ]
THE CONSUMERS
rare-book trade that means it is practically just as it came
out of the bindery. The Argosy Book Store was then about
150 feet from my shop, so I went across the street, without
waiting for the light, and inspected their copy of The Rocky
Mountains. I found it exactly as described and promptly
bought it.
It was still lying on my desk when Donald McKay Frost, the
great collector of Western Americana, and generally one of the
greatest men I have ever known, came into the store. Naturally
he picked up the book.
"Everitt, that's almost as good as my copy/' he said.
"Mr. Frost," I said, "you have a brief case with you. Put
this copy in. If your copy is as good as this, you own two
copies. If it isn't, send me a hundred and fifty dollars."
Shortly afterward I got a letter and a package. The letter
read: "Dear Everitt: Enclosed is my check for $150. If you
can without loss allow me $25 for the enclosed duplicate copy
against future purchases, I shall be quite delighted."
Irving's Sketch Book, by the way, was originally issued in
paper-covered parts. I have never heard of any amount of
money that I believe would now bring forth a complete copy.
His Knickerbocker's History of New York, folding plate and
all, is something you can probably reach out your hand and
take whenever you have a hundred dollars. But so far only one
copy has ever been seen (it once belonged to my friend
Luther Livingston of Dodd, Mead and Company) in the
original boards, uncut, with paper labels. Money values mean
nothing in talking about items like this.
One of my favorite collectors and customers is Bruce Gotten,
who lives in Baltimore and spends all his time collecting North
Carolina material. His privately printed book, Housed on the
[ 85 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Third Floor, is highly unusual in that it represents a collector
talking about his own books instead of hiring some cataloguer
to do it.
In the book he tells about some of his disappointments. Here
is a further setback to add to his list. At the start of World
War II a French dealer sent some pamphlets over to the
Parke-Bernet Galleries for auctioning. Since his address during
the occupation was unknown, the items did not come up for
sale until after the war. Among them was one pamphlet on
North Carolina, the first and only discovered copy.
Mr. Gotten telephoned to me from Baltimore to find out what
the gallery's appraisal was. Their figure was $150.
He told me to go to three hundred. I was nervous about it,
called him back, and persuaded him to authorize five hundred.
But unluckily the catalogue description mentioned the ship-
ping of tobacco from North Carolina an item that probably
covered one paragraph in the pamphlet. This was enough,
though, and George Arents, the tobacco collector, wanting to
fill out the collection he had given to the New York Public
Library, sent in an unlimited bid. So I drove him to $500, and
at $550 it was his.
Another extremely scarce item that Mr. Gotten mentions in
his book is "My earliest Eden ton imprint: Proceedings and
Debates of the Convention of North Carolina, Convened at
Hillsborough . . . 1787. Edenton, 1789. This convention, after
rejecting the Constitution of the United States, adjourned with
much ill-feeling and failed to provide for the publication of its
proceedings. A small edition, however, was printed at the
private expense of a few gentlemen, and the debates as pub-
lished were reported by David Robertson of Petersburg, Vir-
ginia. Shorthand reporting was novel and unprecedented in
North Carolina assemblies at that time, and Mr. Robertson
[ 86 ]
THE CONSUMERS
treated with no consideration, was forbidden the floor of the
Convention, and had to be content with *a very inconvenient
seat in the gallery/ "
As for me, the only copy I ever owned was a perfect beauty,
in original boards, uncut, for which I paid a scout a hundred
dollars.
Soon after I acquired it, William S. Mason, who later gave
his collection to Yale, came in and asked the price of the book.
"Seven hundred and fifty dollars," I said.
"All right, send it over to MacDonald and have it bound
in full red levant, gilt edges."
"No, thanks. I can't do that to a book like that."
"Why, isn't it my book?"
"No, not yet; it's still mine."
"I'll never buy another book from you," said Mason. And as a
matter of fact, he never did.
Among the other charms of Cotten's book is the fact that he
gives what I consider to be the best excuse I've ever read for
collecting books.
Book collecting, whether an acquired taste or an ac-
quired nuisance, is in either case acquired. It develops
by degrees, and passes through numerous forms and
phases, rather curious to look upon.
At first you only want certain sorts and kinds of books
and reject innumerable volumes that in after years you
are violently seeking. You only by degrees overcome your
own prejudices and dislikes and gradually find yourself
including and exploring in ever larger fields. Then there
is always, and for a long time, a struggle, when you real-
ize that the disease has really gripped you; and numer-
ous determinations are made to stop this thing entirely
and not to permit yourself to be classed with those mildly
deranged people who collect things.
[ 87 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
There are collectors of buttons, tobacco tags, boxes,
inkstands, clocks, corks, pins, paperweights, dog collars,
and almost everything else on the face of the earth, and
as a collector of North Carolina books I have been looked
at with shocked amazement by these very same people
and made to feel inferior.
Notwithstanding, I have persevered and have insisted
that book collecting is superior to all other forms of the
disease, though I was shocked and had some misgivings
one day upon being introduced to a man in New York
who collected only books written by one-eyed men.
Just in case I have whetted your appetite for a copy of
Housed on the Third Floor, let me say that you won't find one;
this is on its way to becoming rarer than any North Carolina
item it lists.
Harry Davenport, the actor who followed Frank Bacon in
the title part of Lightning, married Phyllis Rankin, the most
beautiful woman I ever saw. They were both enthusiastic col-
lectors of books about Lincoln.
One day I got a catalogue of a big auction sale in San
Francisco, and Mrs. Davenport happened in.
"Oh, my father is sick and I have to go to San Francisco.
Wouldn't you like me to attend the sale for you?"
I said that would be fine, and gave her a check for $250 to
use as a deposit against what she might buy for me.
About the time of the sale I read that Mrs. Davenport's
father, McKee Rankin, had passed on. Soon after, I got a
consignment of books from San Francisco, with a bill for
several hundred dollars and no mention of any $250 deposit.
Mrs. Davenport arrived soon afterward, very much upset.
She said her father had been so ill that she had not been able
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THE CONSUMERS
to attend the sale, but instead had handed my bids and the
check to a Mr. Delmas (famous as the lawyer for Harry
Thaw). He had attended the sale, but had apparently decided
that he needed the check worse than the auctioneer did. The
$1500-a-week days of Lightning were long past, and Broadway
was flat, but Mrs. Davenport said that of course she and Harry
would scrape together the money somehow.
I told her not to be foolish and said that the prices at the
sale had been so preposterously low that I would not even
need to charge the money off to profit and loss.
Some time later I saw an obituary of Delmas the lawyer,
which mentioned among other things that he had been an ac-
tive spiritualist. So, for that matter, had McKee Rankin.
Almost the next day Mrs. Davenport came to the store.
"Here's an odd one," she said. "Two days ago I got this let-
,
ter.
The letter read: "Last night I talked to your father, and he
criticized me very severely for being unethical with you. I en-
close a bank draft for $250."
The spirits served me better on that occasion than on an-
other, when I was in Buffalo. In the outskirts of the town
lived a little character who used to accumulate books from
heaven knows where and sell them off to booksellers, usually
at a dollar or less apiece. He had a room full of Americana,
and I used to look forward to going there as a child does to
visiting a toy store.
One evening I picked out an armful of fantastic bargains,
and was getting ready to leave when one of the notorious
Buffalo blizzards descended on us. When it really snows in
Buffalo, nothing moves. My man said I had better stay the
night.
By way of passing the evening he and his wife got out two
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
school slates and produced spirit slate writings from about
nine o'clock until midnight. I don't know whether the writing
was real, and I don't want to know. I had more hair then
than now, and every hair on my head stood upright.
Finally, in desperation, I looked out of the window, noticed
that the snow was not much more than thigh deep, and ob-
served casually, "Oh, hell, the storm's all over; I might as well
be getting on home."
I footed it for about two and a half miles to the hotel, giving
thanks every step of the way.
Beyond the slightest doubt the one towering authority on the
Maya civilization was a man named William Gates. My first
introduction to him came when a short, seedy-looking individ-
ual walked into the store. I was about to hand him fifty cents
for a square meal when he asked if I had any books on Central
America.
His second remark was, "The only true scientist that ever
lived was Madame Blavatsky."
I said, "You must have just come from California."
In spite of this, I found out within a few minutes that he
knew more about Central America than any man I had ever
met
I sold him stuff occasionally with mixed pleasure, because
he was always overbought and owed back bills to everybody.
Finally he bought a farm in Virginia, but soon discovered
that the only way he could feed his chickens was by selling
the library he had spent thirty-five years accumulating.
He sent the library to the American Art Association for
cataloguing. They actually printed and distributed an elaborate
catalogue, which I skimmed through, and I remember hoping
the old man might get ten thousand dollars out of the sale.
[ 90 ]
THE CONSUMERS
Before the day of the sale, however, the authorities at Tulane
University in New Orleans, who considered themselves the
proper repository for Central American material, became tre-
mendously excited about the collection. Somebody persuaded
the president of the United Fruit Company to hand over sixty
thousand dollars, with which they bought the collection at
private sale; they then hired Dr. Gates as librarian.
Madame Blavatsky, however, proved too much for Tulane
before very long, and Dr. Gates had to go back to Virginia.
About this time one of my Explorers' Club friends was a man
named Sidney Mackaye, who represented a Toronto insurance
company in the West Indies and Central America. On his
travels he amused himself by stopping at every crossroads sta-
tionery store, looking for local books and pamphlets. He ac-
cumulated several thousand very obscure items. Central Ameri-
can publications are almost invariably ill-printed on very poor
paper, which seems to attract no one but the insects. Further-
more, printing arrived late in most parts of Central America, so
that any local imprint before 1825 is likely to be very scarce
indeed, and some as late as 1870 may well be unique.
Finally, on the occasion of giving up his New York apart-
ment, he decided to part with the collection. He asked if I
could get him three thousand dollars for it.
In my usual completely naive way, I thought Tulane Uni-
versity was the proper repository for this collection, so I wrote
a letter to the president, whose name my Freudian censor will
not let me recall.
He replied, in substance, that all booksellers were knaves
and scoundrels and that he wanted no part of any Central
American books.
I have quite a collection of these letters, which have al-
ways entertained me, and to this one I replied that I could
[ 91 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
not blame him for his judgment of booksellers, but the fact
remained that the Sidney Mackaye collection was available at
three thousand dollars. "Furthermore/' I added, "if anyone who
knows anything about such material will appraise the lot at
less than $5000, 1 will make you a present of it with my compli-
ments."
A few days later a large, sleepy-looking man came in and
said, rather as if his mouth were full of potatoes, "Here, here,
what's the idea of making me come all the way up to New
York on a wild-goose chase? I'm Francis Blom, the librarian
from Tulane."
"All right, Blom/' I said. "You know and I know the man
who knows more about the value of Central American books
than all the other people put together/'
"I suppose you mean Marshal Saville, at the Museum of
the American Indian/' he said.
I called up Saville, and he and Blom inspected the Mackaye
collection. Saville's appraisal was $5500.
When Blom came back to the store, he telephoned to the
president of Tulane, told him what the collection was, and
got orders to have it packed and shipped at once. (Blom, in-
cidentally, wrote by far the most popular book on the Mayas. )
The end of the transaction was a draft from New Orleans
for three thousand dollars, with a fulsome letter of thanks.
After his brush with Tulane, Dr. Gates went to Baltimore,
where with the help of an angel he started the Mayan Society
to publish Mayan texts and material. I served as his New York
agent. Not one of the publications came anywhere near paying
for its printing costs: I remember one Mayan grammar that we
simply couldn't give away. By now, of course, his whole series
are scarce as hen's teeth, and nearly always worth at least
several times their publication price.
[ 92 ]
THE CONSUMERS
The last time I saw Dr. Gates, I went up my steps on 59th
Street one rainy morning and found him sitting there with-
out an umbrella.
"Why don't you take care of yourself, Bill?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm all right, Charlie. Ill write your obituary," he
said. But two days later his sister, Mrs. H. C. McComas of
Baltimore, wired that he had died the day he got back to
Baltimore.
The newspapers, which of course had never heard of Gates
while he was alive, discovered the morning after he was dead
that he had been a great man, and ran column on column of
obituary notices.
Shortly his brother-in-law, Dr. McComas, wrote to ask what
I would charge to appraise the library that Dr. Gates had re-
served from the Tulane sale and accumulated in the interven-
ing years.
I wrote back that I would be glad to do it for my carfare
and a steady supply of bourbon.
E. R. Goodridge, the Mexico City bookseller who probably
knows most in the world about Mexican and Central American
books, was living in Baltimore at the time, and I took him along
to lend me a hand.
I knew that the McComases hoped to realize $80,000 out of
the library. In one room were several shelves of seventeenth-
century beauties that would knock your eyes out. For safety's
sake I put Goodridge to collating these, and he discovered that
there was not a perfect book among them. After all, a missing
map or title page usually means very little to the student, who
can find other maps and who knows what the book is anyway.
For the collector, and hence for the bookseller, one missing
leaf turns any rarity into wastepaper.
In another room was the finest lot of bibliographies of Cen-
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
tral America in any private library anywhere. I would have
given my right eye for the bibliographies.
At the end of two days' work we sat down to supper with
the McComases. I gave them my usual routine: "Do you want
the truth, or are you looking for a fairy story?"
They gave the stock reply: "The truth."
"Well, I'm sorry to tell you, but you'll be doing extremely
well if you get twelve thousand five hundred for the collec-
tion."
That was a bitter pill, but there was nothing I could do about
it.
I sat for some weeks and longed for the bibliographies; then
Mrs. McComas wrote that a young expert from a Midwestern
university, who could plainly have given pointers to Goodridge
and me on Central American books, had bought the old books
for seventeen thousand dollars.
Next she wrote that Johns Hopkins was going to buy the
bibliographies for $2500. I kissed them good-by, prematurely
but rightly, as it turned out.
Johns Hopkins couldn't raise the money. I found this out
when my dear friend Dick Wormser came home in triumph
with the lot. Some Baltimore acquaintance had remarked to
him, "Why don't you look at the Gates bibliographies?"
Dick can see as far through a brick wall as the next man,
and he had them out of Baltimore that same afternoon by
truck.
At least I had the consolation that Dick Wormser got them;
if anyone else had, I would have been tearing my few remain-
ing hairs for months.
Some fifteen years ago, while I was at Dauber & Pine's, the
head of an auction gallery got a letter from a complete stranger,
[ 94 ]
THE CONSUMERS
enclosing a four-page list of books wanted. Most of them were
things abQut as easy tp find, on the average, as the Bay Psalm
Book or a complete set of Caxton's imprints. The auctioneer,
apparently thinking himself very witty, referred the man to
Dauber & Pine.
His name was Tracy McGregor, and I had never heard of
him either. I wrote back that the books he wanted fell in a
class of which one bookseller might think himself lucky to
see two items in fifty years. But since I noticed that his list
referred largely to the American Revolution, I quoted some
of the choicer items on our shelves.
He bought them all.
As time went on, I quoted him good Revolutionary material
whenever I found it. He was the only customer I ever had who
would order 100 per cent of the items quoted.
More surprising, he was the only customer I ever had who
would buy more than one copy of the same item.
When I finally met him, a six-footer with a small gray beard,
I inquired about this peculiarity of his. He told me (which I
already knew) that his great interest was the Revolution; he
said there were ten libraries he was interested in, and when-
ever one of them lacked any Revolutionary item, he would
give it to them, regardless of cost. This meant that he would
sometimes buy ten copies of the same book.
I was just getting used to my good fortune in having such a
customer when Dauber & Pine sent out a miscellaneous cata-
logue containing seventy-one Stevenson items. McGregor wired
for all seventy-one.
The next time I saw him I asked about this; I could not see
any connection between the Revolution and Stevenson.
"Well, I was in this library, talking to the librarian, and a
kid came in and asked for stuff about Stevenson. They had a
[ 95 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
set of his works, and one biography, so I thought I might just
as well send them along this other stuff."
Of course it is an everyday matter for collectors to leave their
collections and money to an institution; but when Tracy
McGregor died, he was the only man I ever heard of who left
a fund to continue the collections of not one but ten colleges.
Rich and spectacular donors to libraries are very plentiful,
as you may have gathered from my stories. The most generous
library benefactor I ever knew had, I am sure, no more than
ten thousand dollars a year at any time in his life. His name
was Daniel Parish, and he certainly contributed more to the
collections of the New York Historical Society than any other
one man. Of course he got no thanks for it, and was trodden
under foot by the librarian; but, nothing daunted, he attended
every auction he could hear of, read every catalogue, and
hardly ever let a bundle of pamphlets get by him. So far as
I know, his sole occupation was buying for the Historical So-
ciety at his own expense. The expense ran chiefly to time, be-
cause he usually acquired the pamphlets for half a cent or a
cent apiece.
The Society showed its gratitude by throwing all of the
bundles into the basement, where they rested unopened for
decades. My friend Oscar Wegelin is only now, twenty years
later, finishing the job of cataloguing.
When my partner Stager discovered (and bought for fifty
cents ) a copy of Williams's Narrative of a Tour to the Oregon
Territory, Cincinnati, 1843, which a high authority had called
"virtually unknown to scholars," there was a record of only
one previous copy, which had been sold for six dollars at the
old Stan V. Henkels galleries in Philadelphia.
I went first to Wilberforce Eames. Here was one book that
the New York Public Library lacked. Then Mr. Henkels was
[ 96 ]
THE CONSUMERS
kind enough to tell me that his sale had been made to Daniel
Parish. Mr. Eames spent most of his summer vacation rooting
through the bundles in the cellar of the New York Historical
Society, and there was Williams.
How many similar rarities fell among Mr. Parish's loot, I do
not know. Certainly a good many.
When Mr. Parish died, the executors wrote that they had
discovered he owed me $1150. They said the estate was a small
one, and it would probably take them two years to settle my
account.
I wrote back that it would be a personal pleasure to me to
write this amount off my books.
They were old-fashioned New York businessmen, and their
reply was the first of a series of checks for $47.92 which arrived
like clockwork on the second day of every month until the
account was balanced.
2. The Librarians
PERHAPS it is ungrateful of me, since libraries are by far the
biggest buyers of rare Americana, that I have almost no use
for librarians; but I doubt that 2 per cent of our librarians
even know the function of a library.
Lunching one day with one of the 2 per cent who do, Dr.
Randolph G. Adams, I remarked that in fifty years of rare
books I hadn't met twenty-five good librarians or twenty-five
real collectors.
"I'll pay for the lunch," said my companion, "if you can
name a dozen librarians or ten collectors."
[ 97 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
I paid for the lunch.
When a man gives an important collection to a public
institution, he naturally assumes that the material will be in
safekeeping for students forever. Little does he know librar-
ians.
A leading Chicago lawyer, E. L. Cooley, lived a bachelor
existence devoid of practically every comfort so he could ac-
cumulate a collection of material relating to his home territory
in western New York. When he died, he willed the collection
to the library in his native town.
Two or three years later, a scout passing through the town
was told by the librarian that nobody ever looked at these
dusty old books, and she would be very glad to exchange
them for some modern fiction that people would read. The
scout asked what she valued the collection at, and she said she
thought she ought to have a hundred dollars' worth of Faith
Baldwin and Warwick Deeping instead of this old collection
nobody ever used.
The scout was almost as bad as the librarian because he
got out a list pricing the books, many of them rarities, at about
5 per cent of their proper value. I had the luck to get the
first copy of his catalogue, and he was unable to fill any sub-
sequent orders from that list.
The librarian of a venerable Eastern university spent twenty-
five years assembling a basic collection of Americana. He did
it in the days when such material could be found by ordinary
vigilance, and at no great expense. Then he died.
His successor, a Scotsman, was interested in nothing but
philosophy. He sent for me. I spent three days picking the
plums out of this extremely rich pudding. Then I lined up my
choices for the new librarian's inspection.
[ 98 ]
THE CONSUMERS
He looked them over and said truculently, "I wouldn't take
less than three hundred dollars for these." When I handed him
six fifty-dollar bills, he was stunned, because he had expected
this price to be in exchanges of philosophy books. I do not
dare tell you how many times over that three hundred dollars
came home to roost.
It is customary for a librarian to explain to me, and I pre-
sume to other booksellers as well, that she has had more ex-
perience than I, and therefore knows more about book prices.
I learned to accept this gracefully on the occasion when I
called at a small Ohio library. A Mr. Hildreth had assembled
one of the famous collections of Midwestern Americana and
had willed it to this library, where of course the books were
immediately deposited in a dark and dusty basement.
When I got there, the librarian went through the routine
about her knowledge of book prices. Fortunately I did not bat
an eye. She knew that any old book was worth at least ten
cents, and so told me that I could have the Hildreth collection
for $125, take it or leave it. It was many years ago, but I have
always lovingly remembered one item in the collection: a
thick-paper copy of the first edition of The Federalist, with
Rufus Putnam's autograph on the flyleaf. I would happily pay a
thousand dollars to see that old friend come back into the
store.
I know it is asking for the moon, but I wish all future librar-
ians could spend a year in an old bookstore instead of going
to library school. And I wish still more that all present and
future librarians would buy, beg, borrow, or steal a copy of
Dr. Randolph G. Adams's pamphlet, Librarians as Enemies of
Books.
* * *
[ 99 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Not all librarians blithely give away priceless collections
to the first comer. A big Western librarian, Dr. Frank Root,
the author of two volumes of perfectly worthless bibliography
of the Midwest, once summoned me to look over his library
duplicates. For twenty-five years he had been conscientiously
accumulating unbound copies of Munsey's, McClure's, Cos-
mopolitan, and every other useless magazine except the Police
Gazette.
I found three dusty buildings and several subsidiary attics
all bulging with this mass of truck. It took me three days,
working with a flashlight, to pick out any stuff that I would
even trouble to cart away. I was exhausted by the task,
and had really very little idea of what I had finally put to-
gether.
Dr. Root said severely to me, "I want four hundred dollars
for these." This I thought was cheaper than spending any more
time with my flashlight, so I let Dr. Root write out a check,
which I signed.
Two days after this stuff got to New York, I had a highly
indignant letter from the librarian, vowing I had taken ad-
vantage of him.
Meanwhile I had examined the books, and found that I had
overpaid him by at least $150. To keep him happy, however,
I sent him a signed blank check, with instructions to fill it in
with the amount at which I had robbed him.
In reply, he sent back the check, still blank, but said that
his real objection was to a middleman's making a profit. He
had been studying the various want lists issued by the anti-
quarian book trade and had discovered that he could have sold
at least three of them for three dollars apiece. The six hundred
volumes I had so avidly carted away must therefore be worth
several times the price I had paid for them. I retorted by mail
[ 100 ]
THE CONSUMERS
that if he lived to be ten thousand he might possibly sell as
many as one hundred out of the six hundred.
Whatever happened to the rest of the accumulation at his
own unfortunate library I have no idea. Certainly the Salvation
Army should have been paid to take the stuff away.
During the thirty years William Abbatt of Tarrytown pub-
lished the Magazine of History, he reprinted some two hundred
rare items relating to early American history 65 per cent
practically unobtainable at any price, 25 per cent obtainable at
high prices, the other 10 per cent not scarce. These well-printed
pamphlets were issued in very small editions some say fifty-
five copies of each, some say a hundred.
Less than 1 per cent of our American libraries subscribed to
this important series.
Six or seven years ago the unsold copies turned up in a
bindery. Mr. Abbatt, always being in the red, had left an un-
paid bill. There were some two or three thousand pamphlets,
and I was glad indeed to pay the binder's bill. In my foolish
enthusiasm I decided that one catalogue would sell every re-
maining copy.
Each item was catalogued correctly author, title, number
of pages, date of the original, and date of reprint; price about
a third of Abbatt's original list.
And what happened? Total orders from libraries, $61; one
clever dealer bought some for $450; two private buyers bought
one of each title.
The type was standing, so I used the same descriptions in
three other catalogue:?. Orders totaled $29.
A sarcastic friend to whom I showed these figures turned
around and grinned at me. "What a damn fool you are! Don't
you know that librarians buy blurbs, not books?"
[ 101 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
For three days I wrote blurbs about books I thought every-
one knew.
Net result: telegrams, telephones, special-delivery letters,
air-mail letters. In three months not an Abbatt reprint in the
store.
I think it is a crime for manuscripts relating to a particular
place or state to be anywhere but in the local archives. Some
librarians agree with me; some do not.
In trying to get books and manuscripts to libraries where
they belong, I find myself succeeding about one time out of
five. As I write these words, I hold in my hand a dilapidated
folio, broken-backed and loose-leaved, describing in detail the
organization, bylaws, organizers, members, reading fees, books
on the shelves, a four-page description of the condition of the
books, organization of a debating society with signatures of the
original members, and many other details of the Dummerston
Social Library at Dummerston, Vermont, from 1808 to 1841.
There has been some suggestion that this library was the first
public or semipublic book collection in Vermont. Many of the
records are signed by Hosea Beckley, who wrote one of the
fairly early histories of Vermont, published in nearby Brattle-
boro. Dummerston is now a suburb of Brattleboro, which has
shoals of literary and artistic summer residents, memories of
Rudyard Kipling ( whose house was actually in Dummerston ) ,
and, for a town of 10,000, a good and lively public library.
The Dummerston Social Library records were offered to
this library on approval for a less than nominal figure. After
some nine months of inspection by the librarian, the finder re-
trieved his material in person.
As I was not the finder, I can gracefully remark that I think
you will have to hunt very hard indeed to find a dozen such
[ 102 ]
THE CONSUMERS
contemporary records of the founding of an American library.
Next I take the liberty of quoting in full an entry from one
of my catalogues:
Is Idaho Only Interested in Potatoes?
ORIGINAL ARMS OF THE TERRITORY OF IDAHO
LYONS, CALEB. Original pencil sketch of the Arms
(Seal) of the Territory of Idaho (1866). Lyons, Gov.
Caleb. A.L.S. describing the Coat of Arms of Idaho and
adding "By the authority in me vested by an Act of the
Legislature, passed hereby adopted I have designed
above described Coat of Arms for the Territory of Idaho/*
1 p. (1866) E. R. Hewlett. Certification of adoption
and reproduction of seal, April 20, 1866. Three pieces.
$350.
When this item appeared in my catalogue, a bookseller was
the only one that paid any attention. He wrote: "Everitt, you
must be crazy; in Idaho no one has spent $100 for books in
the knowledge of man."
But being inexperienced, I wrote the governor of the state,
who referred my letter to the historical society. The historian
replied, "Our legislature has made no provision to purchase
exhibition material." To this I made the obvious reply: "This
is not an exhibit it is in fact a sensational historical docu-
ment/*
No reply to this letter.
As the next move I wrote to the leading Idaho newspaper.
The Pioneer Editor replied: "Caleb Lyons was known to most
Idahoans as a fraud, a sneak, and deep-dyed carpetbagger. . . .
I know of no one in Idaho who would give 350 cents for any-
thing belonging to or designed by Caleb Lyons, unless it might
be his scalp. Most of the information you refer to is already
available in Boise, although not in the original."
[ 103 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
My answer: "Am I to understand that Idaho and other state
historical societies are only to accumulate documents of honest
politicians? If such be the case . . . the many buildings of
such societies would be reduced considerably in size. If I know
anything about the function of a state historical society, it is
to accumulate original material relating to its state."
I quote one paragraph from the editor's reply: "The docu-
ments of Caleb Lyons belong in the Idaho state house. I am
sure the governor and the historian would welcome them.
Perhaps an arrangement might be made whereby the state
would go so far as to pay the postal charges in case someone
wants to donate the manuscripts."
If I understand this sentence, it means that the manuscripts
catalogued are valued less in Idaho than I pay for one Idaho
potato in this town.
Thomas W. Streeter, the great collector of Western Ameri-
cana, finally said, "I don't want the wretched manuscripts, but
I like your description." They are now in his library.
I have been greatly flattered when an occasional prominent
figure in the rare-book world has chosen me to help put an
item where it belongs.
One day Mr. R. W. G. Vail came to me with a shabby bound
volume of a newspaper, for which I gave him four hundred dol-
lars with great alacrity. As you see by the following memo-
randum that Mr. Vail later wrote out for me, this item had been
offered to the four institutions where it really belonged. I sent
a description to the Wisconsin Historical Society and got $650
almost by return mail. I had first called up Mr. Wall, the direc-
tor of the New York Historical Society and practically begged
him to buy the volume. He told me I had no alternative but
to sell it to him at his own price.
I 104 ]
THE CONSUMERS
Mr. Vail wrote:
When I was working for the Roosevelt Memorial
Association Theodore, of course I happened to be
passing through Canandaigua, New York, while on va-
cation, and dropped in at an antique shop and asked the
proprietor's wife if I might see any old books they might
have. Busy with another customer, she waved me to a
back room, where I found quite a lot of old books, but
none worth buying. As I was about to leave, she said,
"There must be an old newspaper in this bureau drawer.
The old man picked it up quite a while ago out in the
country during one of his trips, and like a darned fool
gave $5.00 for it. No one has ever looked at it and 111
bet he's stuck with it. He's always getting excited and
paying more for stuff than it's worth."
I looked at the volume, a small folio about three
inches thick, saw the publisher's name written inside
the cover, noticed the title and date of the first issue,
and said, "I kind of like old newspapers, and might be
interested in buying this volume if you don't want too
much for it."
I tried to keep a poker face, for I realized that it was
the publisher's own file of the lost frontier newspaper
of New York in the 1790's, the Whitestoivn Gazette
lost, that is, except for three or four stray issues scat-
tered through two or three libraries. Whitestown is now
Utica. Here was a practically complete file for several
of the earliest years.
She said, "We'll have to wait till the old man gets back
he ought to be here any minute now. It's his book, and
he will have to put the price on it."
Just then he came in. "So you are looking at the old
newspapers. That's a very fine item. A fellow was looking
at it last week and offered me $15 for it. I thought I'd
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
take him up on it, but haven't gotten around to sending
it to him yet, so if you want to give me $20 for it, the
newspapers are yours."
I glanced at his wife, who looked a bit confused, for
she knew that I knew her husband was making up his
story as he went along. But I swallowed the yarn, grin-
ning at his wife, and said, "All right, 111 give you your
$20 for it." I walked out of the shop with one of the very
rarest of New York newspaper files.
Back in New York I took the volume up to my old
stamping ground, the New York Public Library, and
showed it to Dr. Wilberforce Eames, who was most
enthusiastic about it, and very much wanted the library
to acquire it, but he referred me to the head of the
American History Department.
He liked it too, and then asked the price. When I
told him that I wanted $150 for it, the lowest price at
which it would ever be offered, he countered with the
remark that I had never paid any such price for it, and
the library would give me ten per cent more than it
had cost me.
So I then took the volume to Mr. A. J. Wall, another
old friend, with the price raised to $250. He also turned
me down, though he told me several times later that he
had made a mistake. My next venture was Dr. J. I. Wyer,
state librarian at Albany, but they did not want the pre-
cious newspaper at $350, though I later learned that he
had not shown my letter to Mr. Joseph Gavit, his author-
ity on early New York newspapers, who would have
taken it in a minute. Then I sent a letter to Mr. Pierrepont
White of Utica, banker and President of the Oneida
County Historical Society. Since his name was White,
and Whitestown was Utica, I was rather disgusted when
he did not buy the volume out of his own pocket after the
society had failed to raise my new price of $450.
[ 106 ]
THE CONSUMERS
That was how the Whitestown Gazette passed through my
hands.
I once went to Marietta, Ohio, in pursuit of a very important
library. My trip was a fizzle, because somebody from Chicago
offered five hundred dollars more than I did.
As I was wandering around Marietta, with three hours until
train time, I noticed an old, square stone house. I asked a
passer-by who lived there.
"Well, an old Civil War general used to, but he died about a
year ago."
So I walked up to the door and rang. A very charming old
lady opened it.
I handed in my card and said I was scouting around in search
of old books.
At this she welcomed me with open arms. "We simply
haven't got anything except books." There were books
everywhere, even in the bedrooms, and all Americana. Not
a set of Charles Reade anywhere in the house. I was
nervous at such a good haul as this, so I asked her who her
lawyer was. I had long since forgotten and outstayed my
train.
"As a matter of fact, he's my son-in-law. Why don't you stay
to dinner, and 111 have him over."
He and I soon closed on a good-sized offer. Then I said,
"Where is your husband's correspondence with Lincoln and
his commission?'*
"Over in that old safe there. But I want you to understand
that it is not for sale/*
"Oh, I understand that perfectly. But it would be a privilege
to look at it."
The general had been the Judge Advocate at the Indiana
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
treason trials early in the Civil War. There were five excellent
Lincoln letters and the general's commission.
I asked the general's lady what she intended to do with the
papers.
"Well, I think they ought to be preserved in some institu-
tion, but I haven't decided where."
"The best institution in this state is the Western Reserve
Historical Society," I said. "If I get Mr. Cathcart down here,
will you let him have the papers?"
"Oh, that would be splendid. I just haven't known where
these things ought to go."
I reserved a room for the night in the very dismal local
hotel, and wired to Wallace Cathcart: TRAIN LEAVES CLEVELAND
SEVEN P.M. ARRIVES MARIETTA SEVEN A.M. STOP. WANT YOU TO
HAVE BREAKFAST WITH ME.
Next morning I went down to the station about forty-five
minutes after train time, just at the right moment to welcome
Wallace Cathcart. "What did you drag me down here for?" he
demanded.
"I told you I wanted you to have breakfast with me," said I.
We had breakfast and then walked for nearly a half mile
toward the general's house.
"Do you know who used to live here?" I asked.
"You old scoundrel! I've been ten months trying to get into
that house. How did you get in?"
'Why, I walked in," I said.
The general's widow gave us a warm welcome, and opened
up the safe for Wallace.
After the Lincoln papers and the commission came out, I
poked a hand into one of the pigeonholes and hit on seven
copies of a pamphlet.
It was entitled, Constitution and By-Laws of the Golden
[ 108 ]
THE CONSUMERS
Circle or Sons of Liberty. This organization amounted to an
anti-Lincoln conspiracy, and in its day a man found carrying
a copy of the pamphlet was quite likely to be shot on the spot.
I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, "Wallace, you
only get one of those."
He muttered back, "I do not. I get two."
Being big-hearted, I contented myself with five copies, and
struck out for the West.
In Indianapolis, where the general had presided over the
treason trials, I fatuously went to see the librarian of the
Indiana State Library. When I suggested selling him a pam-
phlet for fifty dollars, he declared, "I can't see why we should
buy this. We already have the reprint from the Government
proceedings at the trial."
I gave him my stock reply for librarians: "If you don't see,
I'm sure I don't."
Some years ago the librarian at a small western New York
college decided that textbooks were more important on his
shelves than dusty and neglected oddments concerning Amer-
ica. As soon as I got the good news, I posted out, spent two
days at work, and picked myself a large packing case full of
reasonably good things, for which I paid $250.
The janitor, of course, was instructed to help me pack up
and ship my purchase. Books have to be packed very tight,
and I found myself with a hole as big as two fists in the corner
of the packing case. I grabbed the first discarded volumes
I could lay hands on, juggling them around until they just
filled out the space; thickness was what mattered, not con-
tents, and I did not even look at the titles.
Of course these makeweights, being nothing I cared about,
were the first things to come out of the case when I unpacked.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
One of them bore the fascinating title, The Christian Advocate,
and I was about to throw it into my capacious wastebasket
when the cover fell open, and I noticed some penciled writ-
ing: "This is the original first edition of Hayward's Aboriginal
History of Tennessee." I had never seen a copy of that either,
but I did know it was a very scarce book, so I went straight to
Mr. Eames.
It was obscure enough so that even he had to look in his
files. "Yes, weVe got it," he said, "but our copy lacks the
folding plate. May we have your permission to photostat this?"
He paid for that small privilege several times over with the
information he had given me, and I catalogued The Christian
Advocate at $250, basing my calculation on the price of the
whole collection.
It was like the Idaho state seal: echo answered.
About this time I was rather struck by the fact that the
Library of Congress was buying many books at auction, but
none of their business seemed to come my way. I thought it was
nearly time to put a stop to this, so down I went to Washington.
I called on Dr. Scott, then head of the Acquisition Department,
and said I noticed he had not bought anything from me in
more than two years, though I was sure some of my catalogues
had contained items he lacked. He pressed a button, and the
man responsible for checking booksellers* catalogues shambled
in. "Do you check Everitt's catalogues?"
"Yes, regularly. He hasn't had anything we want in
years."
"How about this?" I said, pulling The Christian Advocate
from my pocket.
"Oh, I think we have two copies of that/* said the acquisi-
tion clerk.
"Get them!" observed Dr. Scott.
[ no ]
THE CONSUMERS
After enough time to check one catalogue tray and have
a change of heart, the clerk returned. "I made a mistake, sir;
we haven't got it/'
"All right, make out an order to Everitt for this."
I chanced to walk down the corridor with the acquisition
clerk, who said in an undertone, "Why should I buy from your
catalogues?"
"Look here, old man; don't you think you are a bit late?"
I asked.
And I went as fast as wheels would carry me to the Willard
Hotel, where James B. Wilbur, the great Vermont collector,
was staying.
I told him my tale. "If this ever comes into court, I'll swear
up and down that I never heard of it." And in point of fact, I
never did.
A few weeks later the book trade journal had a notice that
the head acquisition clerk at the Library of Congress was
resigning. That's all of that story.
Many, perhaps most, of the mistakes librarians make are cor-
rected in the end when collectors buy up their duplicates and
present them to other libraries.
The basement of the Rhode Island Historical Society was
absolutely crammed with duplicates, under half an inch of dust
and plaster. I said I was going down for a look, but Howard
Chapin, the librarian, said no, it was too dirty.
I said I didn't care; I was going. And I went. There were
eight and ten and a dozen duplicate copies of rare books, in a
shocking state of neglect.
When I was about half through my overhaul, Chapin sent
down to say that I was raising too much dust and would have
to stop. Then I asked to have the porter bring up my choices.
[ in ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
We agreed on three hundred dollars, which was a fair and
square price. Just as I started to pay, Chapin pulled out a
bundle from behind his desk. "Want to give me five dollars
for these no-good broadsides?"
All I could do was say yes, without looking. The great-
est collector of Rhode Island material in the world lived
not three blocks away, so my prospect was not very flatter-
ing.
Some weeks later I had a phone call from Scott & O'Shaugh-
nessy, the cleverest book auctioneers we have ever had in
New York. Walter Scott was undoubtedly the best man I ever
saw on the rostrum. They said they wanted ten or fifteen items
to fill out their next sale.
There happened to be just eleven broadsides in the bunch
from Chapin, so I sent them over, thinking they might bring
three or four dollars apiece and pay my train fare.
I sat at the back of the sale, and when the broadsides came
up, somebody said, "Two dollars/*
Somebody else said, "Three."
Just then Scott turned to me and said solemnly, "Are you
bidding on these, Mr. Everitt? I can't quite see you."
I said, "I certainly am," though I had not yet opened my
mouth.
With this hint from the auctioneer, I joined in the bidding,
and kept pushing until they hit sixty dollars.
Then I noticed that Scott was getting uneasy. He fidgeted
and shifted on his stool. So at sixty dollars I fell out.
Mr. Scott took a final, capping bid from the bid sheet and
struck off the first broadside.
Practically the same thing happened with each of the other
ten.
The lot went, intact, to the collector three blocks from the
[ 112 ]
THE CONSUMERS
Rhode Island Historical Society. Scott told me afterward that
he had house bids for $75 each.
Percentages considered, I have been incredibly lucky in
some librarians I have known.
Around 1900, in my second or third catalogue, I listed some
obscure Canadian pamphlet, eight pages long, for $12.50.
The Canadian National Archives, which had just been put
under the care of Dr. Arthur G. Doughty, asked to see the
pamphlet on approval, and I sent it.
Soon afterward I heard from Dr. Doughty: "Dear Everitt:
Til be a great many years older before I start paying $12.50 for
eight-page pamphlets."
I wrote back: "Dear Dr. Doughty, 111 be a great deal older
before I start selling pamphlets by weight."
This was the beginning of a beautiful lifelong friendship.
After Dr. Doughty got to know me, he stopped worrying about
the bulk of what he bought. His purchases eventually totaled
many thousands of dollars.
One morning about ten o'clock I stopped in to call on
Dr. Doughty in Ottawa.
He said, "Everitt, I'm delighted to see you, but this is a
busy day, and I'm afraid all I can give you is fifteen minutes."
"Oh, I haven't got anything particular on my mind anyway,"
I said. "I hear Sir Lester Harmsworth has given you a swell
collection of Canadiana."
By the time we had finished discussing Sir Lester's gift,
it was 4 P.M.; we looked over Harmsworth's pictures, and at
long last I started to leave. 'Wait a minute," said Dr. Doughty.
"I just want to show you that this is the only library in the
world where you can really find a map when you want it.
You name any American map of any date and any size, and
[ 113 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
111 undertake to have it in front of you, held down by thumb-
tacks so that you can really study it, within five minutes of the
time you say go."
I called for the first map made by the Samuel Champlain
expedition, and it was before me in just over three minutes.
Not long after his map performance, Mrs. Everitt and I
found ourselves staying at the Abbotsford Hotel in Russell
Square, London, one of a series of English temperance hotels
where the only place you could not get a drink was the bar.
For our sins, we suddenly became the best friends of an
Australian and his wife who attached themselves to us. They
persisted in constantly asking us to lunch.
Finally, as the easiest way, we accepted, and they took us
to the Royal Colonial Institute. After a lunch of overdone
mutton, soggy potatoes, and vegetable marrow (which I don't
like much even when it is called squash ) , our genial host said
brightly, "Don't you want to go upstairs and look at the li-
brary?"
You probably know how much a bookseller wants to look at
a club library, but I decided I preferred the library to Austra-
lian conversation, and up we went.
The librarian was supposed to be sitting back of a glass case,
which was filled with notes from Thackeray and Tennyson
declining invitations to tea and notes from Queen Victoria
thanking them for presentation copies of their books.
In one corner of the case was a much less exalted-looking
manuscript, and I asked the man behind the case if I could look
at it.
He replied, "The librarian isn't here at the moment, and
nobody has ever asked to look at anything in this case in the
twenty years I've been around. Just a minute, and maybe Sir
Charles can help us."
[ 114 ]
THE CONSUMERS
I was not to be put off. I handed him my card and said,
"I'd still like to see that manuscript/'
He flushed, then disappeared for a moment, and I saw
him talking to a short, elderly gentleman in a corner of the
library.
This man came over and introduced himself as Sir Charles
Lucas, whom I knew as the author of a great series of Colonial
histories.
"Well, Mr. Everitt," he said, "what's all the excitement?"
"Sir Charles," I said, "I simply asked to see a manuscript.
I know it isn't for sale, but just to make things interesting
I'll be glad to give you five thousand dollars for it."
He turned to the assistant librarian and said, "Open that
case, please."
The assistant flushed again and said, "We have no key, sir."
"Well, get a hammer or a chisel or something and open it
up."
Just then the librarian appeared and he produced a key from
somewhere.
When I finally got the manuscript in my hands, I found it
was in fact what I had supposed; namely, the journal of
Duncan M'Gillivray, the early explorer in the Northwest, with
a map that he had drawn from a sketch made by his Indian
guide. M'Gillivray had used the Indian's sketch on his way to
the Columbia River, since the guide was probably the only
one who had been over the route before. There was also a map
made by M'Gillivray to plot his discovery.
I asked the librarian, "Has no one ever examined this manu-
script?"
"No," he replied.
"Are you sure? What about Dr. Doughty of Ottawa?"
The librarian scratched his head. "Why, now that you men-
[ US ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
tion it, Dr. Doughty was here several years ago and photo-
graphed every page of the manuscript."
"I guess I'm not quite so excited about the manuscript," I
said, "but thank you very much for letting me see it any-
way."
On that trip I was called away from London by a cablegram
from my partner, Stager, asking me to look at a library in
Ottawa in ten days. The only way I could make it was to go
by way of Halifax. In Ottawa I saw the library, offered $4,500
for it, was turned down because the executor had an offer
(though not in writing) from an auction gallery for $15,000,
and stopped off for a moment to call on Dr. Doughty.
"Here," said Dr. Doughty, handing me a handsomely printed
pamphlet, "you might like to have a copy of this new facsimile
publication of ours."
I was very glad indeed to have it. It was the first printing
of M'Gillivray's journal of his discovery of the Columbus River.
(As for the library I did not buy, there was silence for a
couple of years, which brought us to 1930. Then the executor
wrote and said he would be glad to accept my offer. I was
very glad that my boom-time offer had not been in writing
either. A curio dealer finally paid $2,500 for the collection, and
I hope he got out whole. )
3. The Headers
MORE interesting to me than either collectors or speculators
are the readers. It is not much fun selling books to people who
can afford to buy them. The real pleasure is in serving the
[ 116 ]
THE CONSUMERS
true students, those who are hungry for books that cost more
than they can afford.
From long years of friendship the authorities at the Museum
of the American Indian (Heye Foundation) know how I feel
about readers. Whenever any of the thousands of visitors to
the museum ask where they can get books about Indians, they
are referred to me. One day the museum sent a postal clerk
who wanted to own a copy of Bolton's Indians of New York
City to me. He sat down at my desk, and I pulled off the
shelves a copy of Bolton marked $1.50. He explained that he
dared spend only twenty-five cents a week for books. I have
always had more fun giving books away than selling them, so
I tried to give him this one, but he said indignantly that he was
not looking for charity. He firmly put a quarter on the table,
and I wrapped the book.
Every Friday for the next five weeks he came in with his
twenty-five cents. Then he picked another book, and started
buying that the same way.
This went on for some months before he paid me a last
visit, and said he would have to stop because his wife had
discovered that he was buying books. That story had a sad
ending.
Another customer of mine was a shoemaker of West 23rd
Street, whose wife was a trifle less vigilant. I kept a bin full
of books reserved for the shoemaker, and he was able to sneak
two or three volumes a week home unnoticed.
One fine day he drove up literally in a horse-drawn hack,
marched into the store, and said, "Wrap up all my books!"
"What's happened?"
"My wife just died, and I can buy all the damn books I
want."
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
For some years I kept framed a letter to me from a Georgia
Baptist minister, saying in substance: "Dear Sir: Can you
supply any books on circumcision from a Baptist point of
view?" I referred him to the American Baptist Publication
Society of Philadelphia.
Not long afterward the "list boy" from the New York branch
of the Baptist Publication Society came to my store on his
rounds. (In those days every bookseller had a boy who
trudged around with a list in search of books that had been
ordered by customers. The list boy's usual beat was among
the publishers, but if an item proved hard to find, he would
look in on fellow booksellers.) At the head of the Baptist
Society boy's list was an order for a copy of Fanny Hill. Prob-
ably the Baptist Publication Society was the only bookseller in
the country to whom you could have given an order for this
title without creating the slightest flutter.
I looked over the list, and, wanting to be helpful to my
brethren in the trade, wrote next to Fanny Hill: "Try American
Sunday School Union."
Somebody at the big wholesale house of Baker & Taylor,
entering into the spirit of the thing, added: "Try American
Bible Society." To keep the ball rolling, somebody else wrote
in: "Try Goodenough & Woglom," who were religious book-
sellers even more religious than the denominational houses.
I don't know just how long this merry-go-round kept on,
but within a couple of days another celebrated theological
bookseller telephoned to me and asked if I knew of a book
called Fanny Hill.
"I've heard of it," I said dryly.
"Well, where can I get a copy?"
"I don't exactly know," I said. "The last man that did know
got two years in jail."
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THE CONSUMERS
Those were the days when Anthony Comstock was making
an ever-present nuisance of himself, and I got so bored with
trips down to the court of general sessions to testify as a
character witness for booksellers charged with selling erotic
literature that I thought I would at least have a little fun.
Like most spies, Comstock's stool pigeons might just as well
have worn sandwich boards. One of them came into my store
on 34th Street one day and said, with a sickly imitation of a
leer, "I'm looking for something hot to read."
My face brightened. "Come with me," I said, conspira-
torially. I walked him the hundred feet to the back of the
store, down the cellar stairs, and eighty feet toward the front.
Here I took from a shelf of discards a copy of Hannah Whitall
Smith's Christian Secrets of a Happy Life.
"I don't think you got me," said the lover of esoterica and
curiosa.
"On the contrary," said I, "I got you the moment you started
across 34th Street."
When Theodore Schulte first opened his famous bookstore,
at 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue, I helped him start, and
ran his basement for a while.
One day a very aged Negro clergyman from Georgia came
in. "I forgot what book I came in for," he said uncomfortably.
"My brethren gave me some money to buy a book, and all I
know is that it is a commentary some Baptist wrote on the
Bible."
"His name was Adam Clark," I said. "Just a minute." I
brought forward the six plump volumes.
"What's this going to cost?"
"Seven and a half," I said.
The clergyman dug some coins out of one pocket, two dollar
[ 119 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
bills out of another, then unpinned some more paper money
from inside his vest, where it had been safe from robbery. The
pile added up to $7.85. "Will the thirty-five cents pay the
postage?" he asked.
"Oh, we'll be glad to pay the postage," said I.
I asked him if he had his ticket home, and he said yes. I
asked if the thirty-five cents would pay for his food.
"Oh, I don't need to eat till I get back to Georgia," he said,
and went out happy.
You probably know about the hunger and thirst of the
Donner Party, the travelers who, caught in the Sierra Moun-
tains in winter, finally ate one another.
That hunger and thirst is mild compared to that of a col-
lector lacking one volume to complete his collection. Hunger
for books is, in some people, the thing that will break down
all inhibitions and hesitations. It is no respecter of person or
station.
Thirty years ago I spent an unproductive week of book-hunt-
ing in New England. I just couldn't find anything to buy.
Two or three booksellers told me that the theological library
of Reverend Samuel Hart, at Middletown, Connecticut, was
for sale. There was nothing I wanted less than theology, but
I was desperate for a few books to pay my expenses. So I
went to call on Mr. Bliss, Dr. Hart's executor.
Mr. Bliss showed me some seven thousand volumes of
standard theology. It was enough to put any rare-bookseller
into a sound stupor. Dr. Hart had been known as the great
authority on Bishop Samuel Seabury, the first great Episco-
palian bishop of Connecticut. The Hart library, however,
seemed to have not a single volume about Seabury.
"What about the Seabury things?" I asked Mr. Bliss.
[ 120 ]
THE CONSUMERS
"I guess that must be the stuff that's piled in the hall," he
said, taking me out there.
In stacks on the floor was probably the best collection of
Seabury material ever gathered together, as well as a copy
of every Episcopalian prayer book ever printed in America.
The booksellers who had tipped me off had also let me know
that the price on Dr. Hart's collection was three hundred dol-
lars. I said to Mr. Bliss, "I can give you five hundred dollars
for the lot."
"I'm sorry," said Mr. Bliss, "but I can't decide tonight, be-
cause Mr. Schulte, the theological bookseller, is coming up
to look over the collection tomorrow."
I put my watch on the table. "It's eight-thirty now," I
said. "Until nine o'clock I'll give you five hundred for the lot.
After that, I shan't be interested."
"Isn't that rather a tough way to do business?" he asked.
"Well, I'm not terribly concerned about other booksellers,"
I said. Mr. Bliss's wife was out of town, and he telephoned
to her. Even over the phone, her "Yes, yes, yes!" could be
heard across the room.
I handed over my check, and Mr. Bliss asked what I was
going to do next.
"Well," I said, "I'll take a few of these pamphlets along to
the hotel with me now, and I'll be back at ten tomorrow morn-
ing to pick out what else I want."
I packed up two good-sized bundles, consisting of all the
prayer books and all the Seabury material, and set off for
the hotel. By the time I got there, I decided that it was rather
Foolish to go back at all, except that it might have hurt Mr.
Bliss's feelings. I already had everything of any consequence
in my two bundles.
But I went back anyway, and Mr. Bliss introduced me to
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Dr, Hart's successor in the Episcopalian pulpit in Middletown.
The new minister was lost in admiration of Dr. Hart's col-
lection, which he told me was the finest theological library in
Connecticut. To him its value was not at all diminished by
the forty-one volumes I had chosen out of the seven thousand.
"Would you like to buy what's here?" I asked.
"I'd simply love to," he said, "but I can't possibly afford it."
"Could you afford seventy-five dollars?" I asked.
It took me some time to convince him that I was not trying
to be funny. Once he got that through his head, he said yes,
he could afford seventy-five dollars.
"All right," I said. "Write out a check for seventy-five dollars
to Mr. Bliss. I wasn't going to take these books out of the
house anyway."
This is rather a long way around to the hunger for books.
The telephone in our store on 33rd Street was, for some reason,
in a separate room. Besides the telephone we had a table
on which we used to put books before we priced or investi-
gated them. The Seabury and prayer-book collections imme-
diately went on the table.
One of our steadiest customers was a clergyman who used
to come in every week. He happened to use the phone just
after we had laid out the Seabury books, and when he came
away, he told me he had a complete set of American prayer
books except for a copy of Debrett's Proposed Prayer Book
of 1789, published in Philadelphia. He had seen a copy by the
telephone and wondered if I could sell it to him.
I explained that my copy, too, was part of a complete set,
which I could not possibly break up.
The clergyman looked crestfallen, and I thought the subject
was closed.
A few days later he used the telephone again. When later
[ 122 ]
THE CONSUMERS
I happened to glance over the Seabury books, I did not see
any Debrett
This was in October. I did not know of anything I could
do about it except mourn my shattered set, which, as you can
imagine, I did most heartily.
The day before Christmas, the yuletide spirit apparently
got to work. I had a mysterious present from an unknown ad-
mirer, a parcel mailed in Brooklyn, with my name out of a
newspaper advertisement pasted on for a label. As I never
saw this particular clergyman again, I was unable to ask him
whether he had sent the package. Anyway, the missing Debrett
was inside. The collection, thus restored to completeness,
eventually went to the William L. Clements Library, Ann
Arbor, Michigan.
Some time afterward I decided to give the back room its
monthly sweeping. Among the rubbish on the floor was a piece
of paper perhaps six by eight inches. Glancing at it, I saw
some lines of script in the hand of Dr. Samuel Hart. It read:
"This is the only known fragment of original manuscript of
the first Proposed American Prayer Book, written by Bishop
Samuel Seabury."
Any fool could see that this belonged in the library of the
General Theological Seminary, the headquarters of high-
church Episcopalianism in this country. I took the paper down
to Dr. Denslow, the dean, who told me that a board meeting
was just going on, and asked me if I would wait and talk to
the members.
The first question the board asked me was whether I would
guarantee that this fragment was in Bishop Seabury 's hand-
writing.
"On the contrary/' I said, "all I will guarantee is that I
don't know. But certainly Dr. Hart is the great authority on
[ 123 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Seabury; his opinion should be worth more than mine."
I had made a price of $250. "How did you arrive at this
figure?" they wanted to know.
"It was the first one I happened to think of," I said. "If
you give me time to think a little longer, the price may be
several times as high."
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Denslow, "I vote we pay Mr. Everitt
two hundred and fifty dollars for this before he has time to
think any further."
My memories of Bishop Samuel Seabury are, I fear, a little
happier than those of his descendant Judge Samuel Seabury.
He told me a good many times that he wanted a copy of one
of his family genealogies.
Finally a scout came in with a copy, which I bought for forty
dollars. Trying to be a good fellow, I sent word to Judge Sea-
bury saying he could have it for fifty dollars.
He came in, looked the book over, and said, "I've wanted
this book for forty years, but I think I can wait another forty
years before 111 pay fifty dollars for it." And he marched out.
Less than an hour later Michael Walsh of Goodspeed's
handed me fifty dollars and departed rejoicing with the
genealogies.
The next morning Judge Seabury was on the phone: "You
know, I was restless all last night because I didn't buy that
genealogy. Will you send it to me?"
"Judge Seabury," I said, *Tm sorry, but I'm afraid you're
going to have to wait that forty years for another copy."
[ 124 ]
PAR T III
The Trade
Q^^Q^^Q^^Q^^Q^^
1. The Booksellers
IF THE rare-book trade seems to you a fabulously profitable
calling for a strange breed of adventurous yet profoundly
learned beings, I can tell you why.
Every dealer who does not die broke (say one in five
hundred) makes occasional big killings. Like me in these
pages, he remembers and tells about the jackpots. Averaged
out over a business lifetime, the killings melt down to a liv-
ing wage, sweetened by the adventure of the chase. The
adventure is there, no doubt of it.
And the learning is there, too, much of it or little, depending
on its possessor. Fundamentally a bookseller or any dealer
in antiquities has no capital, no equipment, nothing but his
knowledge. A Philistine friend of mine once remarked that
the only difference between Foe's Tamerlane in the original
wrappers and a slightly defective copy of Poeins of Passion, by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, is in the knowledge of the book-hunter
who discovers them.
A bookseller who does not know what he's got has nothing
unless he knows where to find out. (If you read the chap-
[ 125 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
ter after this one, you will see that here, too, it isn't what you
know, it's whom you know.) I have made money sometimes
out of things I knew nothing about; but I used the jujitsu
trick of taking the things to customers who did know, and
letting the customers sell themselves.
When people talk about business and start proclaiming
that you don't need any capital, it is very easy and usually
correct to suspect them of living on an income. And if
Dr. Rosenbach lays out $38,000 for a small piece of paper,
it may not seem very helpful for me to say you can go into
the autograph business tomorrow with fifty cents.
But you can. If you know enough, you can even stay in
business. The only obstacle is the cost of learning. In a pinch
you can always find someone a brother dealer or possibly a
customer to lend you the money for a sure cinch. All that's
required of you is to recognize a sure cinch when you see
it. You may not have a building as big as the Parke-Bernet
Galleries, but neither will you have their payroll to meet.
The old-book business is rather like an iceberg: the shining
peak is only a fraction the size of what's under water. The
American dealers with mahogany-paneled shops and grilled
bookcases containing Pickwick in the original parts can prob-
ably be counted on your fingers and toes. For every Rosen-
bach or George D. Smith there have to be a hundred feeders
to keep those grilled bookcases full.
Suppose I start at the beginning. Where do old books come
from? Where do they go to?
They come from the publishers as new books. Sometimes
the publisher purposely makes or pretends to make them rare
right then by issuing a limited edition. During the 1920's there
were dealers and "collectors" (see The Mechanical Angel,
by Donald Friede) who simply bought the new limited edi-
[ 126 ]
THE TRADE
tions indiscriminately as they were issued and turned them
over like stock shares.
Much more likely the new books are not rare enough-
the publisher prints too many. When he has sold all he can at
the original price, he goes to a "remainder man," a whole-
saler who lives on publishers* mistakes. The remainder man
probably buys a thousand copies of History of Corn County,
Iowa, a five-dollar book, for thirty-five cents apiece. He then
sends out a catalogue to thousands of drug- and department
stores and a few secondhand bookshops, listing Corn County
at seventy-five cents, along with two or three hundred other
flops and ex-successes.
Then one of two things happens. The first is practically
nothing: little by little copies of Corn County trickle away
until the remainder man has four hundred left, which he
sells for wastepaper.
The second is that some smart Americana man in Des
Moines or Cedar Rapids (who has read the book, but of
whom the original publisher has never heard) sends in an
order for a hundred copies, and another hundred, and an-
other, until bingo, no more copies of Corn County are to be
had. The smart Americana man has been sending out cata-
logues too, but not to department stores and not with a blurb
saying, "Was $5, now $1.50." His catalogue goes to librarians
and specialist booksellers (not secondhand stores) and Mid-
western collectors. It says, "Among the finest of Midwestern
local histories. Contains first printing of the pioneer journal of
Gabriel Hornblower, a stranded Mormon emigrant. Out of
print, but I can still supply clean copies at the original price
of $5."
If our man is very smart indeed, he quietly sits on the last
ten copies, hoping he will live long enough to get $15 each for
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
them. He may not have to grow so very old at that. The WPA
guide to North Dakota is worth that much right now, just
because nobody wanted it at the time.
Well, some of the copies of Corn County have reached the
bookshelves of private citizens in Los Angeles who want a
memento of home, and a good many more have landed in
bookshops and public or institutional libraries.
The bookshops barring our Americana friend soon tire
of giving up shelf space to a dingy gray book with no jacket,
and Corn County goes on the two-bit table. This is one chance
for the hypothetical you to start in the rare-book business on
limited capital. Supposedly you know that Corn County con-
tains a Mormon narrative; you know where to find a copy for
twenty-five cents; and you know someone in Salt Lake City
who simply has to have every Mormon narrative in print.
Percentagewise your profit will be a great deal larger than if
you could afford to slug it out with Rosy for a Gutenberg
Bible.
As for the library copies of Corn County, you can get those
with a flashlight, a dust cloth, and a copy of The Case of the
Shoplifter's Shoe as trade goods. For that much in trade you
are rightfully entitled to a Howe's Virginia Historical Collec-
tions as well published before the Civil War, and hence
quite out of date. That there might be anyone fool enough to
pay $25 for a copy is not the librarian's lookout; she knows
about the real values of books.
The copies belonging to the Angelenos from Iowa also
gather dust, and probably don't get back into the book trade
until half a generation later, when the daughters-in-law of the
deceased call in the junk man to clear out the attic.
Obviously the mahogany-paneled book potentates can't
search either Los Angeles attics or two-bit counters. For per-
[ 128 ]
THE TRADE
haps thirty years it won't be worth their while having a copy
of Corn County on the premises anyway. But once it has aged
on the shelf, they can pull in their needs through one of the
most completely disorganized and smooth-working business
structures in existence.
Since the machinery is smooth-working only when you
know what button to press, I will take time to describe it.
There is an organization of antiquarian booksellers whose
true function is to improve the commercial manners and morals
of the members. It plays no great part in the operation of the
business.
Next there are a number of magazines, led in America by
the weekly Want List and Antiquarian Bookman, that pro-
vide a sort of exchange and stock market. For ten or twenty
cents a line you can run a list of books you happen to
want.
Theoretically this sends the entire old-book trade scurrying
to its shelves, thereafter to deluge you with post cards offering
good, bad, and dilapidated copies of Corn County at prices
from one to twenty dollars. (In case you should ever want
to send out a quotation card, remember that it should carry
the author's name, the title fully enough to avoid any possible
confusion, the edition number if you know it, the place and
date of publication, publisher, the condition with note of any
appreciable defects, and the price you want for the book.
Sometimes the size and number of pages are important. )
Actually the scurrying by the trade will not be so brisk.
Books in want-list ads fall into three classes: the rarities, which
the boys would rather sell to their own customers; the mildly
out-of-the-way, three- to ten-dollar books, for which you will
actually get some quotations at prices running from the afore-
said one to twenty bucks; and the common, which are not
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
worth a man's labor to find on the shelves, because he can't
ask more than fifty cents for them anyway.
In the middle category you will have some offers and can
pick the most advantageous if the quoters have told you
enough about the state of the book to allow a comparison.
At the back of the weekly trade magazines, also, are lists
of books for sale. So far as I can tell, these are much more
eagerly scanned than the want lists. Every so often you find
something you have long wanted, offered by someone who
doesn't know or can't get what it's worth. However, the Books
for Sale lists are always much shorter than the Books Wanted
lists.
Behind the pages of the book-finding organs are a bewilder-
ing variety of book traders. Not only are there dealers who
specialize in every subject you can think of I don't mean
just medicine or science or literature, but specialists in chess
books, in weight-lifting and strong men, in Utopian com-
munities, in doll books, in Government documents, in cigarette
cards but there are men who pursue these specialties in a
dozen completely different ways, honest and dishonest.
First in the chain of distribution are the "scouts." They are
the footloose book-hunters who actually dig in people's attics,
paw over other dealers' ten-cent counters, and put up with
the officiousness of librarians. A scout has no store, possibly
at most an attic or shed, and in many cases no stock. He is
the most conspicuous example of a bookseller with no capital
but knowledge.
At first glance you might think he is purely parasitic; but
far from it. Except for him, the books he finds in attics and
libraries would mostly sleep like the dead. As for his pur-
chases from other booksellers, he is famous for uncovering
"sleepers." A sleeper is a fifty-dollar book priced at a dollar.
[ 130 ]
THE TRADE
Most sleepers occur just because no bookman, except Wilber-
force Eames (who began life as a bookseller's clerk), can hope
to know everything. If I have spent sixty years learning to spot
the word "Oregon" in Mexican pamphlets, I won't have had
much time left to discover what books on archery command
premium prices. Suppose I buy a library on hunting because
it has some western Emigrant's Guides; I needn't be unhappy
when a scout pulls out the archery or the fox hunting at a
dollar a volume. I could no doubt go to Ernest Gee myself
and get five dollars each, but I am or should be too busy
figuring out how to realize five hundred apiece on the Emi-
grant's Guides.
If I let the scout live, furthermore, he will come back to me
with the Northwest Territory manuscripts he takes off some
junk cart. And I needn't be afraid he will go straight to my
customer and cut me out, because 98 per cent of the time
scouts sell only to booksellers and to each other. Having no
capital, the scout can't afford distribution costs: he buys, cheap,
whatever he knows a bookseller friend will buy from him. And
he expects the bookseller to get at least twice the scout's price
for what he buys. Of course there are exceptions. On a thou-
sand-dollar item both the scout and the bookseller may be glad
to make a quick hundred bucks for little work. A $25 book
leaves little enough margin for anyone even if the scout gets
the book free, considering the many days when he sees no
book worth five cents.
Some scouts operate through the book-finding magazines
entirely, guiding themselves by the books wanted, and peri-
odically cleaning house with a long for-sale list.
Next after the scouts are the mimeograph booksellers. They
very often have no shop except the back room at home; they
may serve as their own scouts (which I and many others have
[ 131 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
bad the time of our lives doing). Their chief asset is a mailing
ist of customers, to whom they send out mimeographed lists
?r catalogues periodically. That kind of business means some
ipecialization so that one customer will eventually buy more
han one book and it generally means a considerable share
>f library sales. The mimeograph dealer can afford to quote
ather lower prices than a man with high rent or expensively
Minted catalogues. At the same time, really fancy rarities are
lot constantly appearing on his horizon. The good, service-
>ble, mildly uncommon books that libraries want make up a
arge part of his store.
The catalogue dealer is one step up the social ladder. With
he present-day price of printing, any book he catalogues at
*ss than a couple of dollars must be regarded as a loss leader,
ven if he got it for nothing, as he very probably did, tossed
i with some tidbit that he paid good money for. Furthermore,
i setting his catalogue prices he must take into account that
yen a catalogue made in heaven will hardly move more than
[) per cent of the items it lists. Each book sold has to pay
>r the cataloguing of one and a half books still on hand.
Really good book catalogues are works of art, and some-
mes downright bibliographical masteq^ieces. I have men-
oned Ernest Wessen's Midland Note's. The old catalogues
: ^ a S8 s Brothers in London find a ready sale among book-
filers as reference books.
What I think of the average book catalogue I have already
id; for some reason I feel that an ignorant bookseller is
ore insufferably ignorant than an ignorant grocer. The least
; could do is to refrain from putting his ignorance into
int.
Many, perhaps most, catalogue dealers have a shop where
istomers can get waited on, if they wait long enough. A shop
[ 132 ]
THE TRADE
and walk-in trade bring a new set of problems. You have to
keep a wider variety of books, many at prices that don't really
pay for the overhead and handling; you have to deal with a
lot of inquiries for the works of Plato in the Modern Library
and other perfectly legitimate but financially unrewarding
wants. If you keep a store, you tacitly agree to supply what the
sidewalk customers ask for. In other words, you have a general
bookshop (even though you may not carry new books) rather
than a rare-book shop.
I've had both kinds, and both have their rewards. So far as
money goes, in recent years mine has all come from a steel
cabinet beside my desk where I keep the cream of the crop.
The yards and yards of shelving have been filled with stuff that
came in through the transom, and I have been lucky when I
didn't lose monev on it.
s
Some dealers specialize in subjects; some in methods of
operation; and some in customers. The man with half a dozen
big learned libraries or well-heeled collectors on his string
naturally concentrates on them. His problem (even more than
that of any antique dealer) becomes one of supply, not de-
mand. As a result, he will probably charge higher prices, but
work on a smaller percentage margin, than a dealer with a
more varied trade.
This tendency goes to its logical conclusion in the buying
agent Nearly any bookseller will attend auctions for 10 per
cent of the price on your successful bids; some booksellers
specialize in the job. Obviously there's no living in it unless the
items are big and profitable. Equally obviously there is no
risk.
The risk and hence the mark-up is smaller all the way
through when you know that the Huntington Library lacks
some $500 rarity and wants it badly. Just on suspicion you
[ 133 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
probably couldn't afford to buy the thing at all. As it is, you
go $400, and charge $550, The dealer with a general trade
can't buck you for things you really want.
I don't need to point out the business advantages you have
in that way. But the customer gets advantages, too. He pays
somewhat more for what he gets and he does get it. He is
paying you for knowing what his collection still lacks, and for
going out and finding it. He also knows that if there's any
trouble, you will make good. Presumably, since you are his
regular dealer, he is paying you to know enough and take
enough care so that there won't be any trouble. I have always
maintained that any collector, rich or starving, should pick a
dealer he can trust, and trust him. A collector is likely to be
quite old before he knows more than a competent bookseller
about the books he collects.
Auctions are another form of bookselling that takes various
shapes. A hundred years ago American publishers used to sell
their standard books at auction to the booksellers. One or two
smart operators have also auctioned remainders. Now there are
very few auctioneers who hold big sales of important books,
with elaborate catalogues and publicity, at which booksellers
and the mink-coat public are equally welcome.
In England the book auctions are primarily for the trade,
and the public, though not actually excluded, is not cordially
invited. For that reason the dishonest "knock-out" system,
prevalent in England, has never made much headway here. In
this system the booksellers form a ring and set ridiculously low
prices on the items they want; different members bid in these
items, the other accomplices abstaining, and the whole crew
divides the profit
The big auction galleries almost always sell on commission
[ 134 ]
THE TRADE
for consignors, though I have known rather fat parts of a con-
signment to get lost temporarily and reappear, ownerless, in
some later sale.
Another kind of operation is the small-time book auction
gallery that has grown up in the past twenty years. These
dealers will handle nearly anything between covers; success-
ful bids of thirty-five and fifty cents are commonplace, and
the high spot of a sale may bring $150. The cataloguing, of
course, cannot be elaborate, although it has to be passably
good because a great share of the bids come in by mail from
out-of-town buyers. The small galleries often buy their ma-
terial outright, on speculation; they perform a commercial
rather than a service function.
Every so often somebody usually an amateur dealer who
does not know how to price his books holds a postal auction,
or perhaps he merely runs a books-for-sale ad: BEST OFFER
TAKES. I don't know much about these; I've always been too
busy trying to buy and sell books without doing somebody
else's pricing for him. And you always have an uneasy sus-
picion that unless the bids are extravagant, the books may
sit right where they are, best offer or no.
One last reason why I call the book trade a disorganized
and smooth-running machine is that booksellers are apparently
always taking in each other's wash, finding a sleeper here,
selling it to another dealer, back and forth, as if private cus-
tomers were the last thing in their minds. But eventually the
book reaches the dealer who has the customer.
Now, where do books go? They go from publisher to book-
seller to customer to junk man to scout to dealer to dealer to
dealer ... to customer, and sometimes to one of the 2 per
cent of libraries where the librarian knows what he's doing.
The process takes time, sure; but rare-bookselling is almost
[ 135 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the last remaining trade with the charm of leisure. It isn't a
hurried man's calling, any more than it is a lazy man's.
That, roughly, is how the trade operates. As to how a trader
should operate, what I consider the very foundation of suc-
cessful rare-bookselling may seem to you a rather childish
attainment I mean knowing the mere physical appearance of
wanted books. With all the reference volumes in the world
but without a trained eye and a keen memory, you had better
sell coal instead of books.
Even in my old age I can call titles off a bookseller's shelf
(unless, of course, they have been rebound) from at least
twenty feet away. Between sheer memory and an eye for
physical appearance, you can go a long way with almost no
other equipment
One day when I was roaming Fourth Avenue, seeking what
I might devour, I saw a pamphlet in the window of a man
named Deutschberger. On the plain outside wrapper someone
had hand-lettered "Nfr. H."
Just a week before, I had been religiously studying, as was
my habit, the new catalogue of George D. Smith, perhaps the
greatest American book merchant of all time. Fresh in my
mind was his full-page description of the first play by Charles
Lamb printed in America. Mr. Smith's price was five hundred
dollars; Deutschberger's was fifty cents. I hired a barkeep
friend to buy the pamphlet for me, lest Deutschberger get ex-
cited.
Happenings like this lend a double point to my friend Frank
Dobie's words of wisdom: "Luck is being ready for the
chance." After four hours of the most astute and intensive
dickering I sold Mr. H. for $350 to my very close friend Evert
J. Wendell, the brother of Barrett Wendell.
[ 136 ]
THE TRADE
I presume the pamphlet was part of the eight carloads of
books that Mr. Wendell left to Harvard. When he died, I
missed our interminable sessions of haggling more than you
would believe. In addition to the drama collection that was his
main interest, he had a strange weakness for Laurie Todd,
a famous seedsman of early nineteenth-century New York. I
bought one of Todd's diaries at an auction for a dollar,
penciled $10 on the back of it, and threw it in the bin reserved
for Mr. Wendell.
Mr. Wendell came in around nine at night, as he generally
did, and I pointed out the Todd diary.
"Bully!" cried Mr. Wendell. "How much?"
"I didn't pay much for it, E. J.," I said, "so you can have
it for fifty dollars."
An hour later we had agreed on a price of twenty-five.
"I always wanted to show you you weren't so hot as you
thought, E. J.," I said. "Look on the back for my selling price."
"Now what do we do?"
"Now we go to Keen's Chop House, and you buy me fifteen
dollars' worth of dinner," I said.
Nobody was ever less mean with money than Mr. Wendell.
He cared nothing about prices; he wanted the fun of dickering.
Marshall's portrait of Lincoln is one that you see almost
everywhere; most dealers sell it for around ten dollars. Per-
sonally I think it is a horrible thing, but I somehow found
myself with sixty-two copies. Mr. Wendell saw them on one
of my tables, decided to give them away to his friends, and
asked how much.
"Oh," I said, "take the lot for fifty dollars."
*C. P.," he said, "that's the first time I ever found anything
cheap in your store." And he bought them.
Two or three weeks later I needed a copy to give away
[ 137 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
myself, and I phoned Mr. Wendell to ask if he would let me
have one back.
It was three days before the engraving reached me from Mr.
Wendell; and when I opened the package, I found a bill from
Fridenberg, the print-seller, for ten dollars. Mr. Wendell's
collection had long since overflowed from his house into a
warehouse, and he was quite unable to find one of his own
sixty-two copies. From what I know of college libraries, the
sixty-two are probably still tied up in brown paper in the
basement of Harvard University.
One of the pleasantest and almost unvarying routines in
the rare-book world is that by which you go into a store, ask
the bookseller if he has anything new, to which he usually re-
plies no, sit down, and begin passing the time of day. Mean-
while, however, your eyes are wandering around the shelves.
(Memory again.)
In nearly every store you will sec a set of Appletoris En-
cyclopedia of American Biography, bound in red cloth, in six
volumes. It is worth about three dollars a set. But if you can
count as high as seven, and there is a seventh volume, the
value of the set is multiplied by about ten.
Again, take what is still unquestionably the best book on
early American manufacturing: J. Leander Bishop's History
of American Manufactures. In my younger days I used to buy
the two-volume set for about fifty cents. Nowadays I am lucky
if I can occasionally find a set to sell for twelve dollars. But
here is the joker. Volumes one and two were issued succes-
sively; then the Civil War intervened; finally a volume three
was published. Actually the extra material in volume three does
not offer very much extra information, but it raises the price
of the set to thirty or forty dollars.
[ 138 ]
THE TRADE
It often happened when volumes of a set were published
one after another that the subscribers would dwindle away,
and the last volume would be printed in a much smaller edi-
tion than the early ones.
A very striking example is the bound volumes of Niles'
Weekly Register, which began publication in 1811. It is an
extremely important historical source; I might be tempted
to call it the Time magazine of its day, except that it was
written in English. The complete file runs to seventy-three
volumes, of which the first forty or fifty are reasonably
common.
The last fifteen volumes, which were printed in a larger
format than the previous ones, are practically impossible to
find at any price. These volumes contain many narratives of
Western travel that have never been reprinted in books or any
other form. You will find a good many of them listed in the
Wagner-Camp bibliography, The Plains and the Rockies. And
remember, the larger physical size is the tip-off.
In the Antiquarian Bookman of June 3, 1950, Jacob Blanck,
one of our really great living bibliographers, quotes the fol-
lowing about book collectors from the Indiana History Bul-
letin:
The state of Indiana owes a good deal to its collectors.
These are the men and women who gather up written
records, artifacts, pictures, and museum objects and pre-
serve them against loss, dispersal or neglect. ... By
putting a monetary value on the oldest and scarcest
printed and written materials that were produced here,
they have made other people more careful about what
they throw away or neglect. Drawn from attics, base-
ments, barns and bookcases, are pamphlets, books, broad-
[ 139 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
sides, maps, letters, diaries, ledgers, deeds, etc., that
help reveal the story of early Indiana.
Those words, in my opinion, apply almost entirely to book-
sellers rather than book collectors, and I will bet that if the
Indiana Historical Society checked over its acquisitions, it
would find that at least 75 per cent had come from booksellers
such as Clark and Smith of Cincinnati, Ernest Wessen, Wright
Howes, and their fellows. Rescuing from garrets and barns is
almost never done by collectors; booksellers do it.
Here is a letter I had from Wessen some years ago:
Mrs. Wessen and I were returning from a visit to the
folks in Maine, and dropped in at a scout's home near
Mansfield. He greeted me with the query as to what I
would pay for the original account books of a grist mill,
run in Belmont County, Ohio, in the year 1747, A hell
of a question, for there was no grist mill in Ohio at that
time ... no Belmont County . . . no Ohio, if you
please. He brought forth a Hell of a leatherbound tome,
which seemed to indicate that it was the records of a
mill somewhere in England. I afterwards found out . . .
Plymouth, England.
I didn't want it, but wanted to keep him sweet so I
bought it for the seemingly atrocious price of $40.00.
Stuck between its leaves that night I found a letter from
Henry Knox appointing one Josiah Fox as Chief Clerk of
the Navy, but . . . giving Fox to understand that he
would have charge of the design of the frigates about to
be built . . . 1794. Then were found a few random
sketches of parts of naval vessels.
The next morning ... five o'clock to you, you New
York stay-abed, I was at the scout's house, but could ob-
tain no information from him. "Yes, at a Hell of a price,"
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he said, there was a lot of material to be obtained. That
night he showed up at my house, and got us out of bed
around midnight with two large cartons filled with more
papers "about the mill." About the third paper I opened
happened to be a letter from Paul Revere bidding on the
"copperwork" on the frigate to be built at Boston . . .
"OLD IRONSIDES." We paid our man off, and Mrs.
Wessen and I sat up all night going through the stuff.
All night? Until three P.M. the next afternoon with an
occasional bottle of beer and a sandwich served by our
then tot Ruth.
Here beyond all doubt were, in small part, the papers
pertaining to the construction of the first U.S. Navy . . .
authorized in 1794 . . . and though at that time I knew
not one damned thing about the history of that first
Navy, I had to go to work.
But . . . back to the scout . . . The next day I was
again at his cloor stirring him into action. He hadn't the
slightest idea as to what had turned up, but drove off
and came in a few hours later with another couple of
cartons . . . and there he made his mistake. For here
again was but a tantalizing fragment of a whole which
I knew must exist somewhere in Ohio.
However the address labels on these second-hand car-
tons all clicked. That evening I went to him, and said:
"Either you go down and buy the entire lot tomorrow, or
I shall/' "How to Hell do you know where they are?"
he asked. I took a long shot and named the addresses on
the labels of those cartons . . . and clicked!
That afternoon I went to the bank and got all the cash
the Wessens possessed. The next morning at 6 A.M. I was
at my man's house; picked him up, and we went to
Belmont County . . . where I met a delightful old
Quakeress Anna Fox, the grand-daughter of Josiah . . .
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and the old lady remembered him vividly. Got some
young relatives to come in and attest to her qualifications
to transact business . . . for she was in her nineties.
Then we started to comb the house. Bought all loose
papers, and, as we were leaving the attic I saw rolls of
paper . . . "Wallpaper remnants," she assured me, but
I was seeing everything. They turned out to be the
original draughts of not only the CONSTITUTION and
her sister ships, but the CONSTELLATION, and Fox's
famous WASP and HORNET, and his equally infamous
CHESAPEAKE, in which (at the demand of the Navy
Department) he had gone back to the English style of
construction.
Now for research ... I found that a man who had
never gone to sea ... a man who in twenty years had
never built an outstanding ship . . . Joshua Humphreys
of Philadelphia . . . was accredited with designing the
notable CONSTITUTION and CONSTELLATION
. . . and despite great activity then and there* dropping
out of sight, while my man Fox went ahead to design
the truly beautiful WASP and HORNET as well as other
ships.
You don't handle old books very long before you become
conscious of scouts, the usually impecunious middle-middle-
men who pull the books out of attics and sell them to book-
sellers. It seems like an almost foolproof business because there
is no overhead and seldom much investment. Nevertheless,
scouts, like horseplayers, usually die broke. Their trouble is
that instead of taking a profit and being satisfied, they con-
stitute themselves a sort of walking auction. They go to one
bookseller, get an offer of five dollars for a book, and then go
to another with a request for six.
One of the worst offenders I have known was a former
[ H2 ]
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letter carrier who built up quite a business by always asking,
as he left the morning mail, whether there were any old books
in the house.
This man was constantly using my offers to start the bid-
ding. I was also annoyed with him because he once came to
me with what looked like a rather important lot of Andrew
Jackson letters, for which he wanted three hundred dollars.
When I looked them over, they were not nearly so important
as they should have been. I asked, "Are you sure you haven't
got any more of these?"
"No, that's all."
I found he was telling the literal truth when I went to a
friend's shop and discovered a hundred really important Jack-
son letters addressed to the same person as those I had. My
friend had picked out the good ones first, leaving the mailman
only the froth for me.
The reason why scouts go broke because of their peccadil-
loes is that eventually such behavior almost always gives the
victims a chance to get even. I had my chance when my sharp-
shooter friend rushed in with a like-new copy of Beck's
Gazetteer of Illinois, the first statistical summary of the young
state.
"Can I use your American Book Prices Current?" he said.
Willing to save him a trip to the public library, I said,
"Help yourself."
He thumbed through it industriously, then emerged with
shining face. "The last copy sold in here brought thirty dollars,"
he announced. "Will you give me twenty for this?"
It happened that the previous week I had been at a sale
where a copy not as nice as this one had brought $350, so I
said quietly, "Yes, 111 be glad to."
Not long afterward the sharpshooter was in again, not so
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
shining-faced this time. "Did you know that a copy of Beck's
Illinois Gazetteer had just sold for three hundred and fifty?"
he demanded.
"Sure I knew it," I said, "and, furthermore, the copy I got
from you I sold for four hundred and fifty. I've put up
with you for ten years, and I suggest that this close our deal-
ings."
Some scouts don't chisel and don't go broke. One scout
named Barrett came into my store on 34th Street. "I've always
done all my business with libraries," he announced. "I've never
sold a book to a bookseller. Now I'm looking to see if I can
find an honest one."
"That's asking too much, Barrett," I said, "but you may find
me 50 per cent honest, which is way above the average."
He kept his good stuff and good is a mild name for it in
a furnished room in Harlem. With people like him I would
rather work backward from the answer in pricing books. As I
laid down each volume, I would say, "I can get so much for
this." Then we added up the figures. "Now, are you willing to
let these go for half the retail price?" Barrett said he would be
delighted, and for twenty years I was the only bookseller he
ever dealt with.
When he reached the age of eighty, he acknowledged to me
that he had five hundred dollars in the bank for each year of
his age, and he thought that was altogether too much for a
man with no family. So he stopped scouting for books.
Considering that scouts really have nothing whatever to live
on but their knowledge, they slip up rather often. One
slightly shifty-looking character whose name I never did learn
used to bring me standard books at attractive prices for a
number of years. Finally he arrived with a lot that he sold
to me, and then pulled out of his pocket a copy of William
[ H4 ]
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Fleming's Indian Captivity in German, printed at German-
town, Pennsylvania, in 1756. "I won't sell you this until I've
investigated," he said cautiously.
Perhaps I am being unkind to his knowledge. But how the
hell could he investigate a book of which no copy had ever
been sold?
I wasn't going to break my heart over this, and anyway
within a couple of days I was carried off to the French Hos-
pital. Here I was roused from my bed of pain by a phone
call from Harry Alpern, my man Friday. "That guy is here
again with his Fleming," he said, "and he wants twenty bucks
for it."
"Why the hell don't you give it to liim and stop bothering
me?" I replied sweetly.
Or if I was not sweet, I should have been because the
Fleming paid for my entire stay at the hospital.
Here, incidentally, is an object lesson to show that rare- book
prices do not always rise constantly until they reach the
stratosphere. I have long thought that, with two possible ex-
ceptions, Indian captivities were deadly dull reading, and a
pure waste of paper to print. Apparently the collecting public
is coming around to my view, because later at auction the
German Fleming brought less than a third of what William
H. Duncan had paid me for it
Nevertheless I have a pleasant memory connected with
another batch of Indian captivities. A woman came into the
store one day with eleven of them, all the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century New England rarities.
She asked rather stiffly, "What will you give for these?"
"Don't go so fast," I said. 'Tell me the story about them."
It developed that she had just bought an old house and
had found these pamphlets under the eaves in the attic. She
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
decided that she could use a new hat, so she took the lot to
some bookseller on Cornhill in Boston. He offered five dollars,
but she had her heart set on a ten-dollar hat.
She next went to Washington Street, where an offer of fifty
dollars scared her. Then she went to the dealer whom she
should have called on in the first place, and got an offer of five
hundred dollars.
This really did scare her, so she went first to the Boston
Public Library, then to the New York Public. They sent her
on to me.
I mentally priced the eleven pamphlets and struck a total.
"I can get $1250 for these within a very short time," I said.
"How much are you going to let me make for being honest and
telling you the truth?"
She said $750 would do her very nicely. As she was putting
away my check, she said she could probably get several ten-
dollar hats now
Every time a group of booksellers gets together and starts
telling stories, somebody chirps, "It can't happen now/*
This makes me wild. You may not be able to buy a Bay
Psalm Book at auction for fifteen shillings the way Henry
Stevens did, but even now some old family with connections
among the great of past centuries has a fit of housecleaning
at least once every year.
Not more than ten years ago I was on Federal grand jury
duty. During the lunch hour I wandered down Vesey Street
and stopped at a junk shop. Blowing around the floor were
some old documents. I noticed one dated Sari Francisco, 1846,
so I started seriously assembling more. I gathered up 181
papers, and asked the proprietor how much.
He was a damn robber, or more likely thought I was, so
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instead of admitting that he would take a dollar, he said,
"Thirty dollars."
I grinned and handed him $30.
I catalogued the lot of documents very elaborately at $1000.
There were items like the six-month struggle to raise $600 for
a schoolhouse, and the contract with a schoolmam for $600 a
year, unless they could not raise that much, in which case
she was to take whatever they had.
The catalogue was simply swallowed up; not a peep about
the San Francisco documents. So I catalogued them again, at
the same price, this time with a headline: Is THE WHOLE STATE
OF CALIFORNIA BROKE?
This finally brought a San Francisco lawyer to the store. He
asked if the documents were as good as I had painted them. I
said they were a damn sight better.
"Well, send them to Bolton, the state librarian. If he likes
them, I'll send you a thousand dollars."
Within a few days I had his check, and a letter from Bolton:
"How did these things get to Vesey Street? They belonged to
our first San Francisco newspaper editor, and he was run out
of here for being a Mormon, and died in South Carolina/'
I don't know how the papers got to Vesey Street; I do know
that it keeps happening all the time.
During the scrap drive, around 1942 or so, a junk man came
into my shop with a carton of old papers someone had given
him to cart away. I glanced at them, and surprised him very
much by giving him twenty-five dollars.
The papers were diaries and other records of John Pintard.
Pintard was a promoter and liver-by-his-wits who flourished in
the late eighteenth century, spending his time alternately in
jail and contributing lavishly to worthy causes. He was one of
the chief founders of the New York Historical Society and
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the (Episcopal) General Theological Seminary. The New
York Historical Society published all of PintarcTs papers they
could find some fifteen or twenty years ago, in four stout
volumes.
These papers were ones they had not found, including, as
I say, two diaries.
I called up Miss Dorothy Barck, the librarian of the New
York Historical Society. "If you want to see the Pintard papers
you're missing, you'd better get over here."
"Give me ten minutes/'
Each time she picked up a paper, she exclaimed, "This one
I've got to have!" There were none left over. Finally she said,
"How much?"
"Seven hundred and fifty dollars, seeing it's you."
''Well take them, but well have to hold a meeting." So I
sent them over.
Some days later she called up. "It's all right; send us a bill
for seven hundred and fifty. But I don't mind telling you that
Mr. Wall thought the price was outrageous."
I've been sorry ever since I didn't charge him $2500.
Just a few weeks ago I called on my friend and neighbor
Carol Cox, the East 59th Street bookseller, who handed me
three or four old deeds. Deeds are poison to booksellers, partly
because most of them are of no intrinsic interest and partly be-
cause there is almost always an original filed with some county
clerk. These particular papers were dated 1797, and all I
could make out by inspection was that they referred to some
large tract in western New York. There was a large water-
color map showing the terrain. I also noticed the signature
of Alexander Hamilton on the outside.
The papers meant little to me or Cox, but I knew that
R. W. G. Vail of the New York Historical Society (Mr. Wall's
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successor) had western New York history at his fingertips, so
I took a taxi over to show him the deeds.
Dr. Beekman, the president of the Society, was there, and
he explained that the Society had no money. This is a perma-
nent trouble of every library I have ever known, so I went
right ahead and laid the deed on VaiTs desk.
He said to Dr. Beekman, "I think this is a document we have
to have; well take it up at the next meeting.*'
I picked a price out of the air, and then asked Mr. Vail
what he had bought.
He wrote me the following note about it:
This was the corrected and final deed for the so-
called Chassanis Purchase of 200,000 acres in Saint
Lawrence and Franklin Counties in 1797. This is the
original deed for one of the great land purchases of the
late 18th century in New York State. The land was bought
for the settlement of refugees from the French Court at
the time of the French Revolution. Many of these un-
fortunate people who had never worked with their hands
in their lives arrived on the purchase in the dead of
winter, with storm and snow and the thermometer be-
low zero, to live in log huts under primitive frontier
conditions. Needless to say, the original plan of the
purchase was a failure but the land was later settled
and cultivated by hardier stock more familiar with farm-
ing in a bleak climate.
There are almost no printed sources concerning this pur-
chase. Mr. Vail told me that the Massachusetts Historical So-
ciety had the diary of one of the settlers, and that is almost
all the material that exists.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
For some obscure reason, and despite everything I believe
to the contrary, the best buys I have ever made were the things
I knew nothing at all about.
An old Austrian called me up from Morningside Heights.
He said he had been in Mexico with the Emperor Maximilian
and that he had twenty-two hundred volumes in various lan-
guages relating to him.
I went up and looked them over. I asked him what he
wanted for them, and he made the customary reply, namely,
that he had been offered $2500.
I took my hat and bade him a cordial good day.
The next morning he telephoned to ask what price I had in
mind. For some reason or no reason, I said, "Three hundred
dollars."
"Come and get them."
I, like the usual librarian, put the collection down in my
huge cellar on 34th Street.
A member of the New York Public Library staff, Dr. Victor
Hugo Paltsits, one of this country 's most learned librarians,
was washing his hands in my downstairs washroom. When he
came up, he asked what that junk was downstairs. I said I
didn't know.
He asked what I wanted for it.
I said three thousand dollars.
He asked how I arrived at this figure.
I said because I had paid three hundred.
Dr. Paltsits said, "All right, 111 buy them, if you'll bill them
at so much per volume, and let me return any items that we
already have."
As I was packing the books and thus really discovering
for the first time what they were I noticed several items that
struck me in my ignorance as quite valuable, such as a com-
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plete three- volume file of the daily newspaper that was printed
for the Austrian monarch during his unhappy reign in Mexico.
But, knowing the New York Public Library's unrivaled col-
lections, I was sure that all the real rarities would duplicate
what the library already held.
When I went in to settle accounts with the library treasurer,
he said, "Everitt, this is preposterous. At this per-copy rate we
are supposed to be paying you eighteen hundred, and every
single rarity in the lot is a duplicate. What are you going to
do about it?"
"I'm going to collect eighteen hundred and my duplicates,"
I said.
The treasurer stepped into the next room and returned
with a check that had obviously been made out some hours
before.
You never know what you have until after you get rid of it
My old friend Harry Stone once raided a famous West Side
mansion in New York and laid his claws on a great many
rarities. One of them was Captain Bligh's own manuscript
of the mutiny on the Bounty. He sold it to me for fifty
dollars.
I piously wrote to the British Museum, saying that, seeing
it was them, I would let them have this for a hundred and fifty
pounds.
About two months later they replied that they had no
money. (After all, they had the printed book!)
Another dealer friend, John Loomis of Lowdermilk's, Wash-
ington, offered me five hundred dollars, and my enthusiasm
had flagged enough so that I took it.
Shortly afterward an Australian librarian to whom I told my
story said, "Well, I don't know anything about it, but if it's
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the real thing, I wouldn't mind giving five thousand quid for
it."
John had sold it by then.
America has never had a really great bookstore. For a long
time the owners of Leaiy, Stuart & Company in Philadelphia
tried hard to put their store into that class. Percy Wilkins, the
manager, had a wider general knowledge of old books than
anyone in the country except Sam Dauber; and while Wilkins
was running the store, it was the most famous old-book place
in America. Now it is less than a shadow.
One of the last times I saw Wilkins, I poked around down-
stairs without finding anything; then I went up to sec him.
"Did you notice that folio on the floor downstairs?" he asked.
"No," I said.
'"Well, I think you'd better have a look at it."
So we went downstairs. The folio was the well-known album
of Catherwood's illustrations for John L. Stephens^ Central
American Travels. In those days it was a good, standard
twenty-five dollar item. The peculiarity' of this one, however,
was that it had been very beautifully hand-colored. It was
marked $40, which meant $36 net to me, and I hastily paid
up. Afterward I discovered a note somewhere, saying that
Catherwood himself had hand-colored ten copies of the
album.
At any rate, I was just about to leave Leary's, feeling I had
done a good day's work, when Warner, the manager of the
Americana department, put a hand on my sleeve.
"I've just had some rotten luck with a rare book," he said.
"Here's a copy of Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, but it hasn't
any title page." I supposed all booksellers knew that this vol-
ume, issued in Paris, had never had any title page, and I
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thought Warner was kidding me. I paid no further attention,
and started to leave.
"Here, will you take this cripple for two dollars?" he called
after me. I accommodated him, adding $448 to my day's clear
profits.
Percy Wilkins was not in on that transaction. I am reminded
of another Percy, my friend Percy Loring, beloved of a genera-
tion of the publishing trade, who was once poking around on
the fifty-cent stand of a New England bookstore, where he
found a rather nice first edition of Moby Dick. Percy had
heard of about three old books, and that happened to be one
of them, so he invested four bits.
This particular store was constantly advertising for a first
edition of Moby Dick, so Percy waited two or three days, until
he had covered the rest of the trade in the town on his selling
trip, and then marched up to the proprietor of the store. "I see
you are looking for a first edition of Moby Dick" he said.
"Yes, I am. How much do you want for this one?"
"Three hundred and fifty dollars," Percy said
After a considerable amount of Yankee trading, Percy real-
ized that the bookseller could not afford to pay more than $300,
and since the man was an old friend, he let him have the
book.
I feel entitled to say that we have no really great book-
store in America, because I have known three in Great Britain:
Francis Edwards *s in London, Basil BlackwelFs in Oxford, and
James Thin's in Edinburgh.
The first time I went abroad Lathrop Harper wrote to warn
Edwards of my coming visit.
I was welcomed by a delightful little man about five feet
four, who said, "When you get through here, will you do me
the honor to take lunch with me?" He then introduced me to
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
all his department managers, telling each one, "This is Mr.
Everitt, on his first trip here. Mr. Harper tells me he knows a
good deal about Americana. I want you to make any price con-
cession you possibly can if he finds something that interests
him."
Nearly the first thing I laid my hand on was the undated
first edition of Herndon's Life of Lincoln, which was priced
ten shillings. This put my mind at rest about prices. I did dis-
cover that the various volumes of early American travels, in
accordance with what I found later to be the prevailing
British practice, were marked somewhat higher than was our
habit in America. In those days not even Edwards himself
had had any opportunity to become familiar with Western
Americana. The trade overpriced the early travels, from our
point of view, because their only contact was with American
tourists in London, who felt sure they must be getting a bar-
gain from some ignorant Englishman, and readily paid what-
ever price was marked.
After I had worked for three hours with Mr. Love of the
Americana department, Mr. Edwards took me to lunch at his
club. He was a delightful companion, and talked practically
every moment; books were not mentioned once. What really
interested the greatest bookseller in London was prize fighting.
You may be surprised at my calling Francis Edwards the
greatest bookseller in London. There are, as a matter of fact,
half a dozen shops with a more valuable stock, and very astute
merchants too; but they are all more or less specialized. At
Edwards's you can get anything.
I am almost tempted to relent and include Maggs Brothers,
because after Mr. Ernest Maggs took me out to lunch and
offered me unlimited credit (which I was densely foolish
enough not to use), he asked what I was going to do next.
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Tve never really looked at a guide to London," I said.
"Oh, fine, I'll send one over. Do come in again."
And within a few minutes a special messenger arrived at my
hotel with a guide to London, billed at one shilling less 10
per cent.
The next great British bookstore I saw was James Thin's in
Edinburgh. The place is a veritable warren with not thousands
but hundreds of thousands of volumes, new and old, all neatly
classified.
Or almost all. On a later visit when Sam Dauber and I had
been combing the place, Sam went downstairs to wash his
hands. He came back up, saying, "There's a whole room down
there that we never discovered."
I went down with him. The main thing that attracted us was
seventeen folio volumes in red morocco, simply marked,
"Maps."
Blowing and brushing off the dust of decades, I pulled
out one volume. From it I deduced that somebody had spent
a lifetime buying atlases from the sixteenth century on,
and had then torn them apart and reassembled the maps
to form consecutive volumes on various continents and locali-
ties.
We went up to Mr. Thin and said, "What are those old maps
downstairs?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said Thin. "Let me look at my
records."
Finally he reported: *1 gave fifty pounds for those, twenty-
one years ago. As far as I can discover nobody has ever looked
at them or touched them since. Would you like to give me
seventy-five pounds for them?"
When I unpacked them in New York, Albert Johnston came
in and pounced upon them.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
I sold them to him, or at least I had his check, and the books
disappeared from my store. Afterwards Mr. Johnston could
never remember having them. All I know is that I wish I could
find them and buy them back for what he paid me.
A few blocks from James Thin's is the shop of John Grant,
in George Street. Grant deals primarily in remainders and re-
prints, but he has a few thousand old books, which seem to
come in through the transom of practically all bookstores in
spite of the best efforts to keep them out. On one trip, when
I was chaperoning my friend Ernest Dawson's Glen, who was
abroad for the first time to buy books, we poked around in
Grant's for hours.
There was one set of bound pamphlet volumes marked
Civil War, which I had seen at least a dozen times. I had
flashed them without discovering anything whatever to make
them worth the nine guineas I found marked inside one of the
covers. But Glen was buying a lot of stuff his father's prin-
ciple was, "I don't know anything about books; 111 buy any
book that looks cheap to me" and I thought I might as well
fill in the time by really looking through the pamphlet volumes.
My bored persistence revealed what previous quick glances
had not, namely, a copy of Scripps's Life of Lincoln, printed
in Chicago. The peculiarity of this is that Scripps's Lincoln
printed by the New York Tribune is a fairly common pamphlet,
and was long regarded as the first campaign biography of
Lincoln. Then somebody discovered that there had been a
Chicago edition a few months before the Tribune one. Now
the New York edition may be worth $15, and the Chicago
edition, $250.
I had just finished going through the volumes in an unavail-
ing search for any further hidden plums when Aiken, the
manager of the store, came by.
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"Here, Event!," he said, "why don't you buy these Civil
War pamphlets?*
"I don't want to buy them," I said. "I see you've got them
marked nine guineas. Ill give you five for one pamphlet."
"Which one?" Aiken asked.
"Ill tell you that after you've said yes or no," I retorted.
Aiken called out to Mr. Grant, "Mr. Everitt wants to give
us five pounds for one of these pamphlets, but he won't say
which one."
"Neither would I, under the circumstances," said Grant.
"Let him have it."
At long last, as I was paying up, Glen announced that he
was through. He had in his hand a folio that he thought I
might possibly use. It was marked seven shillings, and con-
tained seventy-one newspapers. Some screwball had formed
the eccentric notion of collecting English and Irish newspapers
that announced the outbreak of the American Revolution.
"How about this?" I asked Aiken.
"Oh, you've spent quite a lot of money, take it along," he
replied.
"No, I want to buy it. How much?"
"Well, give me six shillings, if you must."
This far my conscience compelled me to go, because I sus-
pected correctly that I could find some foolish collector
of Revolutionary material who would pay me ten dollars per
newspaper.
I have no very exciting stories to tell about Basil Blackwell,
but he probably does not mind, since I read in the New Yorfc
Times the other day that he had just paid the largest income
tax of any retail bookseller in Britain.
One of the great specialist booksellers in London is a firm
whose name I will not mention because I haven't the slightest
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
idea whether the following rumor about their establishment in
London is true. According to the rumor, a butler from a neigh-
boring great estate marched in one day and said reproachfully
to the proprietor, "You didn't keep your appointment to come
and look at the master's library."
Our man, quick-witted as always, said, "Oh, I'm terribly
sorry was it today? I made sure it was tomorrow. Ill go
straight along."
The rumor has it that he paid five hundred pounds for the
library, and eventually took a hundred thousand pounds out
of it.
When Mr. and Mrs. E. Joseph of Charing Cross Road died,
I lost two of my best friends. Old Jo, starting out as a "barrel
man/' had become an outstanding bookseller, with one of the
best retail locations in London.
The south side of his store was, and is, a large brick wall
with shelves open to the public. When clerks are not watch-
ing, passing dogs frequently use the lowest shelf for practical
purposes.
Not to digress, I think more than 50 per cent of all the
sermons I have ever heard were written with the help of what
clergymen call "homiletic aids/' (In school we called such
things "ponies.") Among the most famous aids is a set of
twenty-one large volumes known as "Simeons" Simeon's
Skeletons of Sermons. For many weeks a set of those skeletons
was on old Jo's lower shelf. Some weeks after it disappeared,
I was gabbing with old Jo when a country clergyman marched
in.
He said he was now the owner of Mr. Simeon's sketches,
but when he put the set in his library, he began to notice a
terrible odor.
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Said old Jo, without a smile, "My dear sir, did you not
know that you were buying a set of dogmatic theology?"
Some rare-book cataloguers are almost as fond of describ-
ing their treasures as "unique" as they are of saying, "Printed
in a limited edition of only 150 copies, of which this is Number
76." My reverence for these statements has diminished some-
what with the years. Once, about the time when I was entering
the book business, some learned printer in Edinburgh re-
printed a limited edition of an actually unique Indian primer.
Only fifty copies were printed. It said so right on the back
of the title page. Accordingly, the reprints should have been
nearly as hard to come by as the original. Some years later
when I was going abroad, Marshal Saville of the Museum of
the American Indian asked whether I could possibly find him
a copy of the reprint. I had no hope whatever of success, but
promised to try anyway.
After a three-hour session with Mr. Aiken of John Grant's,
I wandered down the street and paused by the shilling stand
of a neighboring shop. There was a brand-new copy of the
primer in a paper wrapper.
It really looked too good to be true. I therefore took my
friend inside the shop, handed over my bob, and asked the
proprietor if he had any more copies, because I would like to
buy them all.
He went into the back room, poked around, and returned
with the news that he had 172 copies, on which he would make
me a special rate of sixpence a volume. This broke the market
in Indian primers, so that I was able to pay only a measly half
of my trip to Europe from the proceeds.
In the early part of this century one of the most celebrated
publishers of limited editions in America was Elbert Hubbard
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
of East Aurora, New York. He called his plant the Roycroft
Shop, and made a great to-do about handwork and tiny edi-
tions. Hubbard was the first and, I trust, the last person
who ever succeeded in persuading anybody to buy a book in
ooze calf leather.
Hubbard went down with the Titanic. Only a few days be-
fore he sailed, I had lunch with him at the Savarin Restaurant
in Penn Station.
"Mr. Hubbard," I said, "you put out a book recently in an
edition strictly limited to a hundred copies. So far, I have
personally seen a hundred and fifteen copies. How about it?"
Hubbard grinned. "Oh, those are limited to a hundred copies
for each state."
The man from whom Hubbard probably stole most of his
ideas about bookmaking (except for the ooze leather, which
was original) was an interesting character of a very different
type, Thomas Bird Mosher, of Portland, Maine. Mosher had
a delicate, fin-de-sicle taste in literature, and introduced such
people as Lionel Johnson and William Ernest Henley to
America in dainty little volumes almost invariably printed
from hand-set type on Van Gelder handmade paper. His edi-
tions, though not individually numbered, were really limited:
after each printing he would have the type distributed, and
if there was enough demand for a second edition, he would
Start all over again.
Anyone who expected, after timidly fondling a vellum
Mosher edition of William Morris or Fiona Macleod, to find
Tom Mosher himself an Aubrey Beardsley type would have
been sorely mistaken. He was a burly figure with a walrus
mustache, reputed among his friends to be the most pro-
fane man in the book trade. Unfortunately I never met him
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in that mood; I would have liked to draw comparisons.
Hubbard prepared himself for publishing by working as
advertising manager of a Buffalo soap works; Mosher's literary
taste was formed before the mast of his father's square-rigger.
At fourteen he sailed around the world, and his father gave
him a set of BeUs British Theatre to occupy the off watches.
By chance, John Bell (who published the Theatre) was more
of an influence on English bookmaking than on book contents
the set, after all, was a reprint of the classics. And Tom
Mosher absorbed a feel for how books should look that never
left him.
After a brief turn in a law stationery and publishing busi-
ness in Portland, Mosher borrowed three thousand dollars
(from a friend who said, "This is all I have, and 111 never see
it back, but go ahead") and set up as a publisher in 1893 with
the issue of George Meredith's Modern Love. He sold almost
all his books by mail ( from his catalogue ) to individual buyers.
He paid royalties to his American authors; most of the
English ones he pirated, the American copyright law in those
days being on his side. Andrew Lang and some other victims
were very angry. Others said just as loudly that without
Mosher they would never have been known in America.
Two things distinguished Mosher as a publisher, aside from
his unerring, though rather precious, taste: he was probably
the first in this country who was, and made other people,
conscious of books as physical things; and he made a great
deal of money doing it. He found a way of turning taste and
personality into cash that has been the despair of "fine-book
lovers" in the trade ever since.
In 1898 my store was at 18 East 21st Street. One night as
I was getting ready to leave, a tremendous man walked in,
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
priced a book, and bought it. He said as he handed me the
money, "Old books aren't worth a damn."
Nobody in those days could have failed to recognize Thomas
B. Reed, of Portland, Maine, "the czar of Congress." By this
time he was out of office and practising law in New York.
"Mr. Reed/' said I, "when old books are intelligently bought,
they sometimes make a very good investment."
"Oh, hell," he said, "my law library in Portland cost me
thousands, and when I left, I had to sell it for fifty dollars."
"I don't believe you heard me, Mr. Reed. I said when old
books were intelligently bought."
The whole store shook with his laughter.
From then on Mr. Reed used to drop in at the store oc-
casionally. Once when he was there, John Finley brought in
Reverend Henry Van Dyke, and the three of them sat in the
back room swapping stories. Mr. Reed told about his first New
York law practice. A railroad gave him a case, which he im-
mediately settled out of court. Falling into conversation with
a fellow lawyer from an adjoining office, he remarked that he
had put in about two hours' work on the job, and was trying
to work up nerve to send a bill for five hundred dollars.
"Just let me have one of your billheads," said the neigh-
bor.
Within a week Mr. Reed had a check for $5000 and an
effusive letter of thanks from the railroad.
When I first knew John Finley, he had just come to New
York, after being the youngest college president in America,
at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Knox College had one
of the best collections of Americana in the Midwest, prac-
tically all of which was presented to it by Edward Caldwell,
then the president of the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
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This takes me back to a stranger who came into my store on
33rd Street and announced that he wanted to buy every book
in existence about Louisiana.
I dug out my Century Atlas, showed him Louisiana before
the Purchase, and said I guessed he could accomplish his ob-
ject if he had about five million dollars.
He said he was really more interested in the Mississippi
River, and hoped he could do it with twenty-five thousand.
I told him he could make a very good start.
He bought several expensive books then and there, and
came in every week for the next six months. He was a retired
engineer by the name of Preston Player.
Then I saw nothing of him for a couple of years. One day
the phone rang, and he asked me down to lunch with him at
Tenth Street, His collection had got to the point where he
thought it should be insured, and he wanted me to appraise
it. As I had sold him practically everything he had, the ap-
praisal was only an hour's work. He asked me what he owed,
and I said, "Mr. Player, you bought ninety per cent of this
from me, and I might better ask you what I owe you."
There was another interval of silence, this one lasting three
years. Again he asked me to lunch. This time he said, "Everitt,
I'm going to die in three or four days, and I want to know what
to do with my books. Whom shall I give them to?"
"That's one question I won't answer. All I can tell you is,
give them to a small institution, not a big one."
"Why so?"
I explained that large libraries in the Mississippi Valley re-
gion would surely have at least 75 per cent of the choice items,
so that the gift would really be wasted. With this I departed.
Soon afterwards I saw Mr. Player's obituary, but I had no
idea where the books were going.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Six months later Mr. Caldwell, who was also an old and
valued customer of mine, sent me a catalogue of the books
presented to Knox College by Preston Player. I scanned the
catalogue eagerly, then hurried to the telephone.
"Thanks a lot for the catalogue, Mr. Caldwell/' I said. 'It's
a damn good job, but you've been to the circus and missed see-
ing the elephants."
"What do you mean?"
"The best single thing Player had isn't in the catalogue."
"Well, we put in everything that was there."
I said, "Mr. Caldwell, do you know Meyer's Universum?"
"Of course I do who doesn't? The volume of the American
views is common enough. Mr. Player wouldn't have been very
proud of having that."
"No," I said, "but Goodspeed sold him the original painting
from which the engraving of Nauvoo in 1843 was made."
This news threw Mr. Caldwell into considerable excitement.
Nauvoo was the place on the Mississippi where the Mormons
settled after they had migrated from Kirkland, Ohio. Angry
neighbors finally ran the Mormon settlers out of Nauvoo, kill-
ing the prophet, Joseph Smith, in the process. The Mormons
made one more settlement, in Zion, Missouri, before they
finally set out for Utah.
At all events, Mr. Caldwell said there was no painting of
Nauvoo in the Player collection.
"There was when I appraised it; I put five hundred dollars
on it," I said.
Mr. Caldwell maae tracks for the storage warehouse where
the Player collection had been temporarily housed. As is
customary in such cases, the warehouse people vowed they had
faithfully delivered every single scrap in the Player collection,
and there had never been any painting. On his way out,
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Mr. Caldwell poked a toe at some dusty paintings stacked
against a wall with their backs out. "What about those?"
"Oh, that's junk we're about to throw away. We couldn't
get a starting bid of a dollar for it last week."
Covered with grime, Mr. Caldwell emerged some minutes
later clutching the painting of Nauvoo to his bosom.
The next time I saw Mr. Caldwell, he had the painting
under his arm. "I'm going to take a train to Galesburg and
deliver this picture personally to Knox College." And so he
did.
Booksellers, like some of my other friends, are always boast-
ing about their successes; their mistakes they somehow find less
colorful.
I have made at least one mistake colorful enough to go in
this book. The American Art Association catalogued in one of
its sales "a map of Mexico, Louisiana and the Missouri Ter-
ritory, including also the State of Mississippi, Alabama Terri-
tory, East and West Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and
Part of the Island of Cuba. By John H. Robinson, M.D. Mem-
ber of the Military Philosophical Society of America, Member
of the Western Museum Society of Cincinnati, and Brigr.
General in the Republican armies of Mexico &c. . . . Engd.
by J. Anderson, Philada. Copyright secured according to law.
A.D. 1819. Printed and Coloured by John L. Narstin of Phila-
delphia."
I knew nothing about it, but decided I was going to buy it.
Even blind, I was sure it would cost me $250.
At the sale somebody yelled ten dollars, and I said twelve
and a half, and down came the hammer. Eberstadt and half
the other bright lights of Americana were in the room watch-
ing, but this distinguished company was supplied to me at
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
no extra cost. The map meant nothing to them, and they were
thinking about something else. When I got the map back to
the store, where I was by then in very cramped quarters
(having discovered that the fat books just fill shelves and the
thin ones bring you the money), I tried to open the map, but
since it was over five and a half feet square, all I could look
at was one uninteresting corner.
I was contemplating this without enthusiasm when Ed
Eberstadt came in. "What you got there, Charlie?"
"Oh, I don't know. I can't get the damn thing open."
"What!! you take for it?"
"Well, I was going up to two hundred and fifty. It's yours
for seventy-five."
Ed paid and departed. Ed's office was even smaller than
mine. He too was just trying to inform himself when Philip
Ashton Rollins, a truly great collector of Western Americana,
over a million dollars' worth of which he gave to Princeton,
came into the store.
"Ed, what was that thing Charlie bought yesterday?"
"Don't know; I'm just trying to find out."
"What will you sell it to me for?"
"I gave Charlie seventy-five dollars; take it for a hundred."
Shortly after this, word of the transaction got around, as
word always does. My friend and customer Tom Streeter
called up and said, "Charlie, I kind of think you made a mis-
take on that map. There are only two other copies in existence,
and the Library of Congress has both."
Tom promptly went down and traded some of his duplicates
to the Library of Congress for their spare. Possibly the point
of this story is that Mr. Rollins, being a rich man, had a sleigh
bed big enough to unfold the map all the way.
Philip Ashton Rollins wrote The Cowboy, the outstanding
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and, in fact, unique book on the subject, and edited some rare
Western travels. He has always been one of my favorite
customers.
The first time I saw him he came into the store on 34th
Street from an exceedingly gay party. I didn't know him from
the man in the moon. "I'll buy any damn thing that mentions a
cowboy/' was his introductory remark.
"Covers quite a lot of territory, doesn't it?" I asked cautiously.
"All right, try me."
I hooked out this and that and the other from the shelves.
He didn't pick and choose; he said, not quite crisply, "How
much?"
I ran up the total on an adding machine: $1243.
"All right, let me have "em."
He went over to my packing table, tore a strip off my roll
of manila wrapping paper, and wrote out a check on one of the
large trust companies for $1243.
If this had not been during banking hours, I can't imagine
what I should have done. As it was, the head office of the
Manufacturers' Trust was across the street, and I skipped over
to see Mr. Jonas, then president.
"Mr. Jonas/' I said, "I think this is probably just a practical
joke. Would you look at this so-called check?"
Jonas looked, put in a phone call, and came back grinning.
"I wish I had a few more like that," he said. "This guy keeps
a regular balance in the hundreds of thousands."
Afterward I got to wondering what had originally inter-
ested Rollins in the cowboy; finally I knew him well enough
to ask.
"Well," he said, "I guess everybody knows my father left
me hundreds of thousands of acres and several banks and
things in the West Those didn't last very long. Then another
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
relative died and contributed another injection, but that didn't
last, either.
"When the First World War came along, I decided I wasn't
good for anything but cannon fodder, but the American army
said I was too old. So I sneaked into the Anzacs. I had quite
a rough time, and some of my Aussie friends pulled me out of
the line of fire more than once.
"Evenings in billets I used to amuse them by telling about
the cowboys back home, some of whom had done me the same
sort of favor.
"Finally one long, lanky Anzac got fed up: Thil, you're a
lousy son of a bitch. You keep telling us how cowboys were
always saving your life, but you don't do anything about it.*
So I came home from the war without a dime, and made tracks
for the West to straighten myself out. I got a job on a ranch
that I had once owned, digging postholes at two bits a hole.
"As I was digging away to beat hell, trying to make a show-
ing, a party of dudes came by. So I married one of the dudes,
who was just as much interested in cowboys as I was, and
whose father owned about half of some eastern state."
I don't feel quite so much bruised about my mistake over
the Robinson map because I can comfort myself by remember-
ing what befell my almost infallible friend Mike Walsh of
Goodspeed's. His catalogue Number 168, 1927, was among the
most interesting I have ever seen. In the midst of looking
through it, I picked up the telephone and called Boston. "Mike,
have you still got Number 2211?"
"No. Sorry; it's gone. How much did I slip on that?"
"Plenty," said I, reluctantly hanging up.
One of the prime rarities of Western Americana is The Nez
Percys First Book, one of eight little schoolbooks printed at
Clearwater, Idaho, on a press that some missionaries brought
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across the ocean and up the mountains from Hawaii in 1839.
When I appraised the Coe collection, I put a value of fifteen
hundred dollars on the copy of the book there.
Some years ago, the last time I was in Oregon, I found to
my great surprise that Hines, one of the earliest Oregon print-
ers, was still active. I ran into him at the Oregon Historical
Society.
"Do you know whatever became of that Clearwater Mission
press, Mr. Hines?" I asked.
"You're leaning againt it."
Hines, who was in his nineties, loved to talk. That day he
told me about a stranger who came into the printing office
with some poetry. He said, "Set these up," gave his name as
Joaquin Miller, and departed, never to be seen again.
Before he knew Miller was not coming back, Hines, lack-
ing a title for the poetry, scribbled "Specimens" across the top
of the manuscript, set it, and pulled two proofs.
He kept them long enough so that one proof was worth five
hundred dollars to Fred Skiff, whose copy I later bought and
resold to Mr. Huntington. Heavens knows what became of the
other one; but anyhow I have shaken the hand that set Joaquin
MiHer's first printed verses.
I have also shaken the hand of the bard himself. For a while
I had charge of the first retail store Doubleday opened at
Fifth Avenue and 28th Street. An old man in a red shirt, with
long white hair, walked in and looked around. There was no
mistaking him in those days. "What can I do for you, Mr.
Miller?" said I.
I was a total stranger to him, but any admiring audience
brought him out. "I've never seen the City Hall," he said.
"All right, let's go see it." I started for the subway, which
apparently shocked him.
[ 169 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
"No, no, I want to walk/'
So for the one time in my life I walked from 28th Street
to City Hall, talking with the old man and inspecting new
buildings, half -finished buildings, and excavations for intended
buildings.
After we had reached our goal, Miller said, "I don't want to
see any more of this town. It has more holes in the ground
than any mining camp I was ever in." And that was my ex-
perience with Joaquin Miller.
Even the best people in the business sometimes forget or are
hurried into overlooking things. My friend Charlie Harris, of
Edwards's Bookshop in London, about as learned a bookseller
as I know, once paid fifty pounds at an auction for a set of
Cook's Voyages, printed in New York.
The only feature that makes this set really worth more than
fifty cents is that it contains two plates engraved by Paul
Revere, and when Charlie inspected his purchase, he found
that the engravings were missing.
I have remarked before that nothing ever turns up singly.
Just a few days later I was in Edinburgh, and after a day's
hunting I passed by the store of a dealer I particularly dis-
liked, and found him arranging his stock for the next day.
Among the junk was a ruinous copy of Cook's Voyages, with
practically nothing left of it except the engravings neatly
signed Paul Revere.
"How much for this?" I asked. I knew as well as he did
that he was laying out his shilling table.
"Ten bob/' said he.
"Go to hell, you Scotch robber/* I observed, and stamped on
down the hill.
But as I went, I began thinking about Michael O'Shaugh-
nessy, the New York dealer and auctioneer. I had once en-
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THE TRADE
countered him just after he had given a piece of his mind to a
Fourth Avenue dealer. When I met him, he was mumbling
assorted curses.
'What's the matter, O'Shaughnessy?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm just cursing myself for a damn fool. I've made up
my mind that from now on any dealer is welcome to spit in
my eye and rub it in with his foot, so long as I get a bargain/'
O'Shaughnessy *s words of wisdom prevailed; I turned back,
and, perhaps not very graciously, flung a ten-shilling note at
the Scotsman. I removed the engravings from the book, then I
dropped the book into the nearest dustbin.
Back in London I went to see Charlie Harris, looking as in-
nocent as I knew how. "Charlie," I said, "I hate to see a pal
get stuck. It wasn't really your fault you came a cropper on
Cook's Voyages, and maybe I could take it off your hands."
Charlie looked at me quizzically. "You son of a bitch, I bet
you have the Revere plates."
"Right here in my pocket," I said.
"You'll take ten quid for it, and think yourself lucky," said
Charlie.
And so I did
On one of my early visits to London, I was warned by all
hands against a bookseller named Jackson, in Charing Cross
Road. He was notorious for hating Yankees.
All the London bookshops in those days closed at seven
o'clock, so about six-fifty I went into Jackson's and said, "I hear
you don't like Yankees. Will you have a beer with me?"
"That far 111 go," he said.
I kept at this until about the fifth time, Jackson said, "Would
you pay me fifty pounds for a fine copy of Simcoe's Journal? 9
I said I would be glad to. So he took me downstairs to look
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
at the Americana. He had five or six shelves of very choice
rarities. They were so reasonably priced that my only problem
was whether to buy just some or all.
I added up my purchases and said, "Here, I'll write you a
check."
"No damn Yankee can buy books from me that way/' he
rejoined.
"Well, how must I do it?"
"Ill send the books to your hotel; if you like them, you send
me a draft; if you don't, send them back."
As we were going up the stairs, I noticed a red leather
volume labeled Autographs. I put my hand on it.
"Here, no damn Yankee can look at that," he said, so I
took my hand away,
I came for another visit the following year. Then I skipped
a year. Two years afterward I was received by Jackson's son.
"Where's your dad?" I asked.
"He died three months ago," said Jackson, junior. "Weren't
you and he dickering about some volume of autographs?"
"Dickering, hell! He wouldn't even let me look at it."
Young Jackson fetched the volume out a dazzling red
morocco folio. True to his father's principles, he did not open
it. "Would you give me five pounds for it?"
"Glad to," I said, and that was the last I saw of my mysterious
purchase until it and I were back in New York.
Just as I was leafing through it, trying to find out what I had,
Roger Howson, then the librarian of Columbia University,
came in. He asked what I had there.
"I'm just trying to find out," I said. We sat down together
to look. It turned out that the volume contained secret docu-
ments relating to an early-nineteenth-century treaty among
Great Britain, France, and Belgium. The secrecy was so grave
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that none of the diplomats involved signed his real name to the
papers; but the volume had belonged to one of those present*
who added a key at the back of the book. Howson offered me
$750 for the book, and I stalled him off. I put it under a
counter where I hoped no one would notice it. I should have
known better, considering my experience with book people.
Shortly my prize customer, Albert W. Johnston, came in and
rapidly piled up an order for several hundred dollars. He
pounced on the projecting bright red edge of the autograph
book. "What's this?"
I said hell, I didn't know. It was no use; Johnston went
through the book from cover to cover. 'What's this worth?"
"I haven't the slightest idea; I don't want to price it at all.
The librarian of Columbia offered me seven hundred and
fifty, and I wouldn't let him have it."
Johnston was a man of decision. "All right, you can sell me
this, or you can forget the rest of this order/* So he got the
autograph book for $750.
During the recent war conscience began to trouble him.
He thought the documents belonged in Britain, so he sent his
daughter down to the British Ambassador.
"I'll be glad to accept these on behalf of a grateful nation,"
said the diplomat, suavely.
"Oh, you don't know Dad/' said Johnston's daughter. "He
won't take your receipt. This has to go to Winston Churchill
personally, and only his receipt will do."
The papers are in England now, and Johnston has his
receipt and a personal note from Winston Churchill, which I
imagine he values even more than the documents he gave up.
On one of my periodic trips to London, my friend Leon
Kashnor, of the Museum Book Shop, said, "Look out, Charlie.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Someone in the Hudson's Bay Company has been dumping
stuff. I don't know where it's gone to, but look out/'
Two years later I was back in London and stopped in at
Foyle's Book Shop. The Americana department is on the third
floor. Some boys were carrying in piles of stuff.
"What's this?" I asked the manager.
"Oh, some junk we bought from the Hudson's Bay Com-
pany."
"Have you priced it yet?"
"No."
"What would you do if I picked out a hundred volumes
right now?"
"Well, I guess you can pick out a hundred volumes for six
bob apiece."
I sat down on the floor and started picking, trembling in
every limb for fear one of the owners should come upstairs.
My nerves got the better of me after I had picked 181 books.
"How about these?" I asked.
"Well, Charlie, I didn't think you'd pick out quite so many,"
said the Americana expert. "For this quantity, how about five
bob each? Shall I put them on your bill?"
"I guess I'd better pay you right now," I said, "because I
have a shipment going off tomorrow, and I'd like to have these
delivered across the street today." So I paid up, got a receipted
bill, and fled across the street to Marks & Company before
any of the Foyles should turn up.
I opened my packages in the presence of Mr. Marks and
his partner Mark Cohen, one of the two or three most
learned booksellers in London. Each time that I picked up
a volume, Mr. Cohen remarked succinctly, "Charlie, you son
of a bitch."
* * *
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In the course of my trips to London I found that for some
reason it was almost always a single dealer, even a single
purchase, that paid for my whole trip. One of the nicest book-
sellers I have ever known was old George Suckling, an out-
standing specialist in English literature. I used to go to his
store just for the pleasure of talking to him, though this was
rendered rather more difficult by the necessity of shouting
through a tin ear trumpet.
One day I said, "George, have you got any Americana?"
"Oh, I don't think so maybe a few oddments down cellar."
The oddment corner was lit by about a ten-watt bulb.
A thing every bookseller dreads is finding several copies of
one tide. It practically always means junk that won't even
move off the dime counter. But for some reason, even though
there were two copies of a dull-looking little book labeled,
Report of Milton and Cheadle, I gave a second glance. Milton
and Cheadle were two Englishmen who had been sent to
western North America in the 1850's. Their book on what they
saw is a standard source for Northwestern history, and worth
about three dollars and a half. Before they published this, they
were unreliably alleged to have presented a special report to
Parliament. No copy had ever been found.
These two copies, barely visible in the dim light, were
proof that the report had been made. George Suckling had
neatly penciled in his price, five shillings each.
I went upstairs. "You're wrong on these," I said. **YouVe
got them marked five bob, but 111 be glad to give you ten quid
each."
"Charlie," said George, "if I'm so ignorant that I mark a
ten-pound book five shillings, the price to you is five bob
less ten per cent."
Aside from the secrecy of the report, these rarities had no
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
great value compared to that of the normal three-fifty book;
but each of the two copies fetched a dollar for every cent
that the latter books commanded.
The last time I saw George Suckling was shortly before his
death. I had spent a rather unprofitable three weeks in Eng-
land and was sailing on the Aquitania in the afternoon. I
had saved up two or three hours for a social chat with George.
"George," I bellowed through the ear trumpet, "nobody
has paid for my trip this year/*
"That's a shame, Charlie," said George. He turned to his
son George and said, "Didn't we put something aside for
Charlie last year?"
George Junior went downstairs, no doubt to contend with
the ten-watt bulb. Finally he returned with a quarto volume
wrapped in paper. "Charlie," said the old man, "before you
open this, I warn you it's going to cost you ten guineas."
From the size, it might have been any one of several two-
dollar books that I hoped it was not, or it might just possibly
have been Simcoe's Journal, worth five hundred dollars on
a good day, which I hoped it was.
Instead, it was the first copy I had ever seen of Goldson's
Northwest Passage, privately printed in a small edition at
Portsmouth in 1793.
"George," I said, as I pulled out my checkbook, "somebody
did pay for my trip, after all."
I took my prize over to Henry Stevens, Son and Stiles, who
keep a record of every book they have ever sold since the
1840's. Henry Stevens, III, admitted that they had never sold
but one copy. I resisted his efforts to buy mine, and finally
got six hundred from Dr. Rosenbach for it.
Ten years later a copy of the Goldson book came up for sale
at Sotheby's, the only copy ever sold at auction. Vilhjalmur
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Stefansson, the arctic explorer, one of my best friends and
customers, asked me what he would have to bid to get this
for his collection. I told him he would be lucky if he got it
for sixty pounds. So he mortgaged the old homestead, and
sent a bid of three hundred dollars.
When the book reached him, there was a bill with it for
twenty pounds.
( I got back some of my own, when I appraised the Stefans-
son collection, by putting a figure of $750 on the book. )
You know the axiom about antiquities; when no copy is
known to exist, and somebody discovers one, it is never a mat-
ter of more than a year or two before further copies come to
light. My Milton and Cheadle was just one instance, although
usually the first discovery does not occur in duplicate.
The best buys almost always come from the big shops who
are not scared to death by rare items rather than from the
obscure little shops where the inexperienced book-hunter
would naturally look for rarities at dirt-cheap prices. I went
into Button's bookstore on Fifth Avenue and asked the man-
ager of the rare-book department, a cocky little Englishman
named Grant, if he had any Americana.
"You know we don't deal in that junk," he replied severely.
"There's some stuff on the floor over there, and you can
have any of that you want at fifty cents a volume."
I've always refused to be insulted, so I sat down on the
floor and began looking through the junk. All I found in the
pile was a copy of George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat.
This copy had been defaced by a two-page inscription signed
"George," so our great authority had priced it at fifty cents.
(This I sold to another dealer for three-fifty $350, of
course. )
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Then I picked up an item issued in a limited edition by the
Marine Research Society. I showed it to Grant.
"Oh, that damn thing," he said. "We've been looking for the
limited edition for three months, but that trade edition you
can have for two dollars."
After allowing a suitable time to elapse, I quoted Mr.
Grant the limited edition at sixty-five dollars, and he eagerly
bought it back from me.
My life has revolved around Americana, but you can see I
have had some fun with other books as well. One day in the
1920*8 I was going into Thorpe's bookstore in St. Martin's
Lane in London as the manager was helping an old lady into
her carriage.
"Hello, Charlie," said he. "Do you know who that was?
Thackeray's daughter, Lady Ritchie."
"What have you been buying from her?" I asked.
"Oh, just a lot of rubbish."
"Let me see it," I said.
Rubbish was no word for it. There were several hundred
volumes of absolute shelf-warmers.
My eye fell on the least promising of the lot, a little duo-
decimo Greek Testament. I found it was scrawled full of notes
in Thackeray's unmistakable hand, which anyone who has
once seen it can recognize across the room. He had also drawn
a map in ink.
"Duke," I said to Thorpe's manager, "what did you pay for
this junk?"
"Fifty quid," he told me.
"All right, how much for this Testament?"
"That's the only book in the lot."
"All right, all right, how much?"
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"Seventy-five quid."
'Til take it," I said. I thought I had a customer in mind,
which is always the first thing a sensible bookseller does when
he starts spending money rashly.
My first act the next day was to read up on Thackeray's
life. I found he had been refused entrance to Cambridge
because he had had no Greek. He spent six months at his
uncle's studying Greek, obviously from this New Testament,
because here were all his cramming notes.
My friends in the London book trade had sudden fits of
compassion about the extravagant price I had paid for the
Testament. One of them offered to take over half of my risk,
and two others each offered me a hundred pounds to get me
clear of my predicament.
Owen Young was one of perhaps a dozen great Thackeray
collectors at the time, and I wrote and told him I had something
he needed.
He wrote back: "I have all the Thackeray I ever want to
see.
I wrote across the face of his reply: "You ain't seen nothing
yet." A week later he owned the book, at a price that paid my
passage to England and back.
On that same trip I also exercised my shrewdness, to con-
siderably less purpose, in buying Americana. One of Sotheby's
auction catalogues listed a thirty-two-page manuscript, by an
unknown hand, describing an Indian battle in the West. My
friend Leon Kashnor, of the Museum Book Store, and I fixed
our eagle eyes on this and jointly bought it for ninety pounds,
over spirited bidding from the firm of Henry Stevens. I dressed
up our prize with a twenty-dollar morocco slip case from
Zaehnsdorf s, and took it home to make a killing.
Apparently I was the only dealer in America who had not
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
seen and refrained from buying this manuscript when Charles
Goodspeed originally catalogued it for $150. Some years later,
by high-pressure salesmanship, I unloaded my prize for $125.
The bete noire of every American bookseller, and particu-
larly of those who deal by mail, is probably the newspapers.
Every time a newspaper lacks three-quarters of an inch at the
bottom of a column, it sticks in an item to the effect that Mrs.
Sally Jones has in her possession a copy of the Ulster County
Gazette printed at Kingston, New York, in 1800, containing an
obituary notice of George Washington; and she has refused
five hundred dollars for it.
Mail-order dealers always have more correspondence than
they can handle anyway, and after one of these tidbits in the
papers the mail doubles or triples. Even now, when I am more
or less trying to pull my hole in after me, I get at least two
letters a week about the accursed Ulster County Gazette.
In the first place, I have never understood why everyone had
to have this particular obituary of Washington when three
hundred other hick-town papers printed similar ones. And in
the second place, Mr. R. W. G. Vail (then at the New York
Public Library) devoted an entire pamphlet to the reprint of
this particular notorious issue.
When an old lady brings one of the reprints to the store,
the routine is invariable. She spreads the paper out with
trembling hands, and explains that it must have been in the
family for at least a hundred years because her grandmother
lived to be ninety and had inherited the treasure from her
grandmother.
Ninety-nine out of every hundred copies I see are among
the quarter-million or so printed as souvenirs to be given
away at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. I
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have developed a very keen eye for this particular reprint,
but it has done me less than no good.
For years I would try to explain the true state of affairs
to each hopeful owner. I finally gave up when the twentieth
old lady said, "Can you suggest anyone who knows something
about old newspapers?" Now I find it simpler to lie and say
I don't buy old newspapers.
Another newspaper bane of booksellers' lives is the Vicks-
burg Gazette. It is usually offered to me as "the first Confed-
erate newspaper printed on wallpaper." A more detailed yarn
is that the particular issue in question was printed while Grant
was besieging Vicksburg, so that nothing but wallpaper was
available to the printer. This, too, was reprinted for a souvenir,
and many, many thousands were given away. The routine on
this one, of course, is, "My great-grandfather was in Grant's
army, and got one of these copies when Vicksburg fell."
Among the most valuable forms of information to historians
is the city directory. You can judge the standing of the first
New York City directory when I tell you that a copy came up
at auction some years ago, and a prosperous Bronx real-estate
dealer commissioned me to buy it for him up to $3000.
I bought it in for $2750. My old pals the newspapermen
ran a story about this.
Then came the deluge. Not one but five hundred people
wrote, telegraphed, and telephoned to advise me that they had
directories of New York City at least a hundred years old. Of
course they did not expect to get $2750, but they thought a
modest figure like $1000 might interest me.
It was no use telling them that New York directories of the
nineteenth century, useful as they may be to historians, are
properly bought by the bushel, not the piece, so about all I
could say was that my directory needs were already supplied,
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
An even worse scourge than the Ulster County Gazette and
directories is old Bibles.
In the Robert Hoe sale, George D. Smith paid fifty thousand
dollars for a Gutenberg Bible, and naturally was smeared all
over the front pages for doing so.
At that time there were 130,000,000 people in the United
States, and judging from my correspondence in the succeed-
ing six months, every man, woman, and child of the lot
owned a priceless Bible over a hundred years old, usually in
German.
Naturally it was not my luck to be offered any of the German
Bibles printed by Christopher Sower in Germantown, which
are sometimes worth as much as fifty dollars; no, all I drew
was the output of the Lutherans and the American Bible
Society, which was founded for the express purpose of giving
Bibles away free.
The only standard American Bible I know of that is worth
any real money is the first English Bible issued in this country,
printed by Robert Aitkin of Philadelphia in 1782. Of course
there were many testaments and psalm books before that. I
have had my hands on one copy, which was offered to me by an
old gun dealer for three hundred dollars.
Bibles are very hard books to collate (to check for missing
pages or plates, that is), because the older ones seldom have
any page numbers, and you practically have to read the Good
Book straight through to make sure nothing is gone. In this
case I gave my friend Seymour Dunbar twenty-five dollars to
do a thorough job on the Aitkin Bible.
Four days later he brought it back with a note saying that
it was all perfect, probably the best copy ever offered.
On the strength of this I sold the book to a collector for $750.
A week or two later the new owner came in grinning and
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said, Tve just been collating that Bible again, and it lacks
forty-two pages/'
I was resigned to writing this off as a loss, but some weeks
later apparently God looked after His own because I came
upon another defective copy that had the pages I lacked. In
this way I was able to make up a complete copy, but the total
cost, including what the English call a "shiny" binding, turned
my original $450 profit into a $25 loss.
One queer character in the book trade was in his day one
of the best known dealers, Gabriel Wells. When I first knew
him, his name was Gabriel Weiss, and he was peddling some
set of subscription books around Sussex County, New Jersey.
A little later he had a grisly furnished room on Lexington
Avenue. He once came into my store on 23rd Street and said,
"If I don't sell some books, I don't eat." So I went up with him
to his room, and paid him $3.65 for some of his stock, to
provide him with the next day's meals.
Then for years he eked out a living by going around to
various bookstores, picking out some set on approval for thirty
dollars and selling it to Macy's for thirty-five.
Finally he inherited a large amount of money from some
relative. You wouldn't have known old Gabe. He went to
London, rented one of the swellest apartments he could find,
and made abundant use of the unlimited credit that the big
London booksellers used to give for approval shipments in
those days.
(The first time I went to the famous bookshop of Maggs
Brothers, Mr. Ernest Maggs took me to lunch, said that Gabriel
Wells had recommended me, and told me that if I wanted to
use it, I might have up to a hundred thousand pounds of credit
for books on approval. I said I was just a little piker that liked
[ 183 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
to buy books and pay for them one of the most foolish state-
ments I have ever made in the course of a foolish life. )
Mrs. Everitt and I arrived in London at the time of the
general strike, and found at our hotel several messages asking
me to call Gabriel Wells. When I did so, he invited us to dinner
at Simpson's. All through the evening he was very careful to
talk about nothing in particular. Going home in a cab, he
casually pulled out some manuscripts and asked if I wasn't
going to Birmingham. I said I expected to be passing that
way.
Wells explained that he had paid Lowe of Birmingham four
hundred pounds for these alleged Goldsmith letters, that he
was leaving for home in two days, that he thought they were
forgeries, and that he hoped I wouldn't mind doing him the
small favor of throwing the letters back at the seller.
I was too much taken aback to say anything, but all night
I got madder and madder. Wells knew perfectly well that the
vendor would not take back the fakes, but he thought if I was
buying enough stuff, maybe I could get away with it.
In the morning I returned the letters with a note to Wells
saying that I had changed my itinerary.
These forgeries were part of the output of a very remarkable
Englishman. He was a historian, the author of several standard
works. When he was not writing history, he used to write
Shelley, Goldsmith, and General Wolfe letters better than the
old boys had ever dreamed of in their lifetimes. He was much
more careful about it than such bunglers as Thomas J. Wise,
and always got contemporary paper. His products were really
almost worth the price for the art they displayed. A prominent
British dealer gave him fifty pounds for a beautiful Shelley
letter, and then sold it for five hundred. The dealer, being a
man of conscience, called him in, said he had done a little
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better than he had expected, and handed over another hundred
pounds.
Two days later the buyer returned the letter as a forgery.
Finally so much of this went on that the authorities did
as they sometimes do in this country when a corporation is
too big to be allowed to go bankrupt: they simply hinted that
such an artist would be better off in some other country, and
he forthwith retired to Paris.
The last I heard of him was a letter in which he ordered
six hundred dollars' worth of books. I replied, starchily, that
I would be glad to ship them on receipt of draft.
I have seldom been so stunned as I was when I got a draft
from him by return mail.
Stevenson's The Ebb Tide, which he wrote in collaboration
with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, is dedicated to one of the
McClures. I was closing up my store on 34th Street one day
when this McClure came in and said, "Here's the original
manuscript of The Ebb Tide. I've been lugging it around with
me wherever I went all over the country, and I'm sick of it.
I'd rather have five dollars than this damned manuscript."
"Here's the five dollars," I said. "Come back day after
tomorrow, and I'll have some more money for you."
"There are several chapters missing from the manuscript,
you know," McClure said.
"Natural enough," I said "because Osbourne wrote quite a
bit of the book."
Next morning I took the manuscript to Gabriel Wells, who
laid fifteen hundred dollars on the line without batting an eye.
I gave half of this to McClure, and we were both quite pleased.
Wells, never a man to let grass grow under his feet, hunted
up Lloyd Osbourne, who was still alive, and gave him five
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
hundred dollars to write out in longhand the chapters he had
originally contributed to the book. That completed the manu-
script, and raised the ultimate sales price to what was unreli-
ably reported as ten thousand dollars.
Another peculiar character who frequented rare-bookstores
was not a dealer but a customer, Charlie Montgomery, of
Brooklyn. His mania was the Baconian controversy, and he
used to go around with a reprint of the Shakespeare First Folio,
for which he had out a series of cardboard masks, showing
which words on each page were the cipher that proved Bacon
had written Shakespeare's plays.
The last time I saw Charlie, John Anderson of the Anderson
Galleries was in the store, too.
"John," said Charlie, "I want you to do something for me.
I can't travel by boat, because I get terribly seasick. But I
know you can do this. Just go and dig up Shakespeare's grave,
and I'm certain you will find documents to prove that Bacon
wrote the plays.**
"How's this again, Charlie?" John Anderson asked.
"Why, all you have to do is take a boat and a couple of
men up the Thames, and you can dig up the grave as easy as
nothing."
"Charlie, did you ever hear of Scotland Yard?"
"Why, John, they wouldn't ever bother your
I am now going to tackle an impossible job to give some
idea of George D. Smith, the great book merchant. I said be-
fore that he was the greatest we have ever had in this country.
He never read anything but an occasional racing form; his
word was said to be better than his checks, which sometimes
bounced; he died at the one time in his life when he was worth
[ 186 ]
THE TRADE
a million dollars. Once when I went to the race track with him
I found that he thought less of betting five thousand dollars
than I did of plunging a two-spot.
George reached his position fundamentally because of two
things. The first was that (except when he didn't feel like
paying his bills ) money meant absolutely nothing to him. Most
of us, when we attend an auction, pencil in a price we are
willing to go to on the items we want. Not George. He just put
a check mark, which meant that not J. P. Morgan himself stood
any chance of buying the items at the sale. ( If you looked over
his shoulder and saw the check against something your heart
was set on and said, "George, will you lay off that?" he would
invariably do so.)
George once said to me, "Charlie, you're absolutely crazy.
You deal every day with men who think in thousands, and you
talk in five-dollar bills/' George never made that mistake;
this was one of his two secrets.
The other, which he shared with every great bookseller,
was his memory. He knew offhand at an auction the price for
which any other copy of any consequential book on the block
had sold.
George was a plunger in business as well as at the track.
He very seldom had any orders for items he bought at sales.
And since it was absolutely immaterial to him what he paid,
he often found himself with high-priced enigmas on the
shelves. His method with such special customers as Henry E.
Huntington was to show them the auction bill and say, "Here,
I paid five hundred for this; it's yours for five hundred and
fifty."
Sometimes, when he bought a book from a scout for a
hundred dollars, he would insist on a receipted bill for three
hundred. (George did not invent this method of taking profits,
[ 187 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
which has been used by other hungry dealers before and
since. )
By his prominence, his prices, his success, and his person-
ality, George established himself as the last word on book
prices among scouts. I remember once a traveling salesman
who used to bring me in a good many bargains, turned up with
a bound volume of sheet music, seven of the items bearing
Abraham Lincoln's signature. He asked me $500. They weren't
worth it, and I was shyly thinking of $250, but for the sake of
politeness I asked, 'Would you take any less?"
"No," said the salesman, and went over to George Smith.
George was always sitting at his desk, looking more than
half asleep. He glanced up. "How much?" he mumbled, prac-
tically unintelligibly.
"Five hundred dollars/' repeated the salesman.
"Man, you're absolutely nutsl 111 give you one hundred!"
When George said so, you just took the money and
beat it.
Here is a story that leads back to George in the end. I was
at Leary, Stuart's store in Philadelphia, in the office of Warner,
the Americana man. He said, "Have you ever been to see
C. W. Unger down in Pottsville?"
"Never heard of him," I said.
"Well, he has quite a lot of curious Americana in his house.
You ought to go down some time."
One morning I found myself confronted with a day in
Philadelphia. I had once spent nine months there working for
N. W. Ayer; when I departed, I told my very kind boss that
there was not enough money in the world to keep a man in
Philadelphia. So this day I decided that even the steel-mill
town of Potts ville would be an improvement, though it meant
spending three or four hours on a whistle-stop train.
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At the Pottsville station I got a cab to Unger's house, which
I found filled up to the eaves with old books.
After two or three hours of rooting, I was covered with
coal dust even deeper than is usual in New York bookstores.
I asked if I might wash, and linger took me upstairs. Passing
through the bedroom, I stumbled over a small stack of pam-
phlets, and one that I noticed was a paper-bound copy of Joel
Palmer's Journal of Travels over the Rocky Mountains, Cin-
cinnati, 1847. I was very curious to see what Unger knew
about this, so I tucked it under my elbow as I was drying my
hands and then took it down to him.
"How about this?" I asked.
"Oh, that. Give me a quarter/'
As I was finally making out my check for what I had decided
to buy, I said, "Mr. Unger, I hear you have quite a wonderful
collection of Franklin imprints. Might I see them?" I had no
intention of buying any, but you know what I think about the
opportunity to see and handle rarities.
Unger said very earnestly, "Everitt, I know more about
Franklin imprints than practically anybody in the world, so you
can't expect to buy any from me cheap."
I said I still wanted to see them, and he went on boasting
about how much he knew as he led me to the safe.
One item that practically thrust itself in my face was a little
pamphlet, issued with no title page, concerning the Pennsyl-
vania, Delaware, and Maryland boundaries. In the front of
this copy was a little folding map. I had recently been run-
ning through Campbell's bibliography of Franklin imprints,
which noted that this pamphlet with the map was exces-
sively rare.
"Would you sell me this?"
"I told you I know all about Franklin imprints; you can't
[ 189 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
expect any deal here. I doubt if you could buy any of my
Franklin stuff."
"All right, all right," I said. "I know that, but how much
for this pamphlet?"
"Thirty dollars," said linger, somewhat truculently.
I wrote out a second check.
As soon as I could make my escape from the state of Pennsyl-
vania, I went with the pamphlet to George Smith,
"Oh, I've got too much stock," he said, in a tone of sur-
feit. 'Tm only buying at auction. If you put it in a sale, 111
buy it up to seventeen hundred and fifty."
This was the way in which George's word was better than
his check. I could calculate neatly enough for any banker
that my take on that pamphlet would be $1750, less 15 per cent
to the auctioneer.
My Palmer was at that time the only known copy in the
original printed wrapper, and I got a corresponding price,
though not from George.
George apparently liked a feeling of majesty about the way
he paid his bills. He once owed me six hundred dollars at a
time when I was very much in need of it. I went to him and
said, "George, you Ve owed me six hundred dollars for three
months."
"Sure, and 111 probably owe it to you for three more."
I looked him in the eye: "George, I need that money .*
"You mean you really need it?^
I went on looking at him.
"Hey, Louis, give Everitt a check for six hundred dollars."
George's memory never betrayed him, but his vanity was
stronger still. After all the big sales a number of us used to
congregate at the Hotel Plaza for a few drinks. George was al-
ways a little delayed because he could not walk the three
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THE TRADE
blocks from the gallery to the Plaza, but had to travel in fitting
style in his Rolls-Royce.
While we were waiting for him, some wag said, "Charlie,
think up a good title of some piece of rare Americana that
never existed."
I devised a beauty; I wish I could remember what it was.
After George's glass had been filled, I leaned over and said,
"George, I think I made a mistake today. I had a copy of this
thing, and I never heard of another. I let it go for five hundred,
and I bet I gave it away."
George lowered the water line a little. "That? Hell, I ve
had two, and sold them for two hundred apiece."
"George," I said, "two bottles of Mumm's Extra Dry from
you, pleasel"
Booksellers are constantly accused, usually with justice, of
being bad businessmen. Or perhaps not with so much justice.
The only occasion I ever knew when a bookseller looked up a
reference offered by a customer was once when a very charm-
ing lady from Laurel, Mississippi, came in and ordered seven
or eight hundred dollars' worth of books from me. She asked
to have them sent. As she was leaving the shop, she said, "Oh,
perhaps you'd like a reference. Just ask at Tiffany's."
Not knowing how to go about this, I went over in person to
see the credit manager, who kept me waiting in line for over
an hour. Finally my turn came and he said, "What can I do
for you?"
I said I would like to inquire about this lady's credit.
"I don't know what your damn business is, but give it to
her."
That was the end of my credit investigations.
Incidentally, Adolph Stager and I sold some $300,000 worth
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
of books on trust in the course of our career together, and our
total losses were $32.
Here is a story proving nothing except that booksellers some-
times enjoy a little horseplay.
Somewhere Lindley Eberstadt bought the Wickersham col-
lection of material relating to Alaska. Wickersham was the
author of the standard bibliography of Alaska, and Lindley
found his private library.
When he brought it in, it contained anthropology stuff that
didn't interest the Eberstadts at all, but I liked the look of it.
I, on the other hand, had a rare California pamphlet and no
immediate customer in view. So I wandered over to swap.
Ed Eberstadt said he would give me the anthropology ma-
terial for the pamphlet and twenty-five dollars.
After we had argued for two or three hours, we compro-
mised on the anthropology plus fifty dollars for the pamphlet.
In sorting out the anthropological material, I made two
piles: the stuff I could use and the stuff I refused to carry
away. Ed Eberstadt said all or nothing. I said, "Look here,
I'm not going to pay a truck man five dollars to haul this
junk"
This argument also was compromised by my leaving the junk
behind.
Then Lindley Eberstadt had a stroke of genius. "Send the
trash over to that cheap-book auctioneer on the East Side, to
sell on commission."
No sooner said than done.
Next day I was at Eberstadts for my afternoon's arguing
when the phone rang. Ed Eberstadt answered it
"It's the auctioneer," he reported. "Says he doesn't like to
sell this minor stuff on commission; he wants to buy it/'
[ 192 ]
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He turned back to the phone: "How much can you give
us for it? ... A hundred and a quarter? Just a minute; I
don't know anything about this. Ill have to speak to my
son, who bought the material."
He put a firm hand over the mouthpiece. "The damned fool
wants to pay us a hundred and twenty-five bucks for that
junk; now watch!"
"Well, I've just talked to my son, and he feels he really
ought to get at least two hundred for material of this caliber."
Ed made a face, and evidently successfully muffled the noise
of his chuckles.
"A hundred and fifty? Is that really the very best you can
do? Just a minute, 111 have to ask my son's opinion.
"Well, we're most reluctant to let such a collection go at
a price like this, but I suppose if it's all you can afford, well
have to meet you."
Ed had been kidding me about my ignorance of anthro-
pology, so I checked through the list and made a rough calcu-
lation that nearly the whole lot could have been bought from
the publishers, who still had the things in print, for $19.75.
We all laughed our heads off until the evening after the sale.
Then I added up the figures from a price catalogue, which
totaled $280. Lindley's description of the gallery as a cheap-
book place was true only in a very restricted way.
This reminds me that for some reason Tracy McGregor
wanted a copy of a little book of lectures by President Gilder-
sleeve of Johns Hopkins. I advertised for it until I was blue
in the face, and finally some helpful soul sent in a quotation
of twenty-five dollars. I forwarded it to McGregor with a nota-
tion: "This is ridiculous."
When he wanted something, he never stopped to argue. He
just sent a check.
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A bibliographer friend of mine happened to see the item
and the bill on McGregor's desk, and wrote me a post card:
"Watch your step, Charlie. The Gildersleeve book is in print
with the Johns Hopkins University Press, at $1.00 less 30 per
cent"
So twenty-four dollars went back by return mail to Mc-
Gregor. After the number of times I have told other people
to read the U. S. Catalogue, perhaps that is a cheap price for
me to pay to learn that I had better do it, too.
2. A bookseller s Tools
BOOKSELLERS and would-be booksellers are usually much
excited to know what bibliographies and reference tools they
ought to have. The problem is rather more puzzling to them
because nearly every bookseller somehow accumulates several
shelves of so-called reference books. The last time I called on
Lathrop Harper, I noticed that if he had one auction cata-
logue, he had five thousand, along with at least five hundred
volumes of bibliography.
I am morally certain that he never looks at so much as one
of these, because he already has all the real information in
his head. My own collection numbers less than fifty volumes,
and in any one year I probably do not look inside more than
five.
American Book Prices Current, for example, until Edward
Lazare took over the editorship, was a sort of glorified pin-
the-tail-on-the-donkey. You would find apparently identical
copies of the same book selling in one sale for thirty dollars,
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and at another sale for three hundred, and not a word of ex-
planation. Unless you were actually at the sale or had handled
the particular copies in question or at least knew whether
the sale had been rigged, the only dependable figure in the
book was the date.
For example, if you hunt back through ABPC, you will hit
on a copy of Josiah Priest's Antiquities of North America that
sold for $45. If you were really gullible, you might even con-
clude that only one copy of Priest had ever been sold at auc-
tion. It is a reliable $1.50 book that you can find a good deal
more often than at will: the simple truth is that nothing un-
der five dollars gets listed in auction records for want of space.
The $45 Priest is explained by the fact that a very shrewd
buying agent for a large library had a card catalogue of
everything this library owned. He managed to accumulate
three or four hundred items not in the card catalogue (most
of them because they were too common); then he held an
auction.
Morse, one of the great New York auctioneers, once told me
that all he asked was three bidders: one live one and two
posts. He did not conduct this particular sale, but it doesn't
matter.
In the course of my career I have owned seven sets of
Joseph Sabin's Dictionary of Books Relating to America. It
takes up a lot of room and costs a lot of money; and the only
real use I have ever found for this famous reference set is
in the power it has given me of noting smugly in my cata-
logues, "Not in Sabin," and charging five dollars for fifty-
cent truck.
Occasionally one may vary this by saying, "Sabin No. " As
only five hundred sets of Sabin were printed, this has the merit
of mystifying the ordinary buyer.
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Incidentally, anyone who honestly wants to use Sabin should
get it in the microphotographed Readex version, which oc-
cupies about three inches of shelf-space.
The two reference books I use almost daily are those most
people have quite forgotten about. The first is Larned's
Literature of American History; this is invaluable to any
bookseller because it lists the references by period, with an
appraisal by some eminent scholar after each title.
The Pierre Margry Papers are a famous collection of docu-
ments relating to the discovery and settlement of the Missis-
sippi Valley, published in six paper-covered volumes in 1879-
1888. A set would always bring seventy-five dollars when you
could find one.
We had an inquiry for a set, and as I was about to answer
the letter, Harry Alpern brought over our copy of Lamed,
opened to the entry for Margry. It was noted that in order
to finance the publication of the papers, the Library of Con-
gress had agreed to take five hundred sets.
Harry quietly sat down and sent a post card to the Gov-
ernment Printing Office: "Please send two sets Margry Papers."
The sets duly arrived, with a statement that my deposit
account at the GPO had been charged $4.80 per set post-
paid.
A little later we quietly ordered two more sets.
When our haul had reached eight, the final shipment in-
cluded a circular announcing that the price of the Margry
Papers had been revised to $45.00. Once this tenfold price rise
had made the book available to the ordinary bookseller, of
course the whole stock was gone in no time.
Just about then, too, the GPO reported as out of print
Volumes I and III of Phillips's List of Atlases of the World,
an invaluable reference tool. Knowing the ways of the Gov-
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ernment Printing Office, I got a friend in Washington to inves-
tigate. He reported that there were 1008 complete sets in
such and such a room. For a year or two thereafter I kept
myself well supplied with Phillips, always notifying the GPO
where to find them.
Literature of American History came out around 1906 and
has never been revised, although the WPA collected enough
material to quadruple its size. The original undertaking was
financed by a Canadian named George lies, who lived at the
Park Avenue Hotel in New York. He wrote an amazingly
good book called Flame, Electricity and the Camera; but he
was really more famous among all the booksellers in New York
who had ten-cent counters.
As a matter of fact, lies, like DeWitt Miller, spent a fortune
in time and thoughtfulness on the ten-cent counters. He had
a keen eye and a great memory, and he had friends all over
the continent who were writing books on a variety of subjects.
He used to distribute all his loot from the ten-cent counters
around where it would do the most good.
lies once told me about a visit he had from S. S. McClure,
the publishing genius. McClure, with no money and no pros-
pects, was just about to launch McClure s Magazine, which
was soon to make "muckraking" a household word. During
this visit McClure was passing the hat to raise capital. lies
chipped in. He felt this entitled him to ask, "Sam, why are
you wearing that Prince Albert coat?"
McClure lifted up his coattails. "Because I've got a hole
in the seat of my pants."
After McClures Magazine had become an established
success, McClure serialized in it his autobiography, which
Willa Gather helped him with. It was a success story, of
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
course, but McClure's whole life was a dizzy series of ups and
downs. As a matter of fact, he survived into the late 1940's
(which would have amazed 98 per cent of the people who
had known of him in his great days), and was not even able
to make his own living.
At all events, the autobiography was advertised with pla-
cards on every wall and in every bus: **I came to New York
with twenty-five cents."
I saw one along Fourth Avenue on which somebody had
neatly inscribed: "I bet he wishes he had it now!"
George lies was once at a party given by Henry E. Hun-
tington, at which some of Huntington's treasures were shown.
Mr. Huntington was displaying a first edition of Pilgrim's
Progress, and Mr. lies observed, "I hear you're giving away
souvenirs today. I'd love to have that one."
lies told me, "They watched me like a hawk the rest of the
afternoon."
The other reference book that I use all the time was issued
in 1905 by the American Historical Association: Griffith's
Publications of American Historical Societies. This is a verita-
ble gold mine of information about biographical monographs
and the like.
I remember once I had a telephone call from the vice-
president of a bank who said he was very anxious indeed to
find some biography of his great-grandfather, Hugh William-
son, the author of a history of North Carolina. In Griffith I
learned that the New York Historical Society had published a
pamphlet about Williamson early in the nineteenth century,
and I soon dug out three copies from among the 25,000 odd
pamphlets in my stock. I took one copy, spent fifty cents at
Fridenberg's for a portrait, and had MacDonald put on a ten-
dollar red morocco binding. Then I sent the finished product
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to the banker with a bill for fifty dollars. He paid, and sent
me an effusive note with his check. Two years later he tele-
phoned again, and I braced myself in case he should have
found out just how scarce his grandfather's biography really
was. After all, I had put on a pretty binding.
What he said was, "Mr. Everitt, does lightning ever strike
twice in the same place? Could you possibly find me another
copy of that biography?"
Rapidly calculating how long it would take me to go through
my own stock, I said, "Well, if you have quite a good deal of
patience, I hope I may be able to find you another in four or
five months."
I did.
Another reference tool that I have reason to remember viv-
idly, although I don't look at it very often, is Bradford's
Bibliographers Manual of American History, which is actually
just a list of state, county, and town histories, issued (and
probably compiled, I suspect) by Stan V. Henkels, the Phila-
delphia book auctioneer. Bradford is in five quarto volumes.
It was published at fifteen dollars, in an edition strictly lim-
ited to five hundred sets.
I bought twenty-five sets from Stan Henkels at fifteen
dollars less discount, sold them, and bought and sold another
twenty-five sets. Then I happened to be in Philadelphia, and
he said, "Don't you want to buy fifty sets at three-fifty a set?"
I said, "Sure, send them over.''
I catalogued these at a reduced price and promptly sold
them all. Some weeks later I was down there again, and Hen-
kels asked if I did not want to buy all that was left of the
original five hundred sets at $2.50 a set. Having sold a hun-
dred sets with very little difficulty myself, I thought I could
probably get rid of what few remained.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Within a few days a truck pulled up to my 34th Street
store, and dumped off cartons containing 410 sets. There were
2050 volumes, all wrapped in newspaper, quite unmarked
in any way. It took two of my men three weeks to sort out
the volumes. They have all disappeared, as they well de-
served to, since this is still the only inclusive bibliography of
American local history.
Henkels, one of the great figures in American book auction-
eering, was an unreconstructed Confederate. An appeal to his
Southern patriotism was the only thing that could unsettle
his judgment.
Horace Hayden, librarian of the Wyoming Valley Historical
Society at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was the author of Vir-
ginia Genealogies, one of the most famous volumes in its
field. He sent me a note saying, "I'm getting pretty old, and
I think I have too many books. Do you want to buy
them?"
I went down and offered him $3500. He said he would let
me know. He did: he had had a letter from Stan Henkels.
Henkels wrote: "Don't let that damned Yankee Charlie Everitt
rob you. Send the books down here, and 111 get you twice
whatever he offers/'
The next time I saw Dr. Hayden at Wilkes-Barre was some
months after he had received a check from Stan Henkels for
$2200. I said, "This business of Southern gentlemen's sticking
together is pretty expensive, isn't it?"
Said Dr. Hayden: "Everitt, don't you think you should let
sleeping dogs lie?"
Unfortunately in his last years Stan Henkels was annoyed
with me. I wrote something that got printed about the pam-
phlets I bought in one of his sales for $45 and sold for $1400.
My last communication from him was a note: "Charlie, you're
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a damned liar." For once in my life I was not, but there was
no answer to be made.
Among the purchases I made from Henkels's auction gal-
leries were some volumes of Texas newspapers. I sent a man
down there, telling him to buy the stuff if he could get it
for $250.
He came back with the loot, and remarked, "Everitt, you
don't know anything about newspapers. Here/' Handing me
a bill for $14, he collected $1.40 commission.
I was just in the act of collating the papers when Tom
Streeter came in. As he was looking over my shoulder, a vol-
ume fell open to a broadside from the period of Texas inde-
pendence.
"How much?" said Streeter, eagerly.
"Oh, a hundred and fifty."
Three or four pages further on, another broadside.
"How much?"
"A hundred and fifty."
A few pages further on, the rarest Texas broadside in the
world. The bottom had been torn off. It was one of Stephen
Austin's pronouncements, no copy of which had ever been
seen before.
"How much for that, Charlie?"
"With my compliments, Tom; you'll never complete it."
The next time I was in London I had a letter from Streeter
saying: "Here are the last seven lines of that broadside; I
found them in a Missouri newspaper. See what you can do
with it." The text of the broadside had been reprinted, and
he had copied off the last part for me.
I took the defective broadside and the missing text to
Zaehnsdorf s world-famous bindery and asked what they could
do about it.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
'This will cost you a lot of money ," said Ernest Zaehnsdorf.
"I didn't ask about that; I asked what you could do," I said,
and departed for Scotland.
When I got back, they had completed the broadside so
perfectly that only a magnifying glass would tell where the
original stopped and the copy began. They had lettered in
the type by hand.
"This is beautiful," I said. "What will it cost?"
'Well, it took a man seven days to do it. You can give me
seven pounds."
This is one occasion when the discovery of a unique item
has not lured out any further copies. Tom Streeter's, cobbled
as it is, remains alone.
In trying to keep this book as pure as Ivory soap claims to
be, IVe looked over a good many volumes about bookselling
and book collecting. The only one that struck me as completely
truthful is the Memoirs of the Life of Mr. James Lackington,
a great London bookseller, who, like me, was brought up a
devout Methodist. In middle life, after telling tales of book
transactions that he felt were less than perfectly honest, he
recanted and became an agnostic. Later on, he apparently be-
gan to worry about the future, returned to Methodism, and
wrote another pious Methodist book. I have not followed him
that far.
Of all the millions of words that have been written about
bookselling and rare books, most are damn nonsense. The
whole thing is really nothing but a battle of wits.
One bookselling book, Tommy Spencer's Forty Years in My
Bookshop, is an example of most of its kind, and I don't think
too much of it. Possibly I am prejudiced. On my first trip to
London I had a number of invitations from Mr. Spencer to
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come in. When I finally went, I saw a bunch of junk over in
one corner, and to save my face, I picked out two or three
things that I thought were worth carting away.
"Oh, those books are married," said Spencer. (This is an
English trade term for what we here call a "tie-in" sale you
buy all the books or none.)
I had made up my mind to spend probably five quid on
brother Spencer, so I priced the married lot.
"You can have those for a hundred quid."
"Good-by. I'll be seeing you soon." And off I went.
It happened that Erhard Weyhe of New York, the world's
greatest dealer in art books, was staying at the same hotel
where I was. He spoke to me that evening. "Do you want to
buy anything from Spencer?"
"Oh, he has some junk that I'd be willing to have."
"Well, come along with me. I'm going to spend two or
three thousand pounds down there tonight, and hell sell you
what you want at any price or no price to get you out of the
place."
So down we went. The fat Mr. Spencer kept shifting un-
easily in his chair, and did not seem at all glad to see me.
"Well, uh, Mr. Everitt, what will you give me for that lot of
Americana?"
"Well, I was thinking of ten quid."
"Take them away," said Spencer with a sweep of the arm
and a great sigh of relief.
The only comparable book to Spencer's that I can think of
in this country is Dr. Abraham S. W. Rosenbach's Books and
Bidders.
Some other attempts have been made along the same line,
but so far as I know, no other book equals these two.
If you think gooey writing is a thing of the past, let me
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
quote to you from the Antiquarian Bookman of June 3, 1950.
"We want bookshops pleasant to enter into, catalogues be-
guiling to order out of, libraries treasure-houses of pleasure,
not mausoleums, collectors' meetings as merry and many as
possible." If I ever go into this dream bookshop, I think it
will take two bottles of Mothersill's Remedy and two quarts
of Old Taylor before I feel comfortable again. As to the kind
of libraries described, to say nothing of the collectors' meet-
ings, thank God, they don't exist.
"But," the editor continues, "there are no 'trade secrets/
We do pay off on knowledge, but this is available to all who
will take the trouble to seek it out."
I know of no fifty-six words that contain so much misin-
formation about bookselling. If you had all, or even half, the
trade secrets (by which I mean information not listed in any
bibliography) in the heads of Lathrop Harper, Edward
Eberstadt, Mike Walsh, Ernest Wessen, Sam Dauber, Leon
Kashnor, Mark Cohen, Charlie Harris, and a few others like
them, you could as I have said before this make a very
handsome living out of rare books without a dollar of capital
or a single volume of bibliography.
As you may have concluded from my letter-carrier friend's
experience with Beck's Illinois Gazetteer, on the other hand,
bibliographies and reference books are not worth a damn any-
way unless you know how to use them.
One of the most solemn bookselling organizations I know
of will never sell an old book until they have searched all their
own catalogues and all the other catalogues and price lists in
their extensive reference library. They are very much afraid of
giving away something for nothing. But at the same time
there has to be some end to their pains. Since the various
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volumes of American Book Prices Current do not bother with
items that auctioned below five dollars, these good people have
established a working rule that any book they cannot find
must be worth about $3.50.
On one occasion I bought some Mexican pamphlets con-
cerning California. There were three items that they had not
been able to find in the reference books. "Well call you up
when we've priced these/' their man said.
After a while he did so, and gave me the not unexpected
news that the price of each was $3.50 less 10 per cent.
Since all I said was, "All right, send them over," I hope
I showed no excitement. But the parcel post took four days,
and I got a little uneasy.
All was well, however, when they arrived, and I personally
delivered them to a Western specialist who paid me nine
hundred dollars for two of them.
I don't know exactly how I have developed a feel for tell-
ing when such unprepossessing-looking junk is worthless and
when it is priceless. For one thing, although I can only pick
out about six words of Spanish, I have a sharp eye for such
names as California, Oregon, and Texas, no matter how
baffling the words that surround them. When I see these words
in a Mexican publication between 1830 and 1848, the chances
are that the thing is not recorded, not because it is too cheap
to bother with, but because it is unique.
Once when I came back from a London trip, my partner
Stager said smugly, "Dauber & Pine had a cattle-trade map
catalogued for seven-fifty. So I bought it, and sold it for fifty
dollars."
"Adolph," I said, "Dauber & Pine were pretty stupid, but
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
you were a lot stupider.** The map had been issued in the
1880's by one of the Western railroads, and only three copies
had ever been heard of.
In those days I lived down near Dauber & Pine's and used
to drop in almost every night. Sam Dauber buttonholed me.
"I had two copies of that cattle map, Charlie," he said, "but
Adolph tried to beat me down to five dollars, so I didn't tell
him. Would you like the other copy?"
"Sure, 111 give you seven-fifty with no argument at all,**
I said.
I turned mine over for $350. When the buyer's estate was
sold up not so very long afterward, the map brought $475.
In other words, it's imagination, not bibliography, that
makes money.
Sometimes I think that the followers of A. Edward Newton,
Merle Johnson, and Barton Currie should all go to a psy-
chiatrist; then I wonder whether psychiatrists can do any
good to sheep.
One of the most famous "tools" for first edition collectors is
Merle Johnson's American First Editions. When Johnson was
putting the book together, he said to me, "Charlie, this is
just a game, like checkers. If I can persuade a man that one
edition of a book is worth five dollars, and another edition is
worth three hundred, then I can sell him the three-hundred-
dollar one."
He and I had a long argument over the true first edition of
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast. Harper
& Brothers put out one edition in black cloth and another,
cheaper, in their "school library." I kept telling Johnson I
had never heard of a publisher's putting out a cheap reprint
before the original edition. During this argument I sold a
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very nice copy in black cloth to a collector from Pittsburgh
for a hundred dollars. Johnson could not see the force of my
argument, as in his collector's bible he insisted that the "school
library" edition was the first. My Pittsburgh collector, reading
Johnson, declared I had robbed him. I told him that books
were always sold on the basis of the best knowledge at the
time when they were sold. He was not satisfied.
I said I would be glad to give him $150 for the book. He
said all bibliographers and booksellers were a pack of scoun-
drels, and he was going to sell his collection and never buy
another book. At the sale the Two Years Before the Mast that
he complained about brought $275. For a while after the issue
of Johnson's bibliography the "school library" edition sold for
as much as $1200.
Johnson's book has since undergone several revisions at
the hands of Jacob Blanck, and is now as accurate as any
reference book can be. Let me remark, parenthetically that
it calls the black cloth Two Years Before the Mast the true
first edition.
Apropos of books about book collecting, one of the greatest
living bibliographers is Mr. R. W. G. Vail. I can hardly ever
remember catching him in a mistake, but I treasure as a sub-
lime understatement the following note in his The Literature
of Book Collecting: "Currie, Barton Wood, Fishers of Books
. . . Pleasantly written, not always accurate ... A melan-
choly souvenir of frenzied collecting at top-notch prices be-
fore the crash.
One of the best and most down-to-earth books about books
I know is Leon Vincent's Life of DeWitt Miller.
Miller was among my favorite book collectors. He made
a good living as a Chautauqua lecturer. When he was not on
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the platform, he was usually infesting some old bookstore.
He could be sure of a warm welcome in every shop in the
country. He used to carry a green cloth lawyer's bag three
feet long, and seldom left a bookstore without filling it to the
top.
You could never tell what he was going to buy; it might be
anything in the whole field of literature, biography, or history.
Eight out of every ten books he bought he was likely to in-
scribe and send off to friends.
(Incidentally, he took a fiendish delight in buying at sec-
ondhand stores copies he had autographed and sending them
back to the original recipients.)
Miller had the best accidental collection of great rarities I
ever knew of. He cared nothing about rarities as such; his
method was to go into a bookstore, pull a bagful of volumes
off the shelves, never looking at the prices, and say, "How
much?"
In the small-town shops where he usually went, the dealers
were just as innocent about five-hundred-dollar books as he
was. So he accumulated an incredible collection without any-
one's being the wiser, least of all himself.
His conscious ambition was to accumulate a perfect work-
ing library, and in this he succeeded admirably. At the time
of his death he had many thousands of volumes.
He left this library to a small school in Maryland, along
with money to brace up a building to house it. The trustees
after a few years called in an auctioneer, who picked out about
three hundred volumes from the thousands of books. He must
have been stunned by the quantity, because he overlooked at
least ten times as many rarities as he took.
Then, within a few years, the trustees showed that their
library training had not been wasted: they decided that the
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building was overcrowded, and sold all the books to a book-
shop I know for a few dollars above the freight charges.
The owners of that bookshop not only lived on this col-
lection for a decade, but they are still selling items from it.
The first rule of sound practice for any collector, and indeed
any dealer, is to establish a firm connection with someone he
can trust, and not keep shopping around in search of an extra
dollar. (You may remember that Mr. Ford thought it cheaper
to pay me fifteen dollars for something than to keep hunting
until he could buy it for ten dollars.) Quite aside from the
time you waste, dealing with a friend often shows a better
dollar balance.
I once had a letter from a real-estate man in Virginia in-
quiring about a manuscript he had. He said he did not know
what it was, and would like it appraised or perhaps sold. I
wrote him to send it on, and to be sure to ship it express,
insured. This is the easiest and quietest way of finding out
how high an owner himself values his property. The manu-
script arrived, insured for twenty-five dollars. When I looked
it over, I found that it was the original manuscript of Goo-
kin's Indians of New England.
First I went to the oracle, Mr. Eames, to learn if the manu-
script had ever been printed. He soon told me that it had been
printed in the Transactions of the American Antiquarian So-
ciety, and, furthermore, that this identical manuscript had
served the printer as copy.
I wrote the owner that I did not know what the manuscript
was really worth, but that I could get him fifteen hundred
dollars immediately, or three thousand if he were not in a
great hurry.
He wired that he was coming to town next day. His first
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
and practically only act was to claim his manuscript and scoot
out of the store.
I filled in by the grapevine what happened afterward. He
took the manuscript to the largest auction gallery in the
country, whose Americana expert assured him I was robbing
him. He said the manuscript would bring five thousand at the
very least. When the precious manuscript came up at auction,
a colleague of mine bought it for four hundred dollars.
I sent a postcard to the former owner: 'Tour not liking my
face was pretty expensive."
For a person who has made much of his living through six
decades by reading booksellers' catalogues, I find myself pecu-
liarly apt to be enraged by them. The other day I was reading
a catalogue in which the word "scarce" appeared forty-seven
times and the word "rare" eleven times. Out of the fifty-eight,
none was rare; one of the "rare" ones was, as a matter of fact,
rather scarce.
Somehow I don't mind this quite so much when the booksel-
ler privately knows better. For instance, I once stopped at
Charles Chadenat's famous bookshop in Paris. Chadenat wel-
comed me with considerable ceremony. I found he had a rope
across the door of his rare-book room.
"America has driven down the value of the franc, and I
don't want to sell any rarities until the franc has risen again,"
he explained. "However, you and Mr. Harper have been good
customers of mine for years, and if you can come back to-
morrow, I will be glad to show you any Western Americana I
may have." When I came back, he produced, with an air of
religious awe, a French volume about the California gold rush.
The word "rare" seemed to take on new meaning as he ex-
plained and gesticulated. It was really a gesture of interna-
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THE TRADE
tional good will to allow such a gem to pass from his hands
to mine. Furthermore, it was as fresh as the day it came from
the bindery.
My experience is that books as clean as this have usually
been protected by having other copies on each side of them. I
said, "That's fine, Monsieur Chadenat. Ill be glad to take ten
copies."
He flushed with mortification. "But I only have eight/'
By the way, my own rule-of-thumb definition of a scarce
book is one that you have to spend two or three years hunting
for; of a rare book, one that you can't find in ten or twenty
years.
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PART IF
C.P.E.
EVERYONE knows that the cobbler's children have no shoes.
By the same token, very few booksellers read. If I have any
eccentricity as a bookseller, I suppose it is my habit of read-
ing my wares. This in turn I got from my mother, who was
a country schoolteacher in Andover, New Jersey. There have
been many lists of books that influenced American thought,
but sixty-five years ago practically none of these lists were
available in the country. Instead, my mother used to read aloud
at least three nights a week. When I was a boy, the family
library consisted of a Bible, a set of Josephus, and a copy of
E. P. Roe's Barriers Burned Away, a novel about the Chicago
fire. To this day, I know nothing more about the Chicago
fire.
The library kept pace with me in its growth. The additions
included John Habberton's Hekris Babies, Harriet Beecher
Stowe's Old Town Folks, a volume of California humor called
Phoenixiana, and another of Mrs. Stowe's novels, which im-
pressed me at the time more than any of the others, Dred.
I still think it a better story than Uncle Toms Cabin.
Between feeding three farmhands, making butter, and milk-
ing cows when some of our men were drunk, my mother spent
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
four months reading Vanity Fair aloud. My only surviving
impression of this is that Becky Sharp is one of the most vicious
characters in fiction.
When I was twelve years old, I was presented with a copy
of The Last of the Mohicans. I was lucky enough to find a place
on the roof where my father could not see me; so when I was
supposed to be chopping kindling for the next day, I would be
reading about Natty Bumppo.
When my own children came along, I assumed that they
would enjoy the Leatherstocking Tales, so I presented each
one with a set. None of them could read Cooper at all.
So I tried to reread those stodgy volumes, and discovered
that my children were dead right.
So many years ago that I have quite lost count, I had an
open bookshop across the street from Wanamaker's. A woman
I knew slightly came in one day, and asked if I had ever heard
of Rudyard Kipling.
"Who is Rudyard Kipling?" I asked, or words to that effect.
She gave me a copy of John Lovell's edition of Barrack
Room Ballads. I read it.
Of course you know how youngsters ( I was in my twenties )
are carried away by enthusiasm for a book. I was carried away
by that one, and the odd thing is I have never changed my
mind. I thought then, and I think now, that Rudyard Kipling
was the greatest writer of my generation. I may not live to
see his reputation back where it belongs, but it will come
back.
I have always had the run of Frank Doubleday's publishing
offices; I worked for him once, and my brother was his partner.
Doubleday was noted for his enormous wastebasket, which
stood up higher than his desk. One day I was in his office,
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C.P.E.
and noticed some galley proofs just within my reach in his
wastebasket.
"What are those, Effendi?" I asked.
"Oh, those are the galleys of Kim. We've gone into pages,
and we don't need the galleys."
I fished the proofs out. There seemed to be two or three
hundred corrections in Kipling's hand.
"Look here, Effendi," I said, "fifty-fifty on what I get for
these."
The great Kipling collector of that time was a man named
Williamson. He got a bargain when he paid me $750 for the
galleys.
As Kipling became better known, copyright protection on
his works grew important. Until recently it was necessary in
such cases, under American copyright law, to make separate
printings. Two copies had to go to the Library of Congress,
and two copies had to be billed to some dealer. I remember
as if it were yesterday the time when Doubleday, my brother
Sam, and Kipling stood by the press while the special copy-
right printing of The White Mans Burden came off. The edi-
tion was ten copies, and then the type was destroyed.
I was the dealer involved. Two copies of the poem were
billed to me at $1.50 less 40 per cent, ninety cents each.
Kipling inscribed a copy to J. L. Thompson, Doubleday's
business manager. I don't ever expect to know what happened
to the other three copies.
With what I hope is less than my usual imagination, I sold
my two copies to collectors at fifty dollars apiece. Quite a while
later I sold the Thompson copy to Mr. Ellis A. Ballard, the
great Philadelphia collector, for fifteen hundred dollars. When
Kipling collectors utterly vanished, the Ballard collection was
sold at the American Art Association Galleries for about 10
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
per cent of its appraised value. Still, one consolation was that
The White Man's Burden, the high spot of the sale, brought
five hundred dollars.
During the Kipling boom, without question the outstanding
authority on Kipling was Travers Brown, a bookseller with a
wonderful knowledge of first editions; he was also a friend of
mine, a diabetic, and perfectly irresponsible, He used to play
bridge at my house all the time, lose steadily, and leave me to
pay his losses. He also bought, or at least picked out and
removed, books from my shop.
One day he asked me down for a drink. His diabetes had
been getting worse. "Charlie," he said, "I'm going to commit
suicide tomorrow. Have your man Harry come down to the
store and pick out anything he wants so as to settle our ac-
count."
"It's all right with me, Travers," I said. "I haven't the slight-
est idea what you owe me anyway." And I departed for New
Hampshire.
My man Friday, Harry Alpern, went down as instructed
and picked out some books, including the Montdale and Liv-
ingston bibliographies of Kipling. They contained not hun-
dreds but thousands of additional notes by Brown. I gave
the matter no further thought until I got back from New
Hampshire. Then I discovered that Harry, being afraid I
would worry, had not notified me that Mr. Brown had jumped
off a boat.
My connections with the firm of Doubleday kept me well
supplied with Kipling material for a good many years. One
item that passed through my hands rather embarrassed me.
While I was away, John Phillips, who had been Double-
day's editor, and also a partner in the firm of McClure, Phil-
lips, came into the store with some books because he was
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C.P.E.
moving to Goshen, New York. Harry Alpern quite inno-
cently and unsuspectingly gave him a hundred dollars for
the lot.
On my return I discovered that the books included Mark
Twain's privately printed What Is Man? and two chapters of
the original manuscript of Stalky 6- Co. Everybody's inten-
tions had been of the best; I could not go back on Harry; and
Phillips did not need the money, so we left it at that. I sold
the Mark Twain for a hundred and fifty dollars, and sat back
to wait with the Kipling.
My phone rang, and a voice said, "I'm Stewart, from Halifax,
Nova Scotia. Sam Dauber tells me you have some unusual
Kipling material. Could you come down to the Ritz-Carlton
and show it to me?"
At the Ritz-Carlton I found a man on two crutches, who in-
troduced himself and apologized for not being able to call at
my store. In his room he had two satchels, one on each side of
his chair.
First I showed him several of my scarce copyright printings.
He looked each one over, said, "I have that," and reached for
the next.
Then I showed him a little book of recitations, containing
Kipling's first American appearance in print.
"What's this worth?" he asked.
I said, "Ten cents, and I want fifty dollars for it,"
Mr. Stewart reached down into the left satchel and handed
me a fifty-dollar bill.
"Now," he went on, "I see you have some manuscript of
Stalktj & Co." He looked at the pages for a moment, and went
on, "I understand from Mr. Dauber that you want a thousand
dollars for this."
I said yes.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
He reached down into the right-hand satchel and handed
me twenty Canadian fifty-dollar bills.
"Wait a minute," he said, "the Canadian exchange is against
us/' And he reached into the left-hand satchel and gave me
an American fifty-dollar bill.
"Now/' I said, "Mr. Stewart, would you have any objection
to telling me what the hell this is all about? I know you are a
friend of Kipling's, and that's all I do know/'
"Well, I have a paper business up in Halifax that makes me
a few dollars, and every once in so often I like to go on a
binge. Most of the time I won't answer letters, look at cata-
logues, pay any attention to booksellers' quotations, or any-
thing else. Then I break out. I happen to have the feeling that
Kipling is the most important man in my lifetime, or your
lifetime, and I'd like to get together the best Kipling collec-
tion there is. We have a little university up in Halifax, doesn't
amount to much, but anyway I mean to give this collection
to the university. Probably not a son of a bitch in the world
will ever look at it, but if it provides any inspiration to just
one man, that's all I need."
After Travers Brown's suicide, I offered his annotated Kip-
ling bibliographies to Mr. Stewart for $500. Mr. Stewart did
not feel they were worth more than $250, so I hung on to
them. If he wants them today for $50, they are his.
(By the way, The White Mans Burden was the last copy-
right printing of which exact records were kept. No bibli-
ographer will ever know how many copies were printed of
the innumerable subsequent copyright issues. The boys in
Doubleday's office suddenly discovered there was a good thing
to be made out of these, and for some time special Kipling
copyright printings could be bought, at steadily rising prices.)
# * *
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C.P.E.
The year I was pinch-hitting for J. L. Thompson, the sales
manager for Doubleday, Page & Co., the firm published a novel
by Alfred Ollivant called Bob, Son of Battle. All our readers
and all our editors agreed that it was the best dog story ever
written.
By advertising extensively and trying to spread our own
personal enthusiasm, we managed (with some difficulty) to
sell a few hundred copies.
One day Frank Doubleday was in my office, feeling very
doleful about our pet book.
"Charlie, I just can't understand it. Here's a book written
by a man in a wheel chair, which everybody around here
insists is the best dog story ever put on paper. We have a fist-
ful of reviews that say the same thing. We spend hundreds
of dollars trying to tell the public about it. And then what?
Our salesmen come back and say they can't get it onto the
bookseller's shelves with a sledge hammer. Are you crazy?"
"Effendi," I said, "you go back to your office and write
down what you've just been telling me. Let me make an ad
out of that' 9
The next issue of the World's Work (which Doubleday
owned) contained a full-page ad headed: "The Autobiography
of a Novel." In the following six months we must have sold
fifty thousand copies. A publisher's real problem is making
people listen the first time.
Frank Doubleday had an extremely well-grounded skep-
ticism about the merchandising abilities of American book-
sellers. Whenever he really wanted to sell many copies of a
book, he would think up a brand-new outlet.
Bliss Perry edited for him three ten-volume sets of Little
Classics. The sale through the bookstores was downright mis-
erable. Finally Perry got discouraged, came to Doubleday,
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
and said, "I don't see any future for these wretched things.
If you can give me a few hundred dollars in cash, I'll be glad
to sign a receipt for payment in full."
Doubleday gave him the check, and Perry put on his hat
and departed.
The door had hardly slammed behind him when Frank
Doubleday, true to his mistrust of the book trade, went down
to see Charles Lanier, of the Review of Reviews. He extracted
from Lanier an order for 300,000 volumes of the Little Classics.
In the next two or three years Lanier reordered more than
once, in quantities almost equal to the original order.
Doubleday scrupulously sent royalty checks to Bliss Perry
(which was not enough to keep Perry in the Doubleday stable
of authors).
In 1896, my boss, Summer-field MacLean, bought a tremen-
dous library of Anglican theology. I found myself taking an
interest in it, and became something of a specialist in Anglican
bibliography. While MacLean was dispersing the library,
Bishop Darlington of Pittsburgh was an almost daily frequenter
of the store. He could never resist a seventeenth-century book,
regardless of the subject.
We supplied him with these, and he began bringing in his
friends. One in particular, Reverend Stewart Crockett, came
almost as often as the bishop. When he discovered that I had
a smattering of Episcopalian bibliography, he used to hold
most of his dealings with me.
Bishop Darlington was an eminently free-and-easy, jovial
backslapper, whom I had got into the habit of treating not
at all as you might expect a bishop to be treated. More or
less unconsciously I extended the habit to Dr. Crockett. Ap-
parently this was a mistake; or perhaps it wasn't. Anyway,
[ 220 ]
C.P.E.
one day as Dr. Crockett was leaving the store, he turned and
said, "Everitt, will you deliver a message to your wife?"
I said I would be glad to.
"You tell Mrs. Everitt that I shall be glad to preach your
funeral sermon gratis."
"Will you indeed?" I said. "What are you going to say?"
"The simplest thing in the world. Ill stand up beside the
coffin and just say, 'We all hope he's gone where we know
he hasn't.'"
Only a few months later Crockett was robbed of this pleasure
by death. I appraised his library, and of course made no
charge.
In October of 1898 I left Summerfield MacLean and
opened my own bookstore at 18 East 23rd Street, under-
neath the Scott Stamp and Coin Company. I had a few
books and $303 in cash, but more shelves than books. That
was the season when Kipling's The Day's Work came out, and
I had my window full of it, along with some theological books.
After a few weeks I had a visit from the janitor of the
Catherine Wolfe house at 24th Street and Madison Avenue.
Miss Wolfe had recently died, leaving her estate under the
care of David Wolfe Bishop and Cortlandt Field Bishop, the
latter of whom owned the American Art Association Galleries.
They had sold the house to the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company, which later put up the present building on the
site.
The janitor's tale was that Mr. Bishop had sent several
barrels of old books downstairs with instructions to burn
them, but the janitor thought he might pick up a dollar or
two by speaking to me.
I went over to look at the rubbish, which proved to be
[ 221 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
American pamphlets. "How much do you want for these?"
I asked.
"Oh, give me five dollars," said the janitor.
Not unnaturally, I was uneasy. I said that I would be glad
to do business if the janitor could give me a note from Mr.
Bishop.
He came back with the note in about ten minutes, and I
handed him fifty dollars. Part of this princely sum was to
pay for his bringing the barrels over in a wheelbarrow.
One of the axioms in the rare-book trade is that the grape-
vine spreads word of any important new collection like wild-
fire. One bookseller called on me by accident the next morn-
ing; he couldn't keep his mouth shut; when I opened the
store the morning after, seven booksellers were on the door-
step.
I took in two or three thousand dollars that day (none of it
accounted for by Kipling or theology). As I look back now,
I realize that I was a good deal stupider than the janitor who
sold me the lot for fifty dollars.
Thanks to Mr. Bishop and his janitor, and in spite of my
own ignorance, I accumulated quite a fair-sized bankroll for
a bookseller. I was very glad of it when I got a letter from
the widow of a man who had been postmaster in Harrisburg
for sixty-five years.
I went down to look over his library, which was a very
nice one. We agreed on a price of around twelve hundred
dollars; I wrote my check and was about to leave.
a just a minute," she said. "Let me get out that old box.
My husband kept a sheet of every stamp that was issued dur-
ing his sixty-five years as postmaster. Could you afford to
give me five dollars for the lot?"
I looked at the contents of the box. There were about five
[ 222 ]
C.P.E.
hundred dollars' worth, face value, of uncanceled stamps
there.
"Look," I said, "I have my ticket to New York, and $205
in cash on me. Ill give you two hundred dollars, but I
strongly advise you not to take it, because I think you can do
much better."
"If I offer it to you for five dollars, and you offer me two
hundred," she replied, "I think it would be most unethical
of me not to accept." So I shelled out the two hundred dol-
lars, and added the stamps to my take.
Back in New York I went upstairs to Scott's, and put the
stamps on the desk of John Luff, who was the leading stamp
authority of the time.
"John," I said, "I want you to pick out all the stamps in
here that are selling at a premium, and let me have the rest
to use for postage."
A couple of hours later he came down. "Here, 111 give you
two thousand for these, and that will leave you about three
hundred dollars' worth of stamps to stick on your enve-
lopes."
I looked at him. "John, are you robbing me plenty?"
He looked right back. "You bet your damn life." And we
closed the deal.
One of the finest libraries that has passed through my hands
belonged to William H. Egle, the Pennsylvania historian. It
was rich in genealogies. As I was thumbing through one vol-
ume, I came on a single sheet of paper; it was in crabbed
German, but I finally figured out that it consisted of ten birth
notices of members of the Bellinger family. It was printed in
1763 at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, the great seat of pre-Revolu-
tionary German-American printing. Dr. Egle had written in
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the margin, "The first known genealogical record printed in
America."
By this time I was a real expert, so I boldly priced the
broadside at $150.
The morning after my catalogue was mailed, the librarian
of one of the three largest genealogical societies in the coun-
try telephoned long distance. "Have you still got that Bol-
linger broadside?"
"Yes."
"Is it mine?"
"Sure."
"All right, then. Everitt, you aren't so hot. We've been
advertising for years that we would pay a thousand dollars
for that broadside if we could find one."
I may have lost a paper profit on the Bollinger genealogy.
Another item in the same catalogue brought me a valuable
and much cherished friendship. There was a book by William
Byrd of Virginia, written in German and printed in Switzer-
land in 1737, entitled (in translation) 'New Found Eden. I
have since concluded that this was certainly almost the first,
and probably the first, attempt at real-estate promotion in
Virginia and North Carolina. I was trying to work up nerve
enough to tag it a hundred dollars.
Looking for moral support, I spoke to Daniel Parish, of the
New York Historical Society, who used to frequent my store.
"I don't know a thing about this kind of stuff," he said,
"but there's a man named Wilberforce Eames up at the
Lenox Library who knows more about it than any other
person living. He's a nice fellow. Why not go see him?"
So up I went with my New Found Eden. The Lenox Li-
brary in those days, before it became part of the New York
Public Library, was in the East Seventies. Mr. Eames wel-
[ 224 ]
C.P.E.
corned me in, looked over my book, and got out his copy.
When we compared them, it turned out that his copy had
only one map, whereas mine had two.
"What is your price for your copy, Mr. Everitt?" he asked.
"I haven't the slightest idea. I came to you for information
about it, and I'm as ignorant as a babe unborn."
I supposed that concluded the interview, and I was just
getting ready to leave when Mr. Eames said, "If you would
consider taking two hundred and fifty and our copy, lacking
one map, we should be very delighted indeed to have your
copy."
I did not dawdle very long about trading copies, and went
back to the store with his copy instead of mine.
It was my good luck to have many occasions afterward for
discovering that Mr. Eames was the one librarian who never
made a mistake about a book. No other copy of Byrd's New
Found Eden has ever been offered for sale (although the print-
ing of these words will probably bring four copies to the sur-
face).
About 1902 or 1903 John Francis (who had worked with
me at Summerfield MacLean's) and I started the Everitt &
Francis Company. We made some money, but not enough to
satisfy two such ambitious operators, so we rented a huge
store at 114 East 23rd Street. A man came in one day and
said, "I'm moving. I have a bunch of old books, and if you'll
pay for the express, you're welcome to them." He never gave
his name, and I was not interested enough to ask.
A little while later an expressman delivered a large pack-
ing case, and demanded seventy-five cents' ransom. I hap-
pened to be out, and one of the boys paid the seventy-five
cents.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
When I got back, I pawed through the contents of the case.
"Well," I said, "we're out only seventy-five cents anyway.
Wait a minute, what's this?"
It was the paper cover to J. Q. Howard's Life of Lincoln,
Cincinnati, 1860. Just the cover, no contents.
"Oh, a lot of those were used to stuff out the case."
"What did you do with them?"
"Put them down cellar."
"All right, take this trash down cellar, and bring them up
instead."
He staggered back upstairs with a load of twenty-eight
copies in original paper wrappers.
I sat down and wrote to Major William H. Lambert of
Philadelphia, then the greatest Lincoln collector. "How would
you like a copy of Howard's Life of Lincoln for ten dollars?"
I asked.
He replied in crisp military fashion by endorsement on my
note: "There is no such book."
So I sent him a copy.
He sent back two ten-dollar bills, with a note; "Send an-
other copy." Herman Sauer, the wisest Lincoln scout of the
time, bought five copies. He did not think it worth calling to
my attention something I had not noticed, namely, that one
of the copies he bought was in German. This, I learned later,
he sold to Charles McLellan, of Boody, McLellan & Company,
for a hundred dollars.
Colonel McLellan was a Confederate officer who spent
all the latter half of his life buying books about Lincoln.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., eventually bought his collection and
gave it to the Brown University library. (The last sale prices
of Howard's Lincoln that I heard of were $250 for the Ger-
man, and two copies of the English for $150 each. )
[ 226 ]
C.P.E.
At this time Emmanuel Hertz was just launching on his
interest in Lincolniana. He told me that J. Q. Howard was still
alive, and still working at a job that Lincoln had given him
as a reward for writing the biography, in the Library of Con-
gress. I wrote to Mr. Howard, asking if he could tell me any-
thing about his Life of Lincoln.
Two-line reply: "If you want my autograph, send me two
dollars." I did not want his autograph, so I wrote to John
Hay, Lincoln's biographer, asking what he knew.
His reply ran to two pages. The meat of it was that Howard
had written the biography of Lincoln for campaign pur-
poses, but that Lincoln had thought so poorly of it that no
copies were ever distributed to the public. (I put this reply
in my files, which I am sorry to say I have discovered are even
more bottomless than those of the Government; or at least I
don't know where Mr. Hay's letter is. )
Major Lambert, in addition to his Lincoln collection, had
a fine lot of Thackeray. One day a stranger, looking rather
woebegone, came into my 23rd Street store and said he had
just been to a book auction and had made a mistake. He had
bought a set of Mrs. Chapone's pious Letters, which the
cataloguer said had some notes in Thackeray's hand. His en-
thusiasm had run away with him, and he had paid three dol-
lars. I said all right, I would help him out of his predicament.
Next morning I came to the store rather late and found him
sitting on the steps. "I know I went crazy on this, and I'm
willing to lose a dollar, if you want to give me two dollars."
That far I was willing to go, so money and books changed
hands.
When I looked over my purchase, I found that almost
every page contained some supercilious scribble by Thackeray
about the author's goody-goody sentiments. So I sent the set
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
to Major Lambert, and asked him how he would like to pay
me $250 for it.
He wrote back that the books were dirt cheap, but he had
all the Thackeray junk he wanted.
Next I reassured myself by taking the set to the Scribner
Book Store, where Safford, then the head of the rare-book
department, said there was no mistake, this was the real thing.
Just as I was talking to Safford, Ernest Dressel North
drifted in. He vanished again, and lay in wait for me outside
the door.
"How much?"
"Two hundred and fifty dollars."
"All right, send me a bill."
Being broke, as was my custom, I said I was willing to go
down to his place and pick up the check myself.
A couple of weeks later I had a note from Major Lambert:
"I see that Mrs. Chapone's Letters have rapidly increased in
value. Ernest North is willing to let me have them for $1500."
Ten years later I noticed that this was still one of Mr. North's
prize possessions.
The late Luther Livingston is best known today as the
editor of the first four volumes of American Book Prices
Current, issued in four fat quartos. I think of him more as the
first bookseller in America whose catalogues gave truly accu-
rate descriptions of the books.
After Mr. Livingston died, Dodd, Mead (whose rare-book
business he had run ) gave up their extremely swanky store at
35th Street and Fifth Avenue, and moved their publishing
offices and the remainder of their rare-book department to
30th Street and Fourth Avenue. Robert Dodd was in charge
of the rare books.
[ 228 ]
C.P.E.
One day my partner, Adolph Stager, and I were doing noth-
ing except wondering where the next dollar was coming
from.
"Adolph," I said, "are you going to the Adirondacks this
summer?"
"Yes."
"On what?"
"I don't know. Charlie, are you going to Sebago?"
"Of course."
"On what?"
"I don't know. Let's go in and see the old man."
We were on Fourth Avenue, and we went in and asked Mr.
Dodd if he had any old junk left.
He scratched his head. "Well, I've got thousands of those
wretched pictures that the Society of Iconophiles put out."
(The Society of Iconophiles was a group of amateurs who
specialized in reproducing views of old New York. They
printed only a hundred of each picture, at ten dollars a copy. )
"How many?" I asked.
Mr. Dodd went into the back of the store, shuffled around,
and finally came back to report that he had eighteen hundred.
"How much?"
"Oh, you can have them for a hundred dollars."
"Look here," I said, "you've been trying for years to sell
these things, and you can't do it. If the time has actually come
when you want to get rid of them, I'll give you thirty-five
dollars in real money."
Dodd capitulated.
"All right," I said, "well go down to the bank and get the
money." The only bank we could think of was the old Prov-
ident Loan Society, five blocks down Fourth Avenue, where
Stager pawned his ring for fifty dollars. We went back, handed
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
over the majority of our take, and walked off with the eighteen
hundred prints in bundles under our arms.
At this time there was a cigar store on 23rd Street where
they used to let us leave our packages. On our way down
we ran into Herman Sauer, who was not only a great Lincoln
scout but one of the most famous print-sellers this country has
ever had. His fame rested on himself, not on his store, because
he never had a store. He was equally likely to touch you for
ten dollars or to flash a roll of a hundred fifties. He had
started life as a conductor on the New York Elevated. He
once told me that his introduction to the world of art came
when he rented a cold-water flat on the lower East Side.
Among the rubbish he found a portfolio of old prints. His
wife started to throw them away, but Herman said, "No, let
me see if I can't get the price of a beer out of these."
He took them to Robert Fridenberg, who offered him one
hundred dollars. That was enough to push Herman into the
print business.
This particular day I said to him, "Sauer, have you got any
money?"
"Well, yes," he admitted grudgingly.
So we went out into the back of the cigar store and undid
our bundles. Sauer picked out six hundred prints at $1.50 each,
and peeled the cash off the roll in his pocket. As he was leav-
ing with his package, I stepped into a phone booth and called
up Evert J. Wendell.
"E.J.," I said, "I've got twelve thousand dollars' worth of
Iconophiles pictures, and they're yours for twelve hundred."
"Bully," he said, "but I can't see you. I'm on my way to
the grand jury."
"How long'll you be home?"
"Thirty-five minutes."
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C.P.E.
"I'll be there in ten/-
At his house I spread out the pictures on his big grand
piano. Mr. Wendell's eyes gleamed.
"Bully, I'll take them. But I haven't a check here."
"Never mind," I said. "Where are you going now?"
"Down on the subway to City Hall."
"Fine, I'll go with you."
Down at City Hall I spent a penny in a stationery store
for a blank check and shoved it under Mr. Wendell's nose.
He signed, and Stager and I went on our vacations.
Vacations with me are an end, not a means. I believe in
taking at least two, and preferably three, months off, pursuing
the greatest of game fish, the smallmouthed bass, with no
radio and no old books. It takes a very powerful impulse to
make me change my mind.
Once Harry Alpern was driving the Everitts to Snowville,
New Hampshire, in a new Plymouth. Even on vacation we had
to stop for a word with A. J. Huston, the Portland bookseller.
Huston told me of an antique dealer in South Portland who had
recently bought nearly a ton of old family papers.
Harry is not such a strong character as I am; he was itch-
ing to head for South Portland at once.
"No," said I, "to hell with books. We're going fishing."
Then came four days of steady rain. Finally we decided to
take our new car and call on Esposito of South Portland as
private collectors.
As I stepped out of the car, I was greeted by a large
Italian who said, "How do you do, Mr. Everitt. I hope you
drop in and see me. 71
In the back room I found several hundred letters, excellently
classified. One lot interested me a collection of some two
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
hundred letters from a common soldier in New Mexico to his
family in Maine. Crude they were, but probably the best
actual description of life in New Mexico during the seventies
yet known.
During the two hours I was looking over various piles of
papers, Esposito kept chattering over my shoulder. First ask-
ing me to call him Tony, he told me about his great discov-
eries and his wealthy clients. Tony was a man of real imagi-
nation.
The time finally came to talk money. "How much for this
lot, Tony?"
"You know I have only one price, Mr. Everitt." (Sam Daub-
er's description of "one price" is "the most I can get for it.")
"Three hundred."
"Come on," I said to Harry, "time for us to be getting in
the car."
Tony seemed a trifle nervous, so I used an old dodge and
left my cane in the back room. As I was retrieving the cane,
Tony asked me how much I would pay.
I said $150.
His "Yes!" was so loud I wonder if Huston heard him in
Exchange Street. Anyway, Tony paid for that vacation.
One of the outstanding old bookstores in Boston for many
years was N. J. Bartlett & Co., at 28 Cornhill. Chase of
Bartlett's was known and loved by every bookseller in the
United States and Great Britain. After his death the store
was in charge of Ned Bartlett, who had very little interest in
Americana.
Coming down once by train from Little Sebago, we decided
to stop over at the Parker House for a couple of nights. I
dropped in on Bartlett, who assured me that nothing new
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C.P.E.
in my line had come in for several months. Then, as I was
about to leave, he said, "Oh, Mr. Everitt, here's a volume of
pamphlets we've had on exhibition. The price is probably
too high; we marked it two hundred dollars."
Nothing but seven eighteenth-century New England quarto
pamphlets. If Albert W. Johnston looks up his records, he will
find he paid for our weeks at Little Sebago.
On one of the days when Herman Sauer had no roll of fifties
in his pocket, he came into my store and said, "They're sell-
ing off the stuff at the old Ashland House/*
This was a hotel at Fourth Avenue and 25th Street, which
I suspect may have given its name to the Ashland telephone
exchange, and where at all events I had lunch almost daily
for some fourteen years. In spite of this fact I had never been
above the first floor.
"Everitt, give me fifty dollars," said Sauer. "There's a
painting of Number One Broadway in the parlor and I
want it."
I handed him $50. After a while Sauer reappeared around
the corner, bringing a bill for $250, less deposit of $50. Sauer
said he had expected to buy the thing for $35 or $50, but he
wanted it anyway. So I gave him another $200, and this time
he returned with the painting.
"Give me another two bucks for cab fare," said Sauer. "I
want to take this down and show it to Mr. Hoffman."
He vanished in the depths of a horse-drawn cab, and for
two hours I heard no more. He came back by Third Avenue
El, with eleven cents in cash, and a check for $750 from Mr.
Hoffman, who was one of the chief backers of the New York
Historical Society. The painting is now one of the Society's
most prized possessions. I consider that my share was as
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
easy a $249 as I ever made. It also proves that the more you
pay for a thing, the more you can get for it, if that proves
anything.
I did not give up lunching at the Ashland House because
the place closed; I had broken the habit some time before.
The proprietor was a man named Horace Brockway, six feet
tall, with whiskers, a high dignitary in the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company. A group of book people that included,
among others, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ray Stannard Baker,
John Phillips, the editor, and Lincoln Steffens had presump-
tive rights to a back room where we all used to congregate
for lunch. Our favorite dish was steak Bordelaise, which, with
two vegetables, cost seventy-five cents. Pie or ice cream was
a dime, and coffee was a nickel. This left ten cents for the
waiter.
One day Mr. Brockway marched in and said, "Boys, I'm
sorry, but I've got to raise the price of the steak to eighty-five
cents." We all vanished like leaves before the wind.
Now here is a story that makes no sense, has no moral or
conclusion, and could not possibly be true. Nevertheless it
happened to me.
A perfect stranger came into my store on 23rd Street and
said, "Would you be interested in a copy of Horsmanden's
Journal of the Negro Plot in New Yorfc?"
This is an extremely rare book on a plot that was hatched
in the 1740's. To make conversation, I said, "Have you got the
half title?"
"This is one of the three copies that has it," said the
stranger.
"How much do you want for it?" I asked.
"Two hundred dollars."
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C.P.E.
*Td be very glad indeed to see it."
"Ill be in here at ten o'clock tomorrow morning."
I had approximately three dollars in the bank, so I called up
Lathrop Harper, the most learned of all dealers in Americana.
I told him my trouble, and he promised to be on hand at ten
o'clock with money in his pocket. At ten o'clock a carriage
and pair drew up in front of the store, and our stranger got
out, carrying a quarto volume. We looked it over, found it
exactly as described, and Harper forked over two hundred
dollars.
The stranger started for the door, then turned and said,
"By the way, here's a list of some other books I have."
Harper's and my hair stood on end. There were seven books
of the most fabulous rarity the first New York City Di-
rectory and six other items equally choice.
"I suppose you'd like my name and address," said the
stranger. "Here." He wrote them down. "I can't come back
tomorrow, but 111 be here the day after."
We never saw him again.
I sent a man up to the address, hoping for better luck than
I had any expectation of.
It was a vacant lot.
Julia Marlowe had a collection of several hundred books
relating to the stage. Since practically everyone in the theater
was at least a little in love with her, nearly all the books bore
long, intimate presentation inscriptions from the authors.
The collection thus gave rather a portrait of a great actress.
Sain Dauber paid her quite a handsome sum for the books.
When we opened up the cartons in the store, all the flyleaves
with inscriptions were gone.
Just as Sam and I were discussing our plight, Julia Mar-
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THE ADVENTUKES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
lowe's husband, E. H. Sothern, walked in. He was just as
embarrassed as we.
He told us that when he saw Julia starting to tear out fly-
leaves, he protested that it wasn't fair or honest. Then, to
Sam: "You may not know it, but sometimes Julia is not
amenable to reason."
We must still have looked glum.
"Which would you rather?" asked Sothern. "Have me re-
fund your money, or take a thousand of my bookplates for the
drama books you have in the store?"
Julia Marlowe was a great actress; she was married to a
great gentleman.
I hate stamps, but probably I shouldn't; they don't seem
to owe me anything. One day I dropped in at an auction on
University Place, where a collection of 3600 volumes about
stamp collecting stamp catalogues, stamp magazines, and
so forth was on the block. I saw half the stamp sharpshooters
in New York in the audience. For such keen competitors, they
looked awfully friendly, and there was a constant buzz of
conversation among them.
Finally one of them reluctantly said, "A hundred dollars."
Always ready to make trouble, I said, "Five hundred!"
At this point Walter Scott, of Scott and O'Shaughnessy,
came over and sat down beside me. "Charlie, what are you
butting in for? It's worth a hundred dollars for you to sit
down and shut up."
"Why, Walter, I didn't know it was against the law for any-
one to bid on books at an auction."
I finally bought the lot for nine hundred dollars.
Little as I know about stamps, there are some twenty vol-
umes that I have heard of. It struck me as very curious
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C.P.E.
indeed that not one of these titles was in the collection.
I went back to University Place. "Isidore,** I said to the
auctioneer, "there didn't happen to be a box missing from that
lot of stamp books I bought, did there?"
Isidore's expression of surprise was masterly. "Now you men-
tion it, Charlie, I believe there was one box got left down
cellar/'
"All right, what are you going to do about it?"
"Oh, I'll take five hundred dollars for it."
"Now, Isidore/' I said, "I know you don't want any checks.
Ill give you two hundred dollars in nice dirty ten-dollar
bills, or else. . . ."
"All right," said Isidore.
The next thing was a visit from Walter Scott. "Can I pick
out a few books?" he asked innocently.
"No, Walter, you cannot. I don't know enough about them."
Walter departed, shaking his head.
Finally he got to the point of asking what I would take for
the lot. I said $3500.
"Well have to have a meeting."
He came back with the decision: "The best we can do is
twenty-two hundred."
"Don't bother me; I told you my price was thirty-five
hundred."
Finally he came back: "This is our last word. The very best
we can do is twenty-eight hundred."
"Walter," I said, "this is your last chance: thirty-five hun-
dred. Yes or no?"
He allowed they couldn't do it, and departed. So I spent
about ten dollars on an elaborate night letter to Wallace
Cathcart. He came to town the next day and looked over the
collection. They all had green morocco backs, to delight the
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
heart of any librarian. Wallace made no demur at $3500, and
since the bindings alone had cost $10,000, I guess the West-
ern Reserve Historical Society had something of a bargain at
that.
One of my great pals at the Museum of the American In-
dian was George Pepper, who collected and cross-indexed
pamphlets and ephemeral material on American Indian arts
(which I approved of), and stamps (which I did not). He
also had a private collection of Indian books, which I ap-
proved of more than anything. On his deathbed he said to
his wife, "Have Charlie sell my stuff. If I were alive, I could
get five hundred dollars for the stamps, but Charlie doesn't
know anything about them, so you mustn't expect him to get
more than a couple of hundred." Conscious of my ignorance
of stamps, I called in three different stamp dealers. Oddly
enough, each one offered $160 for his choice of the stamps.
I chased them all out.
Then I ran into Walter Scott, the auctioneer, who was a verv
successful seller of stamps to collectors. "Got a couple of
hours, Walter?"
He said sure.
On our way up town in a taxi, I explained that this was
not a commercial transaction; I meant to give every cent I
took to Mrs. Pepper.
My estimate of time was more than generous. Within thirty
minutes Walter said, "There are just a few of these that I can
use. They're worth a thousand dollars to me, and Mrs. Pepper
can keep the rest."
Some months later I asked Walter if he had got out all right
on the Pepper stamps.
"Oh, not too bad I cleared six hundred dollars."
Then I thought of the other jokers with their $160, and
[ 238 ]
C.P.E.
renewed my resolution never to look at another stamp.
Next came the problem of the classified and indexed pam-
phlets that Pepper had housed at the Museum of the Ameri-
can Indian.
I managed to get hold of William Gates at the moment when
he was librarian of Tulane University. "Bill," I said, as we
rode up town, "I'm about to sell you twenty-five dollars' worth
of merchandise for a thousand dollars. You are one of about
half-a-dozen people in the country that would even know what
I'm talking about."
He looked over the collection rather quickly and said, "I
see what you mean. Send them down to Tulane."
I said, "Bill, there's a string attached to this. George Pep-
per spent something like seven years indexing this stuff. If
you buy it, youVe got to keep it in a separate alcove, and
hang a big picture of George over it."
"Glad to," said Bill.
He kept his word. And no sooner was he gone from Tulane
than his successor issued a mimeographed catalogue offering
most of the Pepper material to the firstcomer at twenty-five
cents a pamphlet.
My partner for eighteen years was Adolph Stager. At the
start of our association we were lucky enough to have his
father, Solomon Stager, occupying the front part of our store.
(This is the man whom Henry Wagner, in his reminiscences,
called "an old Jew named Solomon Steiger.")
Solomon Stager came from Austria as a young man. Soon
after he arrived, his relatives outfitted him with a peddler's
tray, which he stocked with all the combs, shoelaces, and other
notions that his entire capital would buy. On his first day
in business he was attracted to a large, fenced greensward,
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
where a considerable crowd of people had gathered. He went
over to the fence, and the crowd, reaching through the palings,
soon emptied his tray. When he went around to the gate in
order to collect, he found that his pitch was an insane asylum,
and he was without both his capital and his stock. Somehow
he recovered enough from this blow to start a grocery, where
he worked unremittingly (and successfully) until his son
Adolph went into the book business. Then old Solomon came
along to help out the boy.
By my time, he had a little department of his own with
standard new books, dictionaries, and the like. His best seller
and favorite book was a modern reprint of Morgan's Expose
of Freemasonry. It sold for thirty-five cents retail. He was out
to lunch one day when an eager customer came in. But the
customer had only a quarter. I knew that the book cost Mr.
Stager seven cents, so I thought I might as well turn over
eighteen cents for him anyhow.
Mr. Stager, back from lunch, was aroused to the very core
of his being by my dereliction. That book was supposed to sell
for thirty-five cents, and not the Almighty himself had any
business cutting the price by nearly a third. I was made to feel
that I had been an extremely thoughtless young man.
Solomon Stager bore me no grudge, however. It was only
a few days later that I went to him and said, "Mr. Stager,
could you possibly write me a check for ten thousand
dollars?"
"Oh, sure just a minute."
The ten thousand dollars soon brought us back a profit of
$3800. I went to Mr. Stager.
"Here," I said, "we made thirty-eight hundred with that ten
thousand of yours; half of it belongs to you."
"Oh, don't talk nonsense. While you had the ten thousand,
[ 240 ]
C.P.E.
I lost eleven dollars and seventy-five cents interest on it, and
that's what I want back."
To Henry Wagner, Solomon Stager may have been just an
old Jew; to me he was the finest old Jew I have ever known,
and there is no higher praise.
When Adolph Stager and I separated years later, I had a
little money and decided I would go to Europe and amuse my-
self for a while. But I used to frequent Dauber & Pine's shop,
and one day when I came in, I found spread out on the floor
about ten thousand volumes that had belonged to a man named
Ferris, one of the early photographers, who had traveled all
over the West and had never thrown anything away.
"I wish you'd look this stuff over, Charlie," Sam Dauber
said. "It cost practically nothing, and I've had an offer of five
hundred."
I poked around for a couple of hours. "Sam, if you'll let me
write a catalogue of this stuff, I'll guarantee to get five thou-
sand out of it for you."
"All right. Why don't you move your desk in here and
do it?"
I spent about five weeks writing and printing the catalogue.
When the dust had cleared away, the take was $7200. "You
aren't doing anything anyhow," Sam said. "Why don't you
handle our Americana on commission, and take any kind of
drawing account you want?"
So I came in to look things over, and wound up spending
every day of the next seven years at Dauber & Pine's.
I am stunned to discover, on counting up, that it is twenty-
five years since I have been in Italy. When I was there with
my wife, we had a standing agreement that I would spend
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the mornings doing junk shops, meet her for lunch at one
o'clock, and put in the afternoon doing art galleries. One
morning in Florence I went to see Otto Lange, a German who
had worked in America, and who usually had a good lot of
Americana. I spent the morning picking out odds and ends. He
saved his heavy artillery for the last. With something of a
flourish he produced a North Carolina pamphlet of which the
only known copy was in the John Carter Brown library; and
the Brown copy had no map.
Lange's was tagged two hundred dollars.
"Why the price, Lange?" I asked, trying to act hard-bitten.
"It's the only known copy with a map," said Lange calmly.
I shelled out.
When I met Mrs. Everitt for lunch, I announced, "I've just
paid the expenses of our trip with something I have in my
pocket."
"I don't care anything about that," said she. "It's twenty
minutes after one."
For more than two decades the greatest collector of Long
Island material was my friend and good customer Orville
Ackerley. One day he brought in a man whom he introduced
as an authority on Long Island history and one of the coming
great collectors, whom well call James Lacy. Lacy was
Ae vice-president of a large food company.
Lacy bought steadily from me for two or three years, and
then stopped coming. The Hearst papers were full of his
misadventures, and I learned by the ever-ready grapevine that
he owed money all over town.
There was a hiatus of four years. Then Lacy came into the
store, looking rather uncertain of his welcome. "You know
what a damned fool I've been," he said, "but I'm trying to get
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C.P.E.
straightened out. Though I have no great amount of money,
I get a fair income, and I still can't give up my dream of
forming a great Long Island collection. If you're willing, I'd
like to go on buying books from you."
"Jim," I said, "you can always buy anything from me that
you have money to pay for."
He came in almost weekly for some time, paying probably
twenty-five dollars a week in cash for what he found on my
shelves.
Then I was going to London, and he asked me if I would try
to pick him up a copy of Simcoe's Journal under five hundred
dollars.
I found and brought back a beauty for $400. When he came
in, I showed him the bill, and said he could have the book
for $450.
He reached in his pocket, then drew his hand out
empty. "Oh, hell, 111 mail you a check tonight when I get
home."
The check has not yet arrived, but I soon learned that he
had sold Simcoe the next morning to a New Jersey dealer for
a hundred dollars.
The memory of Jim Lacy has always made me rather un-
happy. Another experience cost me nearly as much money, but
somehow left a far better taste. One of the most famous and
sought-after books of North Carolina history is Draper's book
on the battle of King's Mountain. I don't know why the battle
of King's Mountain is suddenly more important than York-
town or Ticonderoga, but everyone whose ancestor fought
there has to have a copy of the book. Some two decades ago
the State of North Carolina announced a big historical celebra-
tion. I thought this was an appropriate time for Dauber &
Pine to issue a reprint of Draper. A friend of Sam Dauber's
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
offered to manufacture five hundred copies of the book by
offset lithography for $850.
The friend forgot to write this down, and the bill, when it
arrived, read $1250. We had been less cautious and had an-
nounced in print a retail price of $7.50, which in those post-
1929 days we could not blithely increase. At all events, the
North Carolina newspapers gave us a splendid send-off; we
were benefactors to every lover of North Carolina history.
The publicity soon brought me a letter from a man who
peddled books throughout North Carolina. He asked my
wholesale price for twenty-five copies.
I told him four-fifty a copy. He wrote back, "My credit is
no good around here; in fact, I am a well-known faker, and
you must never ship me anything until my checks have cleared
the bank, because they sometimes come back. I hope you will
let me have twenty-five copies of your book."
I wrote that I would; he sent me a check for $112.50; when
the bank reported that the check had cleared, I shipped
twenty-five Drapers.
The same thing happened three more times, which took a
certain amount of time because each check was some ten days
going through the clearing process. Finally he ordered a
hundred copies, with a check for $450. I had noticed that the
checks always took either nine or ten days to clear. This
time I waited ten days without calling the bank, then thought
what the hell, and shipped the books.
They were hardly at the express office when I found that
the check was rubber. His perfect timing has always mystified
me.
About thirty or thirty-five years ago there was a flutter in the
book trade at the appearance of a prosperous new customer
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C.P.E.
for material on the Indians. When he came to see me, he
introduced himself as Howard Bible, adding that he was a
barrister admitted to practice in both England and Canada. I
soon found out that he knew a lot about Indian material, quite
a bit of which I sold to him.
For all the law degrees he boasted of, he made his living
selling advertising material to banks.
Then for about five years there was one of the complete
silences that seem to descend periodically on some of my
customers.
One day my wife and I were standing in the hot sun at St.
James's Park, waiting for a parade to begin. There is a low,
one-story building fronting the park, on the roof of which
the aristocracy congregate for such occasions. We had been
standing for an hour or more and were about ready to sit
down somewhere, when whom should I see but Howard Bible,
complete with frock coat, top hat, and yellow gloves, on the
rooftop among the nobility and gentry.
I managed to catch his eye, waved my cane, and was grati-
fied to have him beckon us over. We joined him in the sanc-
tum; flunkies produced chairs. Bible introduced us around
to Lord This and Lady That.
Thinking to return the compliment and show my gratitude
for a place to sit down, I suggested lunch the next day at the
Horseshoe. He accepted with an alacrity that did not altogether
match his frock coat.
After lunch he asked where I was going, and I said I had
run out of cash and was going to replenish my supply at the
American Express Company. He said he would walk me down
there.
When I emerged into the Haymarket, buttoning down my
pockets over fifty pounds, Bible said, "Charlie, you've simply
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
got to let me have thirty-five pounds. My wife and I haven't
been eating, and we're a month behind on our rent"
What could I do but fork over? My wife kidded me about
it all the way back across the Atlantic.
I had not been at home very long when the vice-president
of a downtown trust company telephoned and asked if I bought
books about Indians. He wanted me to come down at eleven
the next morning and inspect a collection they had.
He took me up to a high floor in the bank's skyscraper and
solemnly flung open the door upon serried ranks of old
friends the culls of Howard Bible's collection. Howard had
put all the real rarities in storage in Washington; these were
the everyday, reading books.
"Would you be interested in buying these?" the banker
asked.
"How badly are you stuck?" I retorted.
He flushed. 'What do you mean, stuck?"
"Well, I know every book in this room belongs to Howard
Bible, and they must be in your hands for some reason."
"Well, we have a loan to him of fifteen thousand."
I poked around a little, just to make sure, and said, 111
give you fifteen hundred."
The vice-president was quite put out. He went over and
pulled off the shelf a set of Catlin's Indians in the Grant re-
print "But we have the owner's appraisal of forty thousand for
the collection, and he values this one item at three hundred."
"That s fine," I said. "But all the same, I have a set listed
in my catalogue for seven dollars and a half."
There was some more back-chat, which finally ended with
my writing out a check for $1500. As I was leaving the bank
skyscraper, I told myself that Howard no longer owed me
thirty-five pounds. (This was just as well, because some years
[ 246 ]
C.P.E.
afterward, in the course of a fair-sized transaction, he told me
the same thing himself. )
One of the most interesting issues of the National Geo-
graphic Magazine, and in fact quite a collector's item by now,
is the number on Flags of the World, by Captain "Brick"
McCandless, U.S.N.
With the exception of Frank Dobie, Brick is the best story-
teller I have ever known. There were six of us in our store on
34th Street one day, fondly contemplating two bottles of
bourbon and two bottles of Scotch, when Brick McCandless
walked in. We had a lounging room upstairs, to which we re-
tired, with an anticipatory alcoholic gleam in our eyes. Be-
fore the corks were drawn, I happened to ask Brick some-
thing about his work on the flag number of the 'National
Geographic.
He told us for three hours; and for three hours nobody
pulled a cork.
Brick's son was a hero of World War II, but by that time
he was an old story to me. Brick told us about the time when
he was in command of a flotilla of three vessels, and put into
Istanbul. Young McCandless, then aged ten or eleven, was
aboard, and Brick took him for a walk through the town. A
curious set of dishes caught Brick's eye, and he remarked
casually, "I wish I had enough money to buy those and take
them home to Mother."
When the announced hour for weighing anchor came, young
McCandless was "absent without leave." The irate father and
commander paced the quarterdeck for about two hours before
his young hopeful was discovered on the dock followed by
two burly Turks carrying bundles.
The flotilla shoved off in hot haste, and McCandless pdre
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called his offspring to account. The boy was surprised and hurt
at the excitement.
"But Father, you said you wanted to take those dishes to
Mother, only you didn't have enough money. Well, I went into
the place, and they wanted seven-fifty for the dishes, but I
said I only had three dollars, so they sold them. I had them
bring them along, didn't I?"
The next stop on Brick's cruise was Naples. Many of his
crew being Catholic, he thought they would appreciate the
opportunity of an audience with the Pope. He arranged it
for the whole crew. His Holiness received them most amiably,
and when the audience was over, asked if they would not like
to see the Vatican Library. The sailors were probably not too
much interested, but Brick, being a book collector, thought it
was the chance of a lifetime, and said so. The American
visitors were escorted through some outlying rooms with a
few thousand volumes of the complete works of Carlo Coldoni.
Their further progress was barred by an iron gate, under the
protection of a Swiss Guard.
"So far and no further," said the guard, or gestures to that
effect.
"Hey, what is this?" Brick expostulated. "His Holiness told
us we could see the Vatican Library."
The Swiss Guard declined to lift his halberd.
"All right," said Brick, "we're going back and take this up
with His Holiness." There was a great flutter among the
lackeys. No one had ever heard of two successive audiences
with the Pope. But the United States Navy was as immovable
as the Swiss Guard. Finally Brick actually penetrated once
more to His Holiness. "Holy Father," said Brick, "it was my
understanding that we were to see the Vatican Library, but
some man at the gate declines to let us through."
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C.P.E.
The Pope smiled. "My son, perhaps Napoleon gave us bad
habits. Since he looted the library, no man in uniform has
been allowed to set foot within the inner gate. But for you
I shall be glad to break a rule that is hardly more than a
hundred years old." And he scribbled an order that turned
Brick and his bluejackets loose at will throughout the Vatican
Library.
The next stop was Spain. Brick's great ambition there was
to photograph for his flag book the flag of the Invincible
Armada. He had taken the precaution of getting high-powered
letters from the President and other dignitaries to the King
of Spain.
These produced no results whatever. He might just as well
have been applying to marry the Infanta.
"But Brick," I objected, "I saw the Armada flag in your
book."
"Oh, sure," he said. "I just went to the Alhambra and
slipped the custodian two bits."
Stone & Kimball were two Harvard boys who started the
most spectacular and literary publishing house of the turn of
the nineteenth century. They brought a breath of fresh air
into the publishing business, were extravagantly respected and
admired by all the advance guard, and folded up within a few
years because they could never seem to get more than $1.50
for books that cost them $2.50 to print and bind. Today they
are among the very, very few publishing houses whose imprints
are collected for the publisher's name quite aside from the
authorship.
Peter Stammer, the eccentric and rough-tongued Fourth
Avenue bookseller, paid a dollar a barrel for thirty-one barrels
of Stone & KimbalFs correspondence. I spent days going over
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
the haul letters from Stevenson, letters from Shaw, letters
from every author you ever heard of, and a lot you never did.
I gave Stammer some twelve hundred dollars for the thing
I wanted, but there was one lot he flatly refused to sell. These
were letters from Fiona Macleod, the "young Scottish roman-
tic authoress." Fiona Macleod was a great sensation of the
nineties, and it gradually began to be suspected that she was
a figment of the imagination of an obscure middle-aged author
named William Sharp. The letters in the Stone & Kimball
papers were the first definite proof that this suspicion was
correct.
Stammer, who could be charming to his friends, would let
me have nearly anything I wanted; but about Fiona Macleod
he remained obdurate. Finally E. D. Brooks, a collector-
bookseller in Minnesota whose one interest in life was the
new authors of the nineties, told me he had to have the Fiona
Macleod letters, come what might. After he had told me this
two or three times, I went down to Stammer and said, "Look
here, you're going to sell me those Fiona Macleod letters, and
I'm not going to pay you over a hundred dollars. Five years
hence they won't be worth a nickel, so you might as well get
out while the getting is good/*
After considerable back-chat, I gave him the hundred dollars
and sold the letters to Brooks at the same figure.
( Mr. Brooks died soon afterward and not a word has been
heard of his collection since.)
When Alfred Potter was librarian at the Harvard College
Library, I was one of two booksellers who had free access to
the library duplicate room, and whose appraisals he accepted
without question. The other dealer, being a Bostonian, seldom
went near the place. ( I never go to the New York Public any
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C.P.E.
more, either.) After Mr. Potter retired, the library hired a
young expert to price the duplicates for sale to dealers. One
day when I was in there, I saw a very nice set of Audubon's
Birds of America in the 1840-44 edition, priced at three hun-
dred dollars. This was just about the retail price, so I was
in no great hurry to buy.
Then I noticed on the next shelf two cheaply rebound cloth
volumes marked Cabinet of Natural History, Vols. I and II.
I thought this might help to pay my fare home to New York,
so I said to the young man, "I see you have this tagged at ten
dollars. If you'll throw it in with the Audubon, I'll give you
three hundred for both/*
He did so. Then the Cabinet of Natural History sat on my
shelves for several weeks in New York. It is one of the rarest of
all American sporting items; it ran through two complete
volumes, and the publisher went broke in the middle of volume
three. So of course every bookseller who saw my set im-
mediately yelled, "Where's the third volume?"
One day when I was really hard up for something to do, I
started to collate the set, to see if at least all the plates were
there in the volumes I had.
Not only were they all there, but the fragmentary volume
three was bound in at the back of volume two. When I finally
sold the set to a leading dealer in sporting books, I could have
shown a slight profit even if I had given the Audubon away.
Sprinkled over the smaller towns of England are quite a lot
of bookstores where, if you are lucky enough to beat the Lon-
don dealers, you can do all right. For instance, my partner
Sam Dauber once acquired a great collection of drawings
and paintings by Randolph Caldecott, the illustrator of chil-
dren's books, for fifty pounds. The packing and shipping cost
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
almost as much again as the collection itself. When the things
arrived, I promptly called up Mr. Potter, because Harvard
takes pride in its collection of juvenile illustrators. He asked
if he could have the lot on approval, and I sent them right up.
Shortly afterward he telephoned: "I don't know what you
want for this collection, but we'd like to make a choice out
of the stuff. Some of the things interest us more than others.
I have a friend of the library here who is willing to contribute
seven hundred and fifty dollars for the stuff we choose."
"No, Mr. Potter," I said, "that collection is unique, and it's
not to be broken up. I know it's worth a great many times
that, but to keep it from being dispersed, you can have the
whole thing for seven hundred and fifty."
The next I heard from Potter was a letter containing a check
for a thousand dollars. "My friend and I heartily agree that
it would be a crime to break up the collection, and we would
be deeply ashamed to pay you less than a thousand dollars
for it."
One of my frequent hangouts was the Fifth Avenue Gallery,
which of course was on Fourth Avenue at 24th Street, and
was run by a man named Norman. You never knew what you
would find there, or whom, either.
Once they announced a sale of Napoleonana. This is a sub-
ject about which I care nothing, and know less. Anyway, I
went to the sale. There must have been ten thousand items out
of the one or two or three hundred thousand in existence bear-
ing on Napoleon. As I came in, they were selling off fifty-one
volumes of a newspaper published during Napoleon's time.
All I knew about the newspaper was that it had been re-
printed a number of times, and (from the date) that this was
the original edition. For no reason at all I joined in the bid-
ding, and carried off the prize at fifty-one dollars (in those
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C.P.E.
days there was a custom sometimes of selling sets by the
volume).
After I had it, I did not know what to do with it. Pretty
obviously a library was the only possible taker, so I checked
up to find out what my various librarian friends held.
I was soon seated at Mr. Potter's desk. "I see you lack this,"
I said. "What do you know about it?"
"Nothing, except that I've been looking for it for twenty
years."
"Well, what's it worth?" I asked.
"I have no idea," said Mr. Potter.
"I think you ought to give me a thousand dollars for it, any-
way," I said.
"I don't know anything about book prices," Mr. Potter
said, "only I've found that there are some booksellers in the
country who don't like to overcharge a person, so 111 take
this set."
My price was a perfectly blind guess, but I have since found
out by talking to Napoleon collectors that Mr. Potter and
I were both right.
On another occasion I wandered into the Fifth Avenue
Gallery, and found a great mass of documents concerning
Kingston, New York. If there was one, there were four thou-
sand. Most of them were in Dutch. The whole mass was put
up as one lot. No other dealers were there. If it had not been
for a customer of mine, a man named Smith, from Madison,
New Jersey, I could probably have had the whole shebang
for ten dollars. Smith pushed me to three hundred.
The next day he telephoned. "Ill take those Kingston docu-
ments you bought yesterday," he said.
"What do you mean, take them?"
"Well, you've been buying at auctions for me on a ten per
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
cent commission for a long time; I figured that makes these
worth three hundred and thirty dollars."
"Did you give me any order to buy these?"
"Well, no, but that's always been our arrangement in the
past."
"I haven't looked at these yet," I said, "but I can tell you
now that 10 per cent on this deal is going to be three thousand
dollars."
"Ill never buy a book of you as long as I live," said Smith,
and slammed up the phone.
( He never did, either. )
Most of the manuscripts were Dutch, and hence double
Dutch to me. I hired a Dutch girl to look them over and note
the general subject of each document in pencil at the top.
One of my callers soon afterwards was Dr. Victor Hugo
Paltsits, the great scholar from the New York Public Library.
He picked up one of my Kingston documents, looked at the
penciled heading, and began to laugh. I looked over his
shoulder. The note said, "Religious controversy in Kingston/'
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"Why, this really is the first set of police regulations for
Albany, in the middle of the seventeenth century." Another
lot that caught his eye was all the documents concerning the
attempt to make Kingston the capital of the United States, an
effort that failed by one vote. I let my respect for Dr. Paltsits
and his institution run away with my financial judgment when
I sold that part of the lot to him. A few months later I would
have been overjoyed to buy back those manuscripts at ten
times what Dr. Paltsits paid me.
Incidentally, I listed the most important of these manuscripts
and sent the list to Dr. James Wyer, then State Librarian in
New York, who never even bothered to reply.
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C.P.E.
After I had sold most of the stuff, I picked out a deed that
somehow looked interesting. Usually deeds put me to sleep,
but for some reason I described this one elaborately, and
catalogued it at $35.
Two days after the catalogue went out, a perfect stranger
telephoned from Kingston: "Have you still got that deed?"
"Yes."
"All right, I'll telephone my lawyer to bring you in thirty-
five dollars right away."
I said, "Don't be nervous; it's yours."
About an hour later a lawyer marched in from down town,
laid thirty-five dollars on my desk, and started to remove the
deed.
"Hey, what's all the excitement?" I asked. I thought possibly
some local celebrity was involved, or a new collector was
getting the bug.
"Well, this client of mine has spent forty years trying to clear
his title to some land, and this deed gives it to him on a
silver platter. It would probably have been cheap for him
to pay you thirty-five hundred for it."
I have talked through nearly a whole book about how im-
portant it is for a bookseller to know everything. I find I have
barely touched on the very considerable cash value of ig-
norance. A men's clothing trade journal in West 38th Street
folded up once, and the receiver asked me to come and look
at the office library. There were three huge, ungainly book-
cases full of books on men's tailoring, no doubt one of the
finest existing collections on the subject.
Too ignorant to be impressed, I grumbled to the receiver,
"Oh, I'll give you fifty bucks."
"All right," said the receiver, "but you know you have to
remove the bookcases too."
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
I called up Evert Wendell, who kept a huge loft for just
such purposes, and said, "E. J., I've got three great big book-
cases over here a couple of blocks from your loft. If you'll pay
a truck man to take them away, you can have them."
That disposed of the bookcases, but what to do with the
books? There I sat in my store, with two or three thousand
volumes, asking myself why the hell I had ever wasted fifty
dollars.
Then came a stroke of genius: these were costume books.
I wrote an elaborate description to Wallace Cathcart of
the Western Reserve Historical Society, who was very proud
of his costume collection, and lured him East.
We finally decided that this unique collection was worth
nine hundred dollars to the library if I would pay the freight.
Once when I was in London Bertram Rota phoned to say he
had just bought a fine copy of Logan, by Major Rogers. Fifteen
minutes and two bob in taxi fare took me to Rota's office. I
found him embarrassed and distressed. He said that just after
he had hung up, he noticed that this copy, fine as it seemed,
lacked the half-title. He let me have it, with many apologies,
for half price.
I took it to Ernest Zaehnsdorf, and asked him to make me
a facsimile half-title.
For my next catalogue I noted, "Fine copy of first edition.
Half-tide in facsimile."
Lathrop Harper, dropping in, saw my note ready for the
printer. He began to laugh harder and harder. "Charlie," he
said "Logan never did have a half-title."
At last I owned a unique book. The only copy of Logan
with even a faked half-title.
( Bibliography is such an exact science so far nobody has
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C.P.E.
the slightest idea who was the author of Logan, "attributed
to Major Rogers.")
Nearly everyone except the authorities in charge of the
Mark Twain Estate has read or at least heard of Mark Twain's
item of facetiae entitled Conversation at an Elizabethan Break-
fast Table, usually referred to by the short title of 1601. Some
of the sprightlier elements in Mark Twain's regular publishing
house struggled for years to get the thing legitimately into
print, but never succeeded.
Mark wrote the story, of course, simply to amuse himself.
But, being a great craftsman, he sent the manuscript to a
Harvard professor to have his Elizabethan English checked.
The professor turned out a revised version.
This fact led Merle Johnson and me to think that a variorum
edition would be a laudable enterprise.
The first point was to prove that Mark Twain had written
1601. Everybody knew he had, but when we went through
the correspondence, there was not a scrap of writing for evi-
dence.
Finally we tracked down a man in California who, for a
hundred dollars, let us reproduce a note from Mark acknowl-
edging his authorship.
(There is a famous, and undoubtedly true, story that has
always pleased me: John Hay, the poet diplomat, sent a manu-
script copy loaned to him by Mark Twain to a friend in Cleve-
land. The friend replied that this was the funniest thing he
had ever read; he proposed to make a printing of it for distri-
bution among his friends. Hay replied, "Naturally neither Mr.
Clemens nor I could dream of permitting you to print this
manuscript. If you should do so, however, please send me ten
copies/')
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Johnson and I produced our variorum edition, to the num-
ber of 110 copies. As usually happens in cases like that, we had
at least 250 orders beforehand. We filled all we could, and
found ourselves also as usual in such cases just about
swapping dimes in the matter of cost and income. To add in-
sult to injury, neither of us could even keep a copy for our-
selves.
A decade later I was walking down St. Martin's Lane, Lon-
don, when my eye was caught by a large sign: STONEWALL
JACKSON, THE CHEAPEST BOOKSTORE IN LONDON. Standing in
front of the shop was a lanky Englishman. I accosted him.
"How did you get that name?"
"Oh, that's my real name. My parents never heard of any
darn Confederate general."
"All right, have you got any Americana?"
He reached behind a counter and said, "Here, how about
this?"
It was a copy of the variorum edition of Conversation at an
Elizabethan Breakfast Table. Stonewall Jackson was both
pleased and surprised, but even more surprised than pleased,
when I offered him thirty shillings for the book.
After World War I the regular newsboy in front of the
Abbotsford Hotel was an ex-soldier. We used to pay him a
shilling for a penny paper, and as a result soon heard about
his troubles, the worst of which was that on a good day
he might clear two shillings. One morning he stopped me and
a friend on the street with the remark, "IVe got a hot tip for
the handicap."
In my experience these tips are the best you can get, so
each of us handed him a pound. But when we looked in the
papers to see how we had done, we could not find any such
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C.P.E.
horse as the one he had mentioned running in any of the
races.
The next day he stopped us with a broad grin and handed
us each ten pounds.
"This is fine, old man," I said, "but I couldn't find any such
horse running at any of the tracks/'
He grinned even more broadly. "Oh, didn't I tell you? This
wasn't a horse, it was a dog."
John T. Winterich, a friend and customer of mine, once
remarked in the Saturday Review of Literature that far too
few authors give credit to rare-booksellers for the help they
get. Part of the occasion for Winterich's remarks was an
anthology whose foreword mentioned my help in compiling it.
As a matter of fact, perhaps one reason why authors do
not mention the help they get from booksellers is that not many
booksellers make a hobby of helping authors.
Helping authors is quite a difficult branch of bookselling,
not as you might suppose because authors can't afford to
buy really rare books, but because an author never starts look-
ing for a particular title until he needs it to write his next
chapter.
Another point is that far more often than early rarities they
need sound works of modern scholarship five or six years
old. These books almost invariably flop when published; the
publisher remainders them for twenty-five or fifty cents, no-
body pays any attention, and then suddenly all copies vanish
like water soaking into sand.
A friend of mine has been searching ever since the war for
a copy of A. J. Liebling's The Telephone Booth Indians, which
was published during the war, and even reissued in a twenty-
five-cent paper reprint. In the time he has spent unsuccessfully
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
hunting for this, I suspect he might have found several copies
of Catlin's Indians of North America.
I had a fairly close view of the process as shown through
a man named Charles Wood, who made a comfortable fortune
selling stoves in Dayton, Ohio. He marched into my store one
day, a perfect stranger, and said that he thought the existing
histories of the Apache Indians were inaccurate, and he wanted
to assemble a collection of material that would straighten the
story out. In the course of ten years he learned that what he
had expected to cost him two or three thousand dollars would
run to forty or fifty thousand, but he kept on. Then he died
suddenly (two hours before an auction for which he had
wired me a lot of big bids ) . His material, however, instead of
being bequeathed to a library, and sold for scrap paper, was
shaped by Frank C. Lockwood into a book that superseded
all others about the Apache Indians, just as Mr. Wood had
intended.
The Macmillan Company published the book, but they sold
less than two thousand copies. Naturally, since my office was
next door to their building, no Macmillan salesman had ever
heard of me. They scuttled to remainder the book an oppor-
tunity I seized upon to sell some three hundred copies. I doubt
whether either of the big book wholesalers bought a much
larger quantity of the title than that.
Not infrequently I am called in to appraise, instead of buy,
a library.
When the president of the Delaware, Lackawanna and West-
ern Railroad, Samuel Sloan, died, I had a phone call from his
namesake, a son or nephew. He asked me if I would appraise
the library at the house on 38th Street just east of Fifth
Avenue. I said I would, for a hundred dollars.
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C.P.E.
"The fee's not your problem, Everitt," he said. "The books
have to be divided among seven elderly ladies, and they'll all
be present while you are making the appraisal."
Nevertheless, I went. The seven ladies apparently disliked
one another heartily. I suggested that it would be a good idea
to give the set of Scott to one lady, the set of Dickens to
another, and so on down the line.
Not at all. Each set had to be evenly divided among the
legatees.
Here I was the stumbling block: I have never learned how
to divide twenty- or thirty-volume sets into seven even parts.
Finally I said, "Look, suppose we put all these books in a pile
on the floor, and you ladies can walk round and round and
each choose one volume at a time."
This worked splendidly until we came to a beautiful set of
Audubon. Four volumes were even harder to divide by seven
than twenty. So I stepped outside to consult the executor.
"What's this worth?" he asked.
Remembering the number of ladies, I pared down my ap-
praisal by a hundred dollars or so, and said, "Seven thousand
dollars."
"All right. Til keep those, and send them each a thousand
dollars." Evidently pleased with my diplomacy, he called again
later to ask if I would appraise the books at the country estate
up the Hudson.
He had some lumpers ready to carry the books downstairs
for me to look at. They consisted entirely of "Delay, Linger,
and Wait" reports during Sloan's presidency. My method here
was to make a rough guess at the weight of the paper. I ap-
praised the collection at fifteen dollars, added in my railroad
fare, and sent a bill for $103.60. This, I'm happy to say,
brought me a check and a letter of thanks.
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
At the other extreme from Samuel Sloan s country library is
the collection of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, which was beyond all
comparison the longest and also the most interesting appraisal
I ever made.
If I simply say that Stef has made the world's greatest collec-
tion of material concerning the Arctic and the northern coun-
tries, I shall probably give the impression that he has a lot
of stories about ships frozen in the ice. Actually the collection
covers the entire social, physical, and economic life and history
of nearly a third of the globe. Stef has kept himself poor for
most of his lifetime by unremitting devotion to those books.
I once heard him say to one of his secretaries, "I've got to
go on a trip. Will you cash me a check for two hundred and
fifty dollars?"
"But, Mr. Stefansson, we haven't got two hundred and fifty
dollars."
"How can that be?"
"Don't you remember that you told me yesterday to pay the
back book bills? I drew out twenty-five hundred for that."
I found a shelf of books on falconry, and asked Stef why he
had bought them.
"Well," he explained, "in the days when the nobility hunted
with falcons, they used the white falcon, which was a royal
bird for kings, secular princes, and their opposite numbers in
the Church. . . . the white falcon of Iceland and Greenland
was so valuable that generally it was not sold but was given
as a princely gift, a recognized and proper kind of bribery.
Falcons were also used for kingly ransoms."
The contents of the collection are enough to take your
breath away, but the real expense, and the real value, comes
from the fact that Stef has cross-indexed every page in every
volume he owns. You look in his card index under "whales,"
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C.P.E.
and you can turn to the right page in more than three hundred
different books or magazines. I am sure this indexing has cost
more than the books did.
(The New York Public Library used to figure that it cost
them $2.50 to shelve any book that was given to them free.
And I remember once seeing Alfred Potter at the Harvard
Library tell an accession clerk to order the entire contents of
some German catalogue. This was just after World War I,
during the German inflation, but even so I was somewhat
startled. "Why," said Potter, "it's cheaper to buy them than
to check the catalogue and see if we have them/')
Stef s collection has some thousands of magazines, normally
worth a nickel apiece, each containing some sort of article on
the north. On the strength of the indexing, I decided arbitrarily
that each magazine was going to be worth a dollar.
Occasionally Stef would come in and look over my shoulder
while I was at work. I put down two little German books on
whaling at $250. "Charlie, that's ridiculous," he objected. "I
paid fifty cents apiece for them."
"All right, can I have them for three hundred?"
"Oh, I can't win an argument with you! Get on with your
work."
I look back on this job with considerable satisfaction, be-
cause I do not think there are three other people alive who
could have done the job so well. Even so, I would have been
utterly lost without Stef s wife Evelyn, whose knowledge of
languages made it possible for me to tell what I was doing.
About every half-hour during the twenty-two days I spent
on the appraisal, I was shocked by the discovery of some item
quite unknown to bibliographers. I remember one twenty-
four-page pamphlet in Latin, printed in Germany, which was
undoubtedly the first doctoral dissertation on the Northwest
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THE ADVENTURES OF A TREASURE HUNTER
Passage. Then again there was a Russian atlas, one of the
rarest in the world. Stef s copy, however, was accompanied by
a second volume showing sailing routes. This kind of thing
kept me in a state of perpetual amazement.
I don't like to mention my final, total appraisal, partly
because I am afraid it may be much too low. I have always
considered it an axiom that any reasonably good collection
is worth at least 20 per cent more than its component parts,
but Stef s collection may easily be worth twice as much.
Speaking of Stef and the Arctic reminds me of two stories
having not the slightest connection with books.
One of the best loved members of the Explorers' Club was
Captain Bob Bartlett, an uneducated old Nova Scotiaman who
was nearly the best lecturer I have ever heard. I have listened
to the same lecture five successive times with great enjoyment.
Nearly any explorer will tell you that the Explorers' Club
Medal is the distinction he would most like in all the world.
Very few of them have ever been given. Bob Bartlett was to
have one, and in honor of the occasion they held a big banquet
at the McAlpin Hotel.
Someone got up and made a conventional, rather pallid,
presentation address.
When Bob stood up to reply, the tears were streaming down
his face. "All I can say," he managed to choke out, "is, you're
a goddamned fine bunch of fellows!"
Once Bob was supposed to give a lecture at the Kent School,
presided over by the famous and extremely saintly Father Sill.
Two or three friends and I took Bob aside beforehand and
said, "Look, Bob, this is one time when you cannot swear. You
just can't do it."
I heard later from a faculty wife who questioned her two
small boys about the lecture.
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C.P.E.
"Yes," said one of the boys, "it was very interesting, but
Captain Bartlett swore."
"Oh, I don't think he'd do that, surely."
"Yes, he did too. When Father Sill came in in his robes, I
heard Captain Bartlett say, 'Jesus Christ!' "
Looking back over five decades, I find the net result is a
few hundred old books and glorious memories. When I stop to
wonder about the money that poured through my hands, I
guess it must have been the landlords and the printers and
the promising friends that took it.
The best I can do is let Frank Dobie write my epilogue:
We all met in your office at Dauber & Pine's in March,
1931 Dellenbaugh, Stef ansson, Hodge, and myself. I
don't recollect so much of the conversation, but the
geniality and warmth of the company, led by our host,
remains with me so vividly that my spirits rise now re-
membering it. ...
Never was a merrier host than you, Charlie. When I
read 'Master Francis Beaumont's letter to Ben Jonson/ I
think of that company.
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came,
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life . . .
And, when we were gone
We left an air behind us, which alone
Was able to make the next two companies
Right witty.
Frank.
124024
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