Connoisseurs
When a man has made money in America he at once becomes a victim to the craze for an artistic home. The tradespeople with whom he comes in contact in order to achieve his artistic desires speak of art and rugs and paintings. He reads in the newspapers about Mr. So-and-So who spent thousands of dollars for antique furniture or for pictures in auctions, and he begins his walks on these dangerous and costly grounds where one may buy for goodly sums the ephemeral fame of a collector and a lover of objects of art. The reputation of an art expert seems to go with the objects as well as the wrapping paper and string.
It is the dream of every antique dealer once in his life to enter one of those coveted garrets where treasures of six generations are stored in boxes, in cases and trunks. To enter this garret at the invitation of some real estate owner or lawyer who represents an estate anxious to sell the house and to clear out the ‘rubbish’; to buy the contents of such a garret for a few dollars and to find a painting by Rubens or Tintoretto or Martha Washington’s wedding slippers or a suite of magnificent Colonial furniture ... sure enough these are red-letter days in the career of almost every antique dealer. Only recently, for instance, in an old garret on Ninth Street, an old Persian rug was discovered which no second-hand dealer would have paid fifty cents for, an expert rug man realized its value, gave eighteen hundred dollars for it in competition with other dealers and sold it to a famous rug collector for twenty-six thousand dollars.
Some time ago a buyer of Marshall Field in Chicago saw a painting in one of the minor art shops of the city. He liked it and purchased it for fifteen hundred dollars. It was marked six thousand dollars and put on sale in Marshall Field’s art gallery. It is a standing rule of this art gallery to resell once a year all their purchases. This particular painting seemed unsalable. It was reduced and reduced for a number of years, but it could not be sold. Finally a picture speculator bought it for six hundred dollars, took it back to New York, sold it in an auction sale for ten thousand dollars. The picture was sold and resold eight times during the following six months and ultimately found a final resting place in the mansion of a very well-known man on Fifth Avenue. He paid for it one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
Not the man who keeps shops and stores has the great adventure in seeking after the old and antique. But people who are “picking up things,” attending action sales here and there, visiting junk shops and second-hand shops all over the city, constantly expecting to find something and never tired or disappointed. I know highly educated men unusually gifted, possessing expert knowledge that in many cases surpasses the “infallibility” of our museum authorities, who prefer the free life of buying and selling to high-priced positions in art shops and in art galleries. I know one man who is “picking up” a living by looking through the book-stalls of dealers and buying odd volumes for small amounts of money and selling the same books to rare-book dealers for as many dollars as he pays cents.
Auctions As Amusement Places
REAL enjoyment of life is caused by life’s contrasts. And what greater contrast than to witness Mrs. Astor, for instance, bidding against a second-hand furniture dealer from Second Avenue for a curious crazy-quilt, soiled, torn and catalogued as genuine, direct from some old farmhouse?
Amusement? Galore. And more than that. Studies in human nature, scale exercises of human passions. Everybody has his chance in New York auction rooms. The gambler, the collector, the book hunter, the shrewd dealer, the speculator, the bargain fiend; these auction rooms are a paradise for those who know their own wants, needs and desires. A Dorado for the careful and cautious who have taken advantage of the exhibition on the previous day who have examined the articles for which they wish to bid, who know the condition of the offered wares.
But these auction rooms are a dangerous playground for the emotional, the weak, who really doesn’t need the objects on sale, whose eyes and voice seem to miss constantly proper telephonic connections with his central, his seat of thinking. Disastrous prove these auction rooms for those who bid without seeing properly what they are bidding for, who bid higher and higher because perhaps they do not want the other fellow to have the thing, or prompted by pure gambling instinct.
Fascinated by their surroundings, they are easily moved to action; by a look of the auctioneer, by a nod or a word, that places them all at once (though only for a second) in the limelight of public attention. They pay their bills and do not know what to do with their purchases. What a comedy!
Exactly as you know where to go to when you wish to see a musical comedy or an opera, so do I know in what particular auction room I can get a view of human vanity, a peep at greed, an exhibition of plain, delightful collectors’ mania.
“Follow the red flag,” I would have almost said, but the auctioneers have done away with their old emblem during their recent convention in Rochester. Red flags nowadays are supposed to symbolize revolution, socialism, brotherhood of men, an equal chance for all, and their display is prohibited by city and State legislation. Therefore, blue is now the auctioneer’s color, and you must follow the blue flag.
The auctioneers themselves are wonderful entertainers, psychologists of the first rank: Virtuosos, who play wonderful tunes on the emotions of their audience; golden tunes, tunes that turn into gold in the auction-room proprietor’s pockets.
“Something for nothing” is ever attractive. There wasn’t an American born yet who would not stop, look and listen at the word “bargain.”
But then there is a mystery back of it all. You don’t know where the things come from. They are jumbled together in the picturesqueness of everyday life; a painting by an old master may be followed by an iron bedstead that only yesterday harbored the maid of some bankrupt actress. Napoleon is supposed to have dined from one of the offered china plates, and a much-worn fur coat is offered ten minutes later.
I love auction rooms without catalogues, without plush chairs, where specialists have not been allowed to separate the goats from the sheep.
“Finds” are rare in our times when every grocer’s wife who inherited a library from her great uncle, the preacher, knows more about auction-room prices than the average collector of books; when every push-cart peddlar examines his ill-smelling day’s collection for antiques.
Books and works of art have become objects of speculation. Daily papers are the sources of information on the prices of values in auction rooms as well as on bonds sold on the stock exchange. And still bargains are found almost daily. Little fortunes are made by buying things in an auction room on University Place and selling them in another one on upper Fifth Avenue.
Here is a little amusement calendar for lonely afternoons:
Do you want to see splendid gowns, magnificent jewels, society manners, etchings of priceless value, paintings, sold for thousands of dollars by the square inch? Witness Mr. Kirby’s performance at the American Art Galleries. He is a dignified gentleman: never talks above a whisper: very discreet in advice, but irresistibly urgent in his discreetness. A magnetic fluid seems to emanate from him, and he has the power to direct it properly—believe me!
But what an education to see the great works of great artists put up for public sale: Whistler, Zorn, Degas, Corot, the greatest—and how wonderful to think that they will find an honored place in so many American homes. And the books! Rows of wonderful bindings and old yellowish tomes with broken backs. Rich and poor have an equal chance; and money does not always acquire the most precious, the most coveted prize. Money usually searches for outward beauty; real value is left unobserved in a shabby garment. This is the consolation of the bookworm, but dealers spoil his chances now-a-days. They have learned that it pays to put beautiful clothes on valuable books.
Would you like to see an actor of the old type? Drop in on Mr. Hartmann, in the Fifth Avenue Auction Rooms on Fourth Avenue. Listen to his good-natured talk:
“Madam, you ought to buy this divan,” he urges an undecided, elderly lady, who perhaps lives somewhere in the Bronx, in a little flat and wonders how she could get the monstrous divan into her tiny living room. “Let me advise you to take it,” Hartmann continues. “You will never have another chance at such a magnificent piece of furniture. If I wouldn’t have bought one last week I surely would keep it for myself.” Or, he would lift up some old Steins: “I take any bid for these things,” and he would give his audience to understand how hard he is hit by prohibition. He knows the dealers among his audience.
“All right, if you don’t want to bid any more I will knock it down to one of the dealers who will take it to his shop and sell it to you at an exorbitant profit,” is his remark when he cannot get the people interested in some object or another. Every dealer has a nickname with him. There is a second-hand furniture man from Baxter Street, whom he calls “General Darrow,” much to the delight of the old gentleman who does not look like a general at all. Then there is another one, a very studious looking man, whom he calls “Doctor.” Everybody in the audience really thinks the purchaser is a doctor and a collector of valuables. He is a jovial man who makes you feel at home. A sort of old-fashioned cabaret performance. Everybody seems to take part in the show.
If you would like to see a “dandy,” who feels one with the best of his listeners, whom he wishes to make out society people of the highest order, listen to Mr. Clark on Forty-fifth Street, near Fifth Avenue. His is a society play with an everlasting ripple of shallow laughter on the surface. The auctioneer speaks with a broad English accent, makes little bows every once in a while, and his right hand reaches instinctively for an invisible monocle. I always wonder if he really wears one. And he sells things. Every one has his own methods. But he is a sort of “bon vivant” on the stage of New York auctions.
Would you like to see an old-time Broadway comedy and an actor with a manner that was in style forty years ago? Would you like to listen to well-set flowery speeches? Get acquainted with Mr. Silo and his auction rooms on Vanderbilt Avenue, near Forty-sixth Street. He wears a cut-away and a goatee. He has the distinction of having auctioned off during the past forty years a greater part of the contents of many Knickerbocker Mansions. He seems to love each and every article that comes before his auction table. Everything is “exquisite, beautiful, grandiose, magnificent, stately.” He looks in the ecstasies of an overjoyed connoisseur at his paintings and drawings. He interjects once in a while his sorrow that Mr. Astor is not alive any more, who would have appreciated at once this or that painting. After such exclamations, he looks with sad contempt over his audience, shakes his head as though he wanted to say: “You poor simps, you do not appreciate real art.” He constantly urges: “Don’t buy this, don’t buy it, please don’t buy it. You will do me a favor if you do not buy it, because next week such and such a millionaire collector from California will be in town and he will pay me a far greater price than you intend to offer.”
To emphasize his sincerity at least once during each sale, he would get up from his seat, stand erect with the solemnity of a preacher and declare: “If you are sorry to have purchased this article, please return it to me. I am forty years in the auction business; my word is as good as a bond and I will return the money.” And he makes good; at least he made good to me. In the folly of the minute I bought something that I had no earthly use for. I told him so and a couple of days later he refunded my purchasing price.
What wonderful tales could the hundreds, often thousands, of gowns, wraps, dresses, suits, slippers, stockings, lingerie, furs, hats, gloves and many other intimate garments of pretty women tell, if they had voices to speak while they hang in long rows in Mr. Flatau’s auction rooms on University Place.
Twice a week he conducts an auction of ladies’ wearing apparel. Do not think that poor people go there to buy cheap, second-hand dresses; that they slip in shyly, shame-facedly, make their purchase and disappear into their own somewhere in New York. Ladies with limousines waiting outside bargain for and buy evening gowns, while shop-girls purchase impossible dresses. Here you can learn in one hour more about the tastes of America’s broad masses than in all the museums, art institutions, shops and exhibitions over town. The grotesque seems to hit old and young, beautiful and ugly, slender and fat. The color schemes scream to the heavens. If an invisible power would grant me the fulfillment of one wish I would ask the good fairy who would make me the offer: “Please let all these women that were in Flatau’s auction rooms last Friday wear the clothes they bought there and assemble them for me in the ballroom of the Vanderbilt Hotel.” It would be an unforgettable sight.
And because you were in Flatau’s, drop into Koliski’s, across the street.
The East Sider is very strongly represented in his back rooms, while in the front, the art dealers and peripatetic gentlemen dealers bargain for everything under the sun that you can imagine. Marble lions that stood in front of a library in East Oshkosh are sold with the same nonchalance as the slippers that are supposed to have been worn by Martha Washington during a reception given to Lafayette. Stately furniture from gambling dens is offered immediately after a series of undertaker’s outfits had been sold.
Koliski’s is a great exchange of all antique dealers in New York, as well as second-hand dealers. Here the bids go up a quarter at a time. Human emotions are voiced unrestricted by polite considerations. Here is the atmosphere of an old-fashioned arena.
The Strange Discovery and Disappearance of Stuart’s Washington
ANTIQUE shops are isles of romance and mystery in the commonplace everyday life of New York, but if you wish to enter into the real thrill of adventure, you must forget the fashionable shop, where antiques have found a temporary resting place and you must not talk to the shop-keeper. Antique shops along Fifth Avenue and the main streets are conducted as up-to-date business places, and up-to-date business has a romance of its own, a twentieth century romance that has little to do with the individual and less with sacred time-honored traditions that touch the heart. Most antique dealers kill the charm their curios and works of art awaken in us.
They know the prices of the beautiful and ugly things on sale in their shops, but they don’t know their value. Antique dealers are painful whenever they try to impress you with their knowledge of art or of association or history, or when they simply play on the vanity of prospective customers, telling in whose possession the priceless object has been, quoting prices like stock brokers.
Whenever I spend some time in an antique shop I think of George Bernard Shaw’s essay: “On Going to Church”: “What wonderful and ideal places would churches be if there were no priests and no services to disturb the sublime quiet and the elevating beauty of the edifices.” What charming places for dreams and revery would antique shops be if there were no antique dealers and no ambitious millionaires, who wish to show their appreciation of art by paying exorbitant prices for art objects.
“Then the museum is an ideal place,” I hear you say. No, it isn’t. The museum is a mausoleum of art. The art objects there seem to me buried forever in costly catacombs with beautiful monuments and tombstones, but buried away from our world, separated from life forever; yet the beautiful things done by past generations should be a part of our own throbbing life.
The great antique dealers are not the high-priests of the beautiful in New York. Suave and well-meaning gentlemen; their words come not from their hearts and their love is tied to the price of their wares and not to their merit. Some of these gentlemen have sold shoes, shirts, furniture and cash registers before they went into the “antique business.” Works of art are mere merchandise to them. Money-changers they are in the temple, but the temple is theirs, too; no one ever can chase them out.
“Names” are their gods. Authenticity their dogma. The art of persuasion their greatest asset. To find big names (names that bring high auction prices) is their constant desire and to sell these names to the highest bidder at fabulous prices is their daily dream.
What do I care who painted a portrait? Perhaps it is a priceless Velasquez or Rubens or Botticelli or by some unknown artist of several hundred years ago? But I like to contemplate the person who sat for the portrait; the beautiful girl in her strange attire; I like to dream about the love, hatred, contempt, affection, about all the hopes and all the despair mutely witnessed by some old-fashioned writing cabinet with secret drawers and dozens of pigeon-holes, where once letters reposed that meant so much to the writers and recipients. I like to think of the soft, well-cared-for hands of some Prince of the church, who wore the beautiful Bishop’s ring hundreds of years old that will adorn perhaps tomorrow the jewel-case of an American millionairess.
There are divans and chairs.... Who used them? In whose home have they served? Where will they go to from here? The mystery and romance woven around all the various works of art and useful objects that have withstood the destructive powers of time and men is captivating. How did all these things get into the fashionable antique stores?
Most of them were purchased from other antique dealers; some were bought in auctions and obscure places and a few were purchased from another kind of antique dealer who are not very infrequent in New York.
Where there is mystery there are surely people who wish to solve the mystery, and very curious people are these “detectives of the antique.” The peripatetic antique dealers are in a true sense connoisseurs. They prowl about all sorts of out-of-the-way places; storage houses, auction rooms, in garrets of houses that will be torn down and in cellars of old family dwellings, unoccupied perhaps for generations. They sense the value of a thing the moment they see it. Some of them are scholarly gentlemen who have a great book knowledge, who know more than professors in our universities and curators of our museums. Others know by intuition. And a few have the instinct of a Sherlock Holmes and the sense of adventure of a pirate.
Some weeks ago I noted the following advertisement in the American Art News. It sounded mysterious as well as promising:
W A R N I N G!
The Original Sketch of the Head
for the
Lansdowne Full Length
All Collectors, Museums, Dealers and other interested parties are advised to take no part in the buying or selling of a certain oil painting:—
Portrait of
Washington, by Gilbert Stuart
This portrait head is entirely my personal property. It is now being held by a certain party without my consent, who refuses to return it to me. I wish to warn anyone interested that the present holder of it has not my permission to negotiate its sale and that he cannot deliver title.
Very respectfully,
J. F. MacCARTHY.
339 Lexington Ave., N. Y. City.
Any portrait by Gilbert Stuart is worth from ten thousand dollars up. That there should be a new discovery of a Gilbert Stuart painting, especially one of George Washington, was a great surprise to me. And I know J. F. MacCarthy. He is one of those ideal antique dealers who could not help being one. Of course he sells the paintings, engravings and etchings he discovers, but I am sure he would prefer to keep them if circumstances did not compel him to earn a living, even as you and I. MacCarthy is a well-known figure in auction rooms all over town. He is well known down on Fourth Avenue, where old clothes, damaged shoes, cheap furniture is sold, together with works of art, tapestries, paintings, as well as in those fashionable auction rooms on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, which look like the orchestra of a theatre, where the visitors sit in comfortable plush chairs.
On Fourth Avenue, the auctioneers urge the people to buy, use all the tricks of their much-maligned trade to bring up the price a quarter of a dollar at a time. In the fashionable parts of the city, the auctioneers are well-posed orators who seem to beg the crowds not to buy because they will get so much better prices tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. These auctioneers are studies in themselves. At any rate they are excellent psychologists. And MacCarthy is their great friend. He knows perhaps more than they do. He gives them valuable pointers and he is such a pleasant chap to talk to because he knows stories and tells them well.
So I went up to his shop, which really is not a shop but a sort of connoisseur’s den, and asked him about the “ad” he inserted. “Tell me about it,” I cried. “Was the picture stolen from you? How did you ever get hold of a real Gilbert Stuart? How long have you had it? Why didn’t you ever show it and where is it now?”
MacCarthy is rather slow in his movements and in his speech. He settled himself comfortably in an old Chippendale chair, supposed to have been owned by General Beauregarde, and began in his epic manner:
“You did see the picture. I had it almost eight years. I had it long before I moved to Lexington Avenue. I bought it at the James Sutton sale. It was catalogued as a painting by Wertmuller, supposed to represent George Washington. Wertmuller was a Swiss painter of fame, who came to this country about 1790. Washington sat for him and later on he made several copies of the original portrait. His picture evidently didn’t interest the public very much during that sale and I bought it for little money. I had it in the shop for years. Many people looked at it, but not one seemed to pay any attention to it. It was not a good painting of Washington; the likeness was rather poor and the whole thing looked unfinished.
“One afternoon last year I was looking for some painting in my attic and there I ran across the Washington portrait. I took it downstairs to this room, where we are now sitting. I looked at it for a good long while, perhaps for the first time since I had bought it, and it struck me as strange that Wertmuller should have painted Washington’s eyes as brown, when everybody knows that Washington had blue eyes. The paint seemed very heavy in certain spots and the idea struck me that the whole portrait had been overpainted. I took a little solvent, touched up the eyes and you can imagine how astonished I was to see that the color came off.
“I was very careful, of course, but my interest was aroused. I spent the whole afternoon removing the paint from the eyes. My work was rewarded. Beautiful blue eyes were beneath the coat of paint. I tried the solvent on other parts of the picture and soon I found that the whole canvas had been overpainted. In the course of a week I had removed the entire coat of overpaint and beneath it was an entirely different painting.
“It was a beautiful portrait of Washington, but surely not the work of Wertmuller. I spent another week cleaning it and restoring the painting. It was unmistakably Gilbert Stuart, but it was entirely unlike any other Stuart picture of Washington.
“I at once went to the library and studied the work of Stuart, comparing carefully all paintings he had ever done with the one in my possession. The pose was exactly the same as that of his “Lansdowne” portrait.
“Lord Lansdowne was a very celebrated connoisseur who met Gilbert Stuart during the artist’s sojourn in London and commissioned him to paint a life-size portrait of General Washington in 1796. It is a matter of record that Gilbert Stuart executed this order under grave difficulties.
“France had sent innumerable painters to Mt. Vernon to paint the first President of the new Republic. Hundreds of artists from all parts of Europe came to America in order to paint Washington and on the strength of having painted Washington to receive commissions from the first families of America. Washington had grown tired of giving sittings to all these painters, some of whom were really great artists, but others second-rate craftsmen, who wished to build their reputations upon a Washington portrait painted from life. Gilbert Stuart begged Washington to sit for him again, but Washington had sworn off once for all. Then Stuart used his influence among Washington’s friends and finally Mrs. Bingham, a great favorite of George Washington in 1796 and also a great friend of the artist, succeeded.
“The following letter is on record in the Library of Congress:
“Sir:—I am under promise to Mrs. Bingham to sit for you tomorrow at nine o’clock, and wishing to know if it be convenient to you that I should do so, and whether it shall be at your own home (as she talked of the State House), I send this note to ask information. I am, sir, your obedient servant,”
“GEORGE WASHINGTON.”
“Monday evening, 11th April, 1796.”
“Stuart describes in a letter to Mrs. Bingham, Washington’s visit to his studio. The great man was nervous, ill-tempered and considered the whole thing an imposition upon his kindness.”
“I give you an hour,” he cried after entering the studio. “Tell me in what position you want me and do your work quickly. I am tired and I want to get back home.”
Washington’s nervousness proved contagious. Stuart became so nervous that he hardly knew what he was doing. He realized that he never could induce Washington to sit again, so he took a canvas and threw in hurriedly Washington’s face in broad strokes. He had set all his hopes upon this life-size portrait. He had made arrangements with a steel engraver to have the portrait engraved. He knew that everybody would buy a good portrait of Washington and that his success would not only crown his achievement as an artist but also make him financially independent for the rest of his life.
He made a color sketch of Washington’s features as well as he could. It was a short sketch of the head. Later on he engaged three different men to pose for the full length of the body. The Library of Congress retains the correspondence of Gilbert Stuart with Martha Washington, who loaned him a complete wardrobe of her husband, her husband’s sword and cape, to be worn by the models.
Stuart’s portrait not only pleased Lord Lansdowne but it became the portrait of General Washington. The steel engravings in life size were sold out the very week that they had been struck off. Millions of copies circulated all over the world. But the original sketch of the head was lost. Almost every work as well about Gilbert Stuart as about George Washington’s portrait contains the notice that the original sketch in colors of Lansdowne has been lost.
“My picture was that very sketch. I proved it conclusively. It would lead too far to tell you about the months of detective work I put in tracing back the proprietors of this painting for the last one hundred and fifty years. I was successful, and of course you can imagine how much the painting is worth.
“One day a well known art dealer of Philadelphia strolled into my shop and I told him the story as I have told it to you.
“‘I will sell the picture for you,’ he said. ‘Give me 50 per cent commission and I’ll sell it quickly.’
“I knew the man; he had sold very valuable paintings in the past. In fact, everybody in the art world knows him. I simply cried: ‘Go to it! Get me the best price that you can get.’
“He took the picture along with him and that is the last I ever heard of it. I let the matter rest for several months and then wrote him a letter requesting the return of the picture.
“His astounding answer came back: He claimed to be half owner of the painting; as I had let him in on the 50 per cent profit-sharing basis he refused to give up the painting.
“I went to my lawyer and my lawyer told me: ‘You are stung. That gentleman certainly did you. There are only two ways of action open for you. You either sue him for the value of the picture; no doubt you will get a judgment, but I doubt whether you will ever be able to collect on the judgment. And the minute that you sue for the money, you abandon automatically your proprietary rights to the painting. If you would know where the painting is you could replevin it.’”
“But do you know where it is?”
“I didn’t at the time. Finally this gentleman of Philadelphia made me a proposition to put the painting on sale in one of the most prominent art galleries of New York, who specialize in historic paintings and in old masters.
“The proposition was to pay this art dealer a commission of 20 per cent of the prospective purchase price. This proposition made me suspicious. It would mean 20 per cent to the art dealer; 40 per cent to the man of Philadelphia. Two votes against my one.
“I realized that I was helpless, therefore I inserted the advertisement. I at least wish to prevent him and his helpers to get the reward for my work, for my discovery and all the pains I took in establishing the identity of the portrait.”
I sympathize with MacCarthy. I wonder where Gilbert Stuart’s famous painting will find its last resting place?
In New York Book Shops
EVERY city has its book streets. Book shops are gregarious, and they grow like mushrooms in groups. There is little competition in the book business. No matter how large and complete the stock of a second-hand book dealer may be, his neighbor’s collection will be quite different. The clients of second-hand bookshops like to “browse about,” they seldom ask for a certain book, and they love to have a large territory in which to hunt.
The location of book streets changes with the growth of a city. Seventy-five years ago the book centre of New York was far downtown on Ann Street; after the Astor Library had opened its doors, Fourth Avenue became the city center and soon was lined with picturesque bookshops. The city grew and Twenty-third Street became the Dorado of the book-hunter. Then people began to make immense fortunes and build palaces and mansions on Fifth Avenue, Central Park was opened to the public ... and Fifty-ninth Street became the book street of New York. Ever further the city expanded. Harlem grew in population and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street is another shopping center for lovers of books and objects of art.
Most of the book dealers kept step with the times. They moved from street to street. The grandfather had been prominent on Ann Street, the son on Fourth Avenue, and the grandson flourishes on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth.
Fourth Avenue has come to honors again during the past four years. Some big book dealers had the idea to move back to old “book-sellers’ row,” new people soon gathered around them and today most of the second-hand book business of the United States is transacted here on this old street, surrounded by a ramshackle neighborhood, invaded by factory buildings and sweatshops.
But some book dealers could never make up their minds to move. They stuck to their shops. They are the landmarks of New York’s book streets.
The Den of a Pessimist
The Nestor of the book dealers who “have remained” and have withstood the trend of the times is E. A. Custer on Fifty-ninth Street. Right near Park Avenue, next to a livery stable in the cellar of an old-fashioned brownstone house, is his picturesque shop. Large bookstalls with hundreds of books invite you to rummage about, quaint paintings and drawings will arrest your attention and make you stop even if you are in a hurry. Firearms of all descriptions, swords and shining armor add a war touch that seems quite appropriate in our time. If you look closer you see a pale face with keen black eyes behind the show window. You have to look very closely in order to detect it. And if you enter the store you will meet the proprietor of face and store, sitting at his look-out, watching his stalls, scrutinizing the passers-by who stop to glance at his wares. He continues in his position while he is talking to you; he never takes his eyes from his treasures, even while waiting on a customer, or delving into the depths of his shop.
“I have to watch my property,” he offers as explanation while excusing himself. “I am listening to what you say,” he adds, “don’t mind if I don’t look at you while we talk. All people who stop out there to look at my books are thieves, and if I give them a chance to get away with my books they prefer to acquire them that way rather than to buy. They steal from earliest childhood and never cease until they are dead. I have been forty years in this very place and I know what I am talking about. And though I am as watchful as a dog, I lose about twenty per cent of the stock that I put in my stalls through thieving. All book collectors are thieves; people who never would think of taking anything else without paying for it must think a bookshop is different from all other stores. Their consciences are not sin-stricken if they incidentally slip a book they like into their pocket and walk out with it. I have long ceased to read books. I read human nature for my pastime.
“There is not a day that I do not lose books by theft. Take for instance last week. I had a set of Dickens on my stands. A cheap edition on the table where I keep books for boys. I saw a little freckled, red-haired, bare-footed lad inspecting the Dickens books for longer than half an hour. Some time later he came back and looked at them again. This time he had a few books under his arm. He laid his books on the table and managed very cleverly to pick them up after a while together with one of my Dickens books. The boy really wanted to read the book and I let him get away with it. I knew that he was passing my shop every day, and I thought of speaking to him another time.
“The next day he came again, inspected the remaining volumes of my Dickens set for a few minutes, repeated his trick of the day before and stole another volume. He came every day and acquired six of the seven volumes. It was only on Saturday that he stole the sixth volume; this time I went after him, told him sternly to come back with me, handed him the seventh volume and said to him:
“‘Here, my boy, I don’t keep open on Sunday, and somebody might buy this one and spoil your set. Better take it along. You have the right spirit. Continue and one of these days you will find yourself a millionaire. Perhaps then you will endow libraries.’
“Or the old Irish woman whom I caught only yesterday. She came with a basket covered with newspapers, examined my books very carefully, and dropped every once in a while one of the books in her basket. I waited until the basket was filled, then I told her to come inside of my shop; I emptied the basket and handed it back to her. I didn’t say a word. She took her basket and went outside.
“Well-to-do-looking men come in, examine books, tear out plates, and walk out again without buying a penny’s worth of my stock.
“I don’t think they are all bad at heart. They simply don’t look at books as merchandise and if they can get something for nothing, they take it. Women are the worst. Especially those modern women who write and try to reform humanity. They are quite shameless and do anything as long as there is a slight chance of getting away with it.”
“But,” I interjected, “mustn’t it be dreadful to sit in your shop day after day as a sort of watchman?”
“I’m accustomed to it,” he answered, “and that’s the only way I can make my business pay. It was not always so. There was a time when people really loved books and bought them in order to read. Then they had time to read. The successful man of today has an automobile, has to go out joy-riding after business hours, has to spend his time in cabarets and road-houses. He needs books only as decorations when he buys a home or furnishes an apartment. And then he leaves it usually to his decorator to choose the most attractive and expensive bindings in keeping with the color scheme of his library.
“I tell you, New Yorkers dont know books, dont want to know them. The men read newspapers, the women magazines, and the young people trashy novels. Of course there are our modern book collectors. They know as much about the commercial values of books as I do. They buy books as an investment, just like pictures. They follow the auction sales and gamble in books. You can hardly call such people booklovers. Thirty years ago I used to have comfortable chairs in my shop and in the evening big business men, lawyers, and physicians would drop in and examine at leisure some tomes that I had laid before them because I knew they were interested in this or that subject. Today most of the men who are interested in books are so poor that they can hardly pay their room rent.”
And then he proceeded to show me some of his treasures. “Who do you think buys this sort of books in our day? Dealers, nobody but dealers. And they sell them again to dealers. Finally they find their way into the auction rooms and are bought again by a dealer.”
Mr. Custer has traveled all over Europe and is a lover of beautiful paintings. Original Corots, Millets, original drawings by Aubrey Beardsley lean against piles of books, hang in cobwebbed corners. “Are you not afraid that someone will steal them?” I asked him, commenting on his carelessness.
“They don’t know enough,” was his answer. “Some months ago I had a wonderful painting of Corot’s in the show window. A man whom I knew as a notorious miser came in and asked if it was genuine. I said in a matter-of-fact way that I have no proof but the picture, and that I would sell it for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I myself had paid for it three thousand. He looked at it for a long time and then said he would come in again. The following day he brought his wife and brother-in-law to look at it. They examined it very carefully and went out. The following week I sent the painting to an auction sale where it realized eight thousand eight hundred dollars, notwithstanding the bad times on account of the war. On the very day that I received my check in payment for the picture, the man came in again and proposed to buy it for one hundred dollars. I showed him the check, and it pleases me even today to think how disappointed and crestfallen he was; because I never told him that I would not have sold him the picture even if he had given me a hundred and twenty-five dollars at the time I offered it to him.
“I have my worries, but I also have a lot of enjoyment watching my contemporaries and noting their faults.”
Mr. Custer is a small man with a kindly smile, and after I saw him chatting with the ragamuffins swarming around his bookstalls, and talking kindly to a girl who wanted some information, his piercing dark eyes did not seem so very misogynic and his pessimism seemed of the kind of the dog who barks but does not bite.
A Whitman Enthusiast
Little Max Breslow, who isn’t taller than a good-sized doll and has such tiny hands that he can hardly hold two books at the same time, is so vivacious and young looking that everybody must like him if for no other reason than his continuous smile. He is the last of his guild on Twenty-third Street. Max sold books since his earliest youth; he sold his school books. When a boy he used to go about “picking up” books and selling them to book dealers; he started in as apprentice in an out-of-the-way bookshop on Eighth Avenue, and then opened up the cellar which he has made so attractive since.
As neighbors he had the potentates of the second-hand book market, Mr. Schulte and Mr. Stammer, both of whom have moved to Fourth Avenue since, and many other less important sellers of books who have dispersed in all directions during these latter years. He loves Twenty-third Street and intends to stick there till the last house is transformed into a factory. You almost fall into his shop from the street, so steep are the stairs and tread-worn. He has the instinct of the born second-hand book dealer to find out-of-the-way books on out-of-the-way subjects. There is always something unusual in his shop and his prizes are within the reach of the poor man’s purse. He likes his books and he likes to sell them to good homes. And therefore he often fits his price to the purchaser’s purse. His hobby is Walt Whitman. He has the most famous collection of Whitman items in this country, even larger and more extensive than the one Horace Traubel has guarded. He has original manuscripts of Whitman, proof sheets of his books, everything that was ever written in any language about Walt Whitman, more than four hundred pictures of the “good, gray poet,” and you couldn’t buy one of those precious things for any money in the world.
An Optimist
Frank Bender, who is considered at present one of the leading second-hand book dealers of Fourth Avenue, and that means of the United States, is an entirely self-made man, and his career is unique even among book dealers. Only five years ago he started his shop, without books, without money, and without knowledge. In a short time he acquired all these three essentials, and here is his own story:
“I used to sell books to architects on the road, architectural year-books and magazines, and later I added books on decorations which I sold to decorators. It occurred to me one day that I could save rent if I opened a shop where I could sell enough books of all kinds to pay expenses. That was five years ago. I signed a lease for a little one-story building that stood where the new post-office on Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street is at present. I sold enough architectural books to pay my first month’s rent and to buy lumber to fix up my shop. I literally built up my own business. I laid the floors, built the shelves, the tables. My shelves remained empty because I had no money to buy books. One day a friendly print dealer came along who must have taken interest in and pity on me. “Why don’t you hang some prints around your shop to fill out the wall spaces?” he asked. “It will make it look better. I have a bunch of prints I will sell you for forty dollars and I’ll give you six months’ time in which to pay it.”
“I accepted his offer, and those prints netted me over five hundred dollars in a surprisingly short time. If one keeps a bookshop something unusual happens almost every day. It is the uncertainty of the book business that always attracts me. Of course every book dealer who wants to make a decent living must have a specialty of his own. Mine is architectural books. I have a large clientele of architects and decorators; I know these books well, and they were the backbone of my business. Chance and good luck are the great factors in the book dealer’s life. Let me tell you a few instances:
“A few months after I opened my shop at the time of the big auction sales, I felt very gloomy. Of course I needed cash in order to buy books, and I did not have it. One morning one of my best customers walked into my shop and asked for a copy of Canina’s Ancient Rome. I told him that the book was so scarce that there was no use to ask for it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I am willing to give you two hundred and fifty dollars for it any time you bring me a copy.’ The very same afternoon I noticed a copy of the book in an auction catalog to be sold the next day. I went to the auction and sat there shaking like a leaf, waiting for the first bid after the book was put up. Nobody seemed to be interested to buy it. Somebody bid five dollars, and I got it finally for six dollars and seventy-five cents. I had it wrapped up, took it around the corner to my customer and collected two hundred and fifty dollars. That was the first real money I made, and it gave me a chance to acquire better books.
“Take only yesterday. I was very busy writing when a man who introduced himself as a rag paper-dealer, offered me linen-bound copies of a historical encyclopedia for seven and a half cents a volume. I didn’t even want to spend time talking to him, and so I declined abruptly. ‘I have many thousands of these books,’ the man insisted, ‘make me an offer.’ He went out and, strange to say, came back in a half hour with a cart-load of the books and said to me, ‘Here they are.’ The books proved good sellers and I made a pile of money. The people that come into my shop are my only source of information. They all tell me what they know about the books they are interested in. I love to talk to them, even if they seem to be cranks. No, I don’t mistrust them. They are welcome to make themselves at home in my place. I believe that everybody that enters my shop is just as honest and straight as I am myself. Only once, after I had lost a valuable book in a mysterious way, I became suspicious. I was busy talking to some customers as a man entered whose looks I did not like. He busied himself with some fashion books at the back of my store. I grew so nervous about him that I approached him quite roughly with a question, ‘What is it you are looking for?’ He answered, as I thought guiltily, naming the title of a certain fashion book that I happened to have in stock. I brought it out, he examined it and asked the price. It was seven dollars and fifty. The book had cost me five dollars. He said that he could not pay seven fifty for the book. ‘If he really wants to buy the book,’ I thought, ‘and didn’t come in here to steal, he will purchase it for three fifty.’ I firmly believed that the man did not have ten cents in his pocket. I offered the book for three dollars and fifty cents. ‘At this price, I take it,’ he answered. I lost one dollar and fifty cents, but regained my belief in humanity.”
A Gambler
On Thirty-fourth, near Lexington Avenue, Jerome Duke has opened a bookshop of a peculiar sort. It is not exactly a book shop because there are antiques and curiosities all over the place. The books are thrown together topsy-turvy, Latin authors, modern novelists, theological books, old French tomes and German philosophers. I asked the proprietor about his books and his answer was:
“I don’t know anything about them. I never read books and would not be bothered with them. I buy them at a certain price and I try to sell them at a profit. In fact, I intend to buy anything I can get cheap enough, no matter what it is. I went into the book game in order to gamble and I am going to gamble on anything that people bring in here.
“There is one thing I have just refused to buy because the man wanted too much for it. He said that he had recently returned from Europe, had been a soldier, and wanted to sell me the embalmed finger of a German general. I forget the name of the general, but the man said that it was authentic and that he would sign a document before a notary public, swearing that he had been present at the time the finger was cut off of the general’s hand. Now, if he had asked fifty cents or a dollar, I would have been willing to take a chance, because it would make a good window display in this time of war; but he wanted five dollars, and I couldn’t see my way clear. That’s too much of a chance, to stake a five-spot on an embalmed finger of a German general. So I bought a slipper instead. It belonged to a Madame Jumel, and she is supposed to have worn it on the day that she got her divorce from Aaron Burr. I paid a dollar for it and I consider it a pretty sound gamble.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well,” he answered, “because Aaron Burr was the second Vice-President of the United States.” Of course that argument was final, and I wished him luck with his purchase.
II.
Strange to say, most of the bookshops in New York with individual appeal are modern places only recently established, and their proprietors young, often very young people. Most of them are up-to-date business men who had their training in different lines. They were lovers of books, they realized the possibilities of a “bookshop with a soul,” they opened shops after their own hearts, and are meeting with success.