Even I, with but a short experience as a mere onlooker in the collecting game, realized its greater value. After my uncle’s death this Washington letter sold for $925, and it rests to-day as one of the treasures in the Pierpont Morgan collection.
THE INFANT BIBLIOPHILE
A few years ago I bought back the Pennypacker’s Mills letter for $130 from Governor Pennypacker’s estate. Because of the incident it recalls I would never part with it.
When I was eleven years old I began book collecting on my own. My first purchase was at an auction in the old Henkels’s auction rooms on Chestnut Street. It was an illustrated edition of Reynard the Fox, and was knocked down to me for twenty-four dollars. My enthusiasm rather than my financial security swept me into this extravagance, and after the sale I had to go to the auctioneer, Mr. Stan V. Henkels, and confess that I was not exactly solvent. At the same time I explained I was Moses Polock’s nephew, instinctively feeling, I suppose, that such a relationship might account for any untoward action concerning books. I had hardly got the words out of my frightened mouth when Mr. Henkels burst into a fit of laughing which—although I was too young, too scared and self-conscious to realize it at the time—was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between us.
When he ceased laughing, he looked down at me, a sombre little boy with a book under his shaking arm, and said, “I’ve seen it start at an early age, and run in families, but in all my experience this is the very first baby bibliomaniac to come my way!” With this admission he kindly consented to extend credit, and trusted me for further payments, which I was to make weekly from my school allowance. Giving him all the money I possessed, ten dollars, I marched from the auction room, feeling for the first time in my life that swooning yet triumphant, that enervating and at the same time heroic combination of emotions the born bibliomaniac enjoys so intensely with the purchase of each rare book.
Stan V. Henkels—no one dared to leave out the middle initial—was a remarkable man. Even in his young days he resembled an old Southern colonel, the accepted picture we all have, a man of drooping moustache, rather patrician nose, and longish hair which he decorated with a large-brimmed, rusty black hat of the Civil War period. He insisted he was an unreconstructed rebel and was always willing to take on anyone in a verbal battle about the Civil War.
By profession an auctioneer of books, Mr. Henkels was the first person to make the dreary, uninteresting work of auction catalogues into living, fascinating literature, almost as exciting reading as fiction. Previous to this, anyone wanting to find out what was in a collection had little luck when searching through a catalogue, beyond discovering names and dates.
Observing this, and that certain items whose contents were of exceptional interest did not sell well, Henkels decided to find out for himself what was between the covers of the books he sold, and to learn what was often told so confidentially in the literary manuscripts and letters, and then to print the most interesting data he could find about each item. This was a great work in itself, and how he found the leisure to give to it was a mystery. Thus he brought in color and life, a human-interest setting, which added thousands of dollars yearly to his business, and which awakened feelings of gratitude in many collectors.
