A Library Vandal
One of the English writers who came to this country possibly for his own country's good, gave me some trouble. I was editing Hearth and Home at the time, and he brought me for sale a number of unusually good things, mainly referring to matters French and Italian. He was absolute master of the languages of both those countries, and his acquaintance with their literature, classical, medieval, and modern, was so minute that he knew precisely where to find any literary matter that seemed salable. With a thrift admirable in itself, though misdirected, it was his practice to go to the Astor Library, find what he wanted in rare books or precious foreign newspaper files, translate it, and then tear out and destroy the pages he had plundered. In that irregular fashion he made quite a literary reputation for himself, though after detection he had to retire to Philadelphia, under the orders of Mr. Saunders, Librarian of the Astor Library, who decreed banishment for him as the alternative of prosecution for the mutilation of books.
He carried the thing so far, at last, that I regarded it as my duty to expose him, and I did so in my capacity as literary editor of the Evening Post. I was instantly threatened with a libel suit, but the man who was to bring it left at once on a yachting trip to the West Indies, and so far as I can learn has never reappeared either in America or in Literature. It is one of the abiding regrets of my life that the papers in that libel suit were never served upon me.
LXI
In the autumn of 1882 a little group of literary men, assembled around Richard Watson Gilder's fireside, decided to organize an Authors Club in New York. They arranged for the drafting of a tentative constitution and issued invitations for twenty-five of us to meet a little later at Lawrence Hutton's house in Thirty-fourth Street to organize the club.
We met there on the 13th of November and, clause by clause, adopted a constitution.
It was obvious in that little assemblage itself, that some such organization of authors was badly needed in New York. For, though there were only twenty-five of us there, all selected by the originating company, every man of us had to be introduced to some at least of the others present. The men of letters in New York did not know each other. They were beset by unacquaintance, prejudices, senseless antagonisms, jealousies, amounting in some cases to hatreds. They had need to be drawn together in a friendly organization, in which they could learn to know and like and appreciate each other.
The Founding of the Authors Club
So great were the jealousies and ambitions to which I have referred that early in the meeting Mr. Gilder—I think it was he—called three or four of us into a corner and suggested that there was likely to be a fight for the presidency of the club, and that it might result in the defeat of the entire enterprise. At Mr. Gilder's suggestion, or that of some one else—I cannot be sure because all of us in that corner were in accord—it was decided that there should be no president of the club, that the government should be vested in an executive council, and that at each of its meetings the council should choose its own chairman. In later and more harmonious years, since the men of the club have become an affectionate brotherhood, it has been the custom for the council to elect its chairman for a year, and usually to reëlect him for another year. But at the beginning we had conditions to guard against that no longer exist—now that the literary men of New York know and mightily like each other.