There is one thing worthy of note in connection with the Authors Club. Almost from the hour of its inception it has furnished the country with a very distinguished proportion of its most eminent diplomats and statesmen. To mention only a few: James Russell Lowell, Andrew D. White, David Jayne Hill, William L. Wilson, Carl Schurz, General Horace Porter, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt, Oscar S. Straus, Edward M. Shepard, and a dozen others easily mentioned, may be cited as illustrations of the extent to which a club of only about 180 members in all has been drawn upon by the national government for its needs in diplomacy and statesmanship.
The Authors Club idea of a watch night meeting has been borrowed by a number of other organizations, but I think in none of them has it become so well recognized an event of the year. At any rate, it throngs our rooms to the point of suffocation on the night of every thirty-first of December.
Another habit of the club has been for a considerable number of members and guests to linger after its regular meetings until the small hours of the morning, telling stories or discussing matters of intellectual interest. This has become a feature of the club meetings since Charles Henry Webb—better known in literature as "John Paul"—said one night at two o'clock:
"Upon my soul, the Authors Club is one of the very pleasantest places I know—after the authors have gone home."
"Liber Scriptorum"
Soon after the club took its quarters in Twenty-fourth Street, three of us—Rossiter Johnson, John D. Champlin, and myself—were impressed with the need of more funds and better furnishings. We suggested the publication of a unique book, as a means of securing the funds and providing the furnishings. Our plan contemplated a sumptuous volume, in an edition limited to two hundred and fifty-one copies—one for the club, and the rest for sale at one hundred dollars a copy. We proposed that the members of the club should furnish the poems, stories, and essays needed; that each of them should agree never to publish his contribution elsewhere, and that each poem, story, or essay should be signed by its author in pen and ink in each copy of the book.
We were met with prompt discouragement on every hand. The older men among the members of the club were confident that we could never secure the papers desired. Our friends among the publishers simply knew in advance and positively, that even if we could make the book, we could never sell it. Mr. Joe Harper offered to bet me a hat that we could never sell twenty-five of the two hundred and fifty copies. I lived to wear that hat and rejoice in it, for we not only made the book—"Liber Scriptorum"—but we realized something more than twenty thousand dollars on its sale, as a fund with which to provide leather-covered morris chairs, soft rugs, handsome bookcases, and other luxuries for our friends the doubters to rejoice in.
Authors are supposed to be an unbusinesslike set, who do not know enough of affairs to manage their personal finances in a way to save themselves from poverty. Perhaps the judgment is correct. But the Authors Club is the only club I know in New York which has no dollar of debt resting upon it, and has a comfortable balance to its credit in bank.
The case is not singular. It has been written of William Pitt that while he was able to extricate the British exchequer from the sorest embarrassment it ever encountered, he could not keep the duns from his own door.