Alfred Goldsmith’s is the youngest of New York’s book shops. This is to be found on Lexington Avenue near Twenty-fifth Street, in an old-fashioned basement, with pillars and nooks, near some of the oldest auction rooms in the city, just the place for a book shop.
Shelves all around the walls filled with a few thousand well-selected books, comfortable chairs to sit in here and there, a sacred case of first editions, all other books well dusted and in neat rows, modern authors mostly, scarce translations of authors whose names, perhaps, you have never heard before, but who will be your good friends when once you have made their acquaintance.
Mr. Goldsmith is a young man, a college graduate with a successful business career in the print paper industry behind him. He always was a great reader and buyer of books. One day this fall he decided to open a book shop, and to get married. He did both, and is well satisfied with both ventures.
Book collectors are gifted with a sixth sense. It is not necessary to send them announcements. Some day they are sure to drift in, and if the atmosphere is congenial they come again and again.
“I love books,” said Mr. Goldsmith, who is a great philosopher and an excellent talker. “Book selling is a game. The sort of books I am selling are hard to be found, and quite easy to sell. My great pleasure is to go about town picking up my books. Once I place them for sale on my shelves they quickly go. It is wonderfully interesting to observe the people that come in here to buy books. Of course you know all about the peculiarities of collectors. But since I have opened my shop I have discovered some new species of book shop habitues. Let me tell you about them.
“There is Mr. Pimple, a big, stout, uncouth man of about thirty, who looks like a butcher and pretends to be a highly educated lover of books. His specialty is the autograph game. He writes letters to living authors which read something like this: ‘In a treasured niche of my favorite book shelf in my library, is a volume that I prize more than any other book. It is your novel. You would earn the eternal gratitude of an old book worm if you would have the goodness to autograph it for me.’ The author receives the letter and imagines some old devoted book crank, autographs the copy, and returns it to Mr. Pimple at his (the author’s) own expense. Mr. Pimple makes the rounds of the book dealers and sells his treasured autograph copy to the highest bidder. Worse than that, he throws the very letter which he received from the author, promising the book, into the bargain. Gertrude Atherton, Richard Le Gallienne, Katie Douglas Wiggins and many others have autographed whole sets, forty and fifty books at one time, for Mr. Pimple, who went so far as to take advance orders for such sets.
“How little he really thinks of the authors to whom he sends his stock admiration letter the following story evidences: One day he asked me if eight books of Upton Sinclair, first editions, would bring good money if autographed by the author. I answered in the affirmative. Pimple looked up the address of Sinclair, wrote him, received a favorable reply and found that it would cost forty cents to send the books by parcel post to Pasadena, Cal. ‘Too much money,’ he remarked. He tore out the fly leaves, sent them on, Mr. Sinclair autographed them, Pimple pasted them carefully back into the books and sold the whole set on the very day.
“But the best trick was the one he put over on the publishers of Ambrose Bierce. After Bierce’s disappearance, collectors were hot after his first editions and autographs. Bierce’s publishers had a good many letters and presented one to each purchaser of the author’s collected works. Mr. Pimple paid them a visit, talked for more than an hour of his admiration for Bierce, mentioned once or twice that circumstances did not permit him to purchase one of the sets, and finally declared that the ambition of his life was to own a letter in the handwriting of ‘the greatest writer and artist in the world.’ The sincere enthusiasm of Pimple, his insistence, the pleading of poverty, finally induced the publisher to give him a short letter of Ambrose Bierce as a gift.
‘I will never part with this treasure. I will always carry it in my portfolio, near my heart,’ were his parting words. He came directly to my shop and told me the story. We were talking about Bierce as a customer entered and soon took a hand in the conversation. ‘I’d like to get a letter of Bierce,’ he explained. ‘I would be willing to pay seven dollars and a half for a short note in his hand.’
“I hardly believed my eyes! Mr. Pimple took out his portfolio from near his heart and offered his treasured letter of Bierce for the seven dollars and a half.