Mr. Madigan’s Interesting Shop
A complete change of scene. The most fashionable shopping district of New York, just around the corner of Fifth Avenue in Forty-fifth Street.
A window filled with expensively framed autographs marks the sanctum of Mr. Francis P. Madigan. He is a jovial man who has all the qualities which make for the success of our Fifth Avenue art shops. He knows when to stop talking, he knows when to say “the word” which closes the deal: he sells to his customers, they do not buy from him. The high walls are hung with innumerable autographs in appropriate frames, signed portraits of great celebrities; some little drawings and sketches by lesser known artists—Mr. Madigan also dabbles in art. His specialty is selling books signed by their authors. He is one of the few men who realized Oscar Wilde’s importance at a time when no one paid much attention to this unfortunate poet. In the course of years he collected a mass of Oscar Wilde material, and he is now reaping the harvest.
I spent an afternoon in his shop. Quite a study for the observer of human souls was the procession of visitors who came and went continuously. They pay for autographs of men who never could even sell their work during their lives. Mr. Madigan has sold more Poe material during the last ten years than anybody else.
Poor Poe! During his entire literary career he hardly got in direct returns as much money as this dealer in dead men’s letters receives for one single epistle.
The Poet’s Income
A letter of Poe, dated New York, January 18, 1849, also in the possession of Mr. Madigan, allows us to look behind the scenes of a literary workshop of the early fifties. It is addressed to John R. Thompson, the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, one of the most powerful literary magazines of the time. Poe offers his services as a critic at the rate of two dollars a page, provided Mr. Thompson obliges himself to take not less than five pages each month. The irony of fate was never better exemplified. The manuscript which he offered at two dollars a page is now worth four hundred and fifty dollars. The very letter in which he offers to sell it at that sum was purchased a short time ago for five hundred dollars.
“New York, Jan. 13, ’49.
“My Dear Sir: