“Can you imagine the poet hunting for his corrected book, the printer waiting until he discovers that some friend has carried it away? And here is a suave note of John S. Sargent, the American portrait painter, asking some society woman in words of utmost politeness to come to his studio for a sitting. One almost can see the $5,000 check paid for the painting.
“Here read the fuming indignation of an American poet. A letter by Bayard Taylor, whose London publishers had refused to publish his ‘Masque of the Gods.’ He writes about English prudery to James R. Osgood, his American publisher. ‘I return the two London letters. What prigs the publishers there must be. It is very evident they are afraid, though why I can’t see for the life of me. If there is reason for it, then you are the boldest of the bold.... If you see any unusually spicy or stupid attacks, I should be greatly obliged if you would send them.’
“Lucy Larcon is an American poetess, who is not very well known, but I think this little poem, evidently never published before, is not bad:
“I said it in the meadow-path;
I say it on the mountain stairs;
The best things any mortal hath
Are those that every mortal shares.”
1918
The Romance of a Chicago Book Dealer
WELLS Street, between the river and East Chicago Avenue, is the Bowery of Chicago. Once a residential section, now the old mansions and frame cottages, hastily erected after the fire, are dilapidated and are used as lodging houses and factories of the inferior sort. Here and there a modern structure, a storage house or an industrial plant. Dan Martin’s Mission is here, several rescue halls, a Salvation Army citadel, the famous coffee wagons on the corners of side streets, where unfortunates are given a cup of coffee, a loaf of bread and advice that should lead to salvation. The Moody church is the aristocrat of the quarter. Drunken men and women line the sidewalks day and night; gruesome phonographs are continually heard in rum shops. Policemen patrol in pairs, and this beat is considered the most dangerous in the whole city.
In the midst of one of the worst blocks is a large show window. A pawnbroker would be most appropriate in these surroundings. But it is not a pawnbroker’s display; there are paintings and, if you choose to step nearer to examine them, you will scarcely believe your own eyes: a couple of portraits by Benjamin West, signed; a magnificent etching by Whistler, with the familiar butterfly in the left hand corner; high up near the ceiling, between mischievous gargoyles, a large canvas which one recognizes as a magnificent work of an Italian master. A few Duerers are pinned to the wall, rows of old books, not dusted for a long while, are on shelves in the center.
“If these things are genuine,” I thought, “they are priceless treasures; of course they cannot be.” I entered the shop. There was just enough space to open the door, to squeeze in: piles of books from the floor to the very high ceiling, drawings, paintings, carvings, leaned against the dusty backgrounds of old tomes. It was the most extraordinary place I had ever entered. There seemed to be some order in this most astonishing disorder. A little bell sounded somewhere in the faraway background. It was a very long room. I heard approaching footsteps, very energetic footsteps. I was astonished that a person could worm his way through an almost invisible passage between the heaped-up stacks of volumes—an old gentleman with hair hanging to his shoulders, a long beard, wonderful eyes which seemed to sparkle in the dim light of the strange place. I liked him at once; his quiet melodious voice, his dreaming faraway look and the decision of his manner. I told him frankly that the strangeness of the place, in such strange surroundings, had attracted me. I came again and again. And I treasure the hours I spent in Mr. Doerner’s “book-shop” as among the most pleasant of my life. I never grew tired of standing up there. There was no space for a chair, and I doubt if there was a chair in the place.