Mr. Doerner has made discoveries during his career which were of the utmost importance to American history. His collection of paintings, especially of American paintings, would fill a private museum. He hates commercialism, he loves weak humanity, and, strange to say, the disreputable men and women of Wells Street love him, and he and his possessions are safe in the most dangerous part of the city.
Or is it true, as he once answered in a rather pessimistic mood: “If they suspected that I had only one thirty-second carat of a diamond in my place, they would murder me and loot my shop in order to find it. But books or paintings, who cares for them in America?”
Frank Morris and His Famous Shop
Chicago had a great literary period in the nineties. Eugene Field had come to the Western metropolis and was in the early stage of his fame. Stanley Waterloo had written his books, the White Chapel Club was in its flower, Oppie Reed and Bill Nye carried the strangest legends of Chicago throughout the United States on their more or less romantic “lecture” tours. Ben King’s funeral had created a sensation all over the United States. The World Fair brought a great influx of English poets and writers to Chicago. Cowly Stapleton Brown had started his unforgetable Goose Quill in which he predicted twenty-four years ago that Kipling had sung his swan song in “Plain Tales of the Hills,” that Hall Caine would sink into oblivion after a few seasons of best-seller notoriety. He paid in the Goose Quill homage to the genius of Oscar Wilde, and to the man who wrote the Elder Conklin stories. Kimball and Stone established their Chap Books in which America was given a chance to get acquainted with Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsly, John Davidson, Stephane Mallarme, Verlaine, Joseph Peledan, Villiers de L’Isle Adam, Baudelaire here found their first translations, and until today the Chicago Chap Book remains the only source of information of the lives and times of the French decadents. Bill Eaton then was the great dramatic critic who had had his season in London and had come back as the only American who in one year had acquired a perfect English accent. Col. Bill Visscher, the famous Confederate editor and singer of the Southern States had completed his eleven hundred and fifty-sixth patriotic song and had issued his sentimental “In the Canoe.”
And all this time Frank Morris’ little book shop on West Madison Street was the center of the very select among artists and literati. Frank Morris was the friend of all of them. In his shop they used to assemble and talk of future glories and the fame of the past. Everybody loved Frank, and many were homeless after his shop had fallen victim to the flames. But soon he was established again, on Adams Street. Those of his old friends who were left followed him there, and now, after times of storm, he is settled in new quarters in the Marshall Field Building. There is no more genial man to talk to than Frank. He is not only a seller of books, but is a part of the most important period of American literature, of our famous nineties. Many poets have written poems to Frank Morris. Here are two by Eugene Field.
TO FRANK MORRIS:
Believe me by all those endearing old charms
With which your quaint shop is provided,
I shall honor the trade by whose help I have made
A collection of freaks that’s derided.
And if you believe me—when then I’ve to ask
That, till fortune betimes readjusts me
With dollars and dimes for my yarns and my rhymes,
You still shall continue to trust me.
EUGENE FIELD.
October, 1889.
LINES WRITTEN UNDER PORTRAIT OF F. M. M.:
This is the robber, as sure as you’re born,
Against whose guile I fain would warn
The bibliomaniac, tattered and torn,
Who pauses to look at some second-hand book
That lies on the shelf all covered with dust
And is marked “four dollars for cash—no trust”
In a gloomy corner that smells of must
Down in the shop that Morris built!
EUGENE FIELD.