Good books, good plays, good movies and a chance to express their individualities in a healthy, pleasant way?
1919
New York Book Magnates
“If I were rich,” said a well-to-do broker to me recently, “I’d spend a few hours every day in one of those book dens on Fifth Avenue. Their proprietors are delightful people; the surroundings are as comfortable as a club library. Only it is so intimate there, and they always seem to have the very things that one wants—and they are so darned expensive. They seem to be in touch with the whole world, and the mere fact that they always have new things whenever I drop in is sufficient proof that the genus of book-worms is not on the dying-out list, and that people buy costly books even in our times of so many other lures.”
Of course, there are book buyers today who expend thousands and thousands of dollars for rare books, but whom we would not class with the enthusiastic broker who wished to be rich in order to be able to follow his hobby. Rich men often buy their books as investments. They have their brokers who attend auctions for them, and one day we read that Mr. So-and-So bought such-and-such a book for a staggering sum of money, and six months later we receive a catalogue from an auction house telling us that the very same “book lover” will dispose of “duplicates” from his library at auction. And, lo! we find the very same much-advertised rare book in this catalogue. If we compare the price he receives with the price he paid several months ago; we will invariably understand why a stock gambler was induced to become a book-lover.
But, as I said, we still have antiquarians of the old school with us, and we also have book-sellers who have preserved Ben Johnson’s spirit in the book dealers’ guild.
Gabriel Wells
It is not so very long ago that Mr. Wells did not occupy his palatial suite on Fifth Avenue, and the enthusiasm he then had for his books and for their authors is his today. Fine sets of well-known authors and also of the minor lights, are his specialties. Printed on beautiful papers, wonderfully bound, marvelously extra-illustrated, inscribed by their authors, they are there on his shelves. They seem alive, they seem to talk to you, they seem to smile to you a welcome—if Mr. Wells feels you a friend, a brother lover of books. The whole world knows about Mr. Wells’ beautiful sets of books, and whoever wants a rare, unusual edition comes to Mr. Wells, or writes to him, or wires to him, or cables to him, dealers as well as private buyers. And if he has time, he may ask you to view the original manuscript of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “New Arabian Nights,” or of Victor Hugo’s “Ninety Three.” Or he will show you a bundle of letters written by Thomas Payne, the draft of a speech in Lincoln’s own hand ... he could fill a museum with the material wrapped up in his safe. And the most delightful thing is the free air of hospitality in his den. I don’t know another place where one can lounge around more comfortably ... and not to forget his assistant, Mr. Royce, the Balzac enthusiast, who compiled the only Balzac bibliography in existence.