While the Humanistic type was being cut, Doctor Biagi came to America as the official representative from Italy to the St. Louis Exposition. Later, when he visited me in Boston, I took him to “Shady Hill” to see Mr. Norton. It was an historic meeting. The Italian had brought to America original, unpublished letters of Michelangelo, and at my suggestion he took them with him to Cambridge. Mr. Norton read several of these letters with the keenest interest and urged their publication, but Biagi was too heavily engaged with his manifold duties as librarian of the Laurenziana and Riccardi libraries, as custodian of the Buonarroti and the da Vinci archives, and with his extensive literary work, to keep the promise he made us that day.
The conversation naturally turned upon Dante, Biagi’s rank in his own country as interpreter of the great poet being even greater than was Norton’s in America. Beyond this they spoke of books, of art, of music, of history, of science. Norton’s knowledge of Italy was profound and exact; Biagi had lived what Norton had acquired. No matter what the subject, their comments, although simply made, were expressions of prodigious study and absolute knowledge; of complete familiarity, such as one ordinarily has in every-day affairs, with subjects upon which even the well-educated man looks as reserved for profound discussion. Norton and Biagi were the two most cultured men I ever met. In listening to their conversation I discovered that a perfectly trained mind under absolute control is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Climbing the circular stairway in the old, ramshackle Harper plant at Franklin Square, New York, I used to find William Dean Howells in his sanctum.
“Take this chair,” he said one day after a cordial greeting; “the only Easy Chair we have is in the Magazine.”
Howells loved the smell of printer’s ink. “They are forever talking about getting away from here,” he would say, referring to the long desire at Harpers’—at last gratified—to divorce the printing from the publishing and to move uptown. “Here things are so mixed up that you can’t tell whether you’re a printer or a writer, and I like it.”
Our acquaintance began after the publication by the Harpers in 1906 of a novel of mine entitled The Spell, the scene of which is laid in Florence. After reading it, Howells wrote asking me to look him up the next time I was in the Harper offices.
“We have three reasons to become friends,” he said smiling, after studying me for a moment with eyes that seemed probably more piercing and intent than they really were: “you live in Boston, you love Italy, and you are a printer. Now we must make up for lost time.”
After this introduction I made it a habit to “drop up” to his sanctum whenever I had occasion to go to Franklin Square to discuss printing or publishing problems with Major Leigh or Mr. Duneka. Howells always seemed to have time to discuss one of the three topics named in his original analysis, yet curiously enough it was rarely that any mention of books came into our conversation.
