Ever wonder what all those
Civil War books granddad collected for 50 years would be worth on the rare-book
market? Or the letters your father sent back from Europe during World War II?
Or maybe you inherited a cache of photographs that look like they should be in
some archive.
Tomorrow could be your
lucky day. The Rosenbach Museum and Library will take over the nearby Academy
of Vocal Arts, 1920 Spruce St., to sponsor a free four-hour seminar about
evaluating and protecting our family treasures. This is the museum’s way of
calling attention to its exhibition, “Rosenbach Redux: Further Book Adventures
in England and Ireland,” which will, after one more week, move on to the Folger
Library in Washington.
Not only is the
professional counseling free, but those who attend get a free pass for the
final week of the exhibition.
Glen Ruzicka, of the
Conservation Center for Art and Historical Artifacts, will lead off the seminar
with a 20-minute talk about how to recognize what’s worthwhile and what’s not.
Rosenbach’s Leslie A. Morris will follow with suggestions on how to care for
family treasures.
Then, for three hours, a
task force of several conservators and appraisers will scrutinize the heirlooms
you bring in (limited to books, manuscripts and photos) and give you a
suggested value based on similar items already marketed, and tell you where to
get a firm, official appraisal.
Your participation will
honor the memory of the legendary Dr. Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach (1876-1952),
known officially as A.S.W. Rosenbach, known to his intimates in Philly as “Rosey,”
and known worldwide—among those with rare books and manuscripts to sell—as Dr.
R. He turned the sale of rare books in the ‘20s into a sort of high-adventure
detective story. In the little Fort Knoxes of stately homes in England and
Ireland he found treasures, then sold them to freshly-minted American
millionaires who wanted some trappings of culture now that they had the cash.
More than once, he endured
the controversies his acquisitions stirred in Britain, particularly when the
British Museum had turned down treasures he swooped up to buy, and when the
British Museum had turned down treasures he swooped in to buy, and when the
British accused him of plunder.
Rosenbach got his Ph.D. in
English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1901 with an old-style
dissertation—the influence of Spanish literature on Elizabethan English.
Anti-Semitism in Penn’s English Department at the time made it impossible for
him to lead the life of the teaching scholar. So he went for an alternative: He
became the wiliest, most financially successful buyer and seller of rare books
and manuscripts in America.
He and his brother Philip had
inherited an antiques business. Philip concentrated on the old furniture and
paintings (not too successfully, by all accounts), freeing up Dr. R. to deal
books. Dr. R. flashed that doctorate in the way a detective investigating a
crime would wave his badge. His first super-sortie in 1928 to England and
Ireland is the subject of the current exhibition at the Rosenbach.
What rocketed Dr. R. into
orbit was his sly maneuvering to the manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures Underground at Sotheby’s
in 1928. A snooty critic, one I.A. Williams, wrote condescendingly in the London
Mercury about the manuscript before
the sale, huffing that “its value is largely sentimental, and … there is little
doubt that the sum could be spent more profitably on books and manuscripts of a
far higher importance to scholarship.”
What Williams didn’t
comprehend was Dr. R.’s business acumen. Dr. R. knew that buying the marginally
important Alice’s Adventures Underground (for 15,400 pounds, when a pound was worth $4.80), would be worth
literally millions in the publicity that would secure his fame as a well-heeled
American who gave good, new U.S. bucks for old, unread U.K. books.
In spirited bidding, the
British Museum dropped out early, and Rosenbach went head to head with an
English book-dealer before winning the prize at what was, for the time, an
astonishingly high amount. The purchase raised a storm of protest in Britain,
even though Rosenbach immediately offered to turn the manuscript over to
Britain for the price he had paid for it.
No wealthy Briton stepped
forward to reclaim Alice, and
Rosenbach sold it to Eldridge R. Johnson, president of the Victor Talking
Machine Co. (Years later, Rosenbach bought the manuscript back from Johnson’s
heirs for $50,000, then agreed with a proposal by Philadelphian Lessing
Rosenwald to raise money to return it to Britain as an American gesture of good
will. It’s now in the British Museum.)
The Mercury reporter, capturing the Sotheby event, wrote
afterward that when the sale was finished “and the auctioneer announced the
buyer’s name as ‘Rosenbach,’ an innocent gentleman standing next to me
remarked: ‘Who is Rosenbach? Is he a dealer?’”
Make that wheeler-dealer.
No one with books to “get rid of” in the United Kingdom would ever again ask, “Dr.
Who?” The drawing rooms of the stately houses in Ireland buzzed with Dr. R.
talk. Tougher inheritance taxes and a failing agricultural economy were turning
the Irish gentry into financially strapped ghosts of their former selves. Dr.
R. gave them a respectable way out of the fiscal pits recent history had dug
for them.
A stroke of serendipity was
Dr. R.’s linkup with a minor Irish writer and Catholic apologist named Shane
Leslie. Nowadays, no one remembers what Leslie wrote. But in the ‘20s he knew
everyone worth knowing in Ireland. After the Sotheby sensation, Leslie and Dr.
R. made a beeline for the overnight Belfast boat. (Leslie created a crisis by
losing the first-class tickets Dr. R. had purchased ahead of time. Dr. R. was
unflappable, as he was said to be, always.)
At the first stately house
they visited in Ireland, Dr. R.’s eyes bugged at treasures he knew his best
customer, Henry A. Folger, would go ga-ga over. He telegraphed the wealthy
American back in the States, and before you could say Western Union twice,
Folger wired back a buy-order.
Dr. R. made the traditional
10 percent markup on the Alice manuscript.
But he made millions of dollars on the follow-up sales—what the European gentry
called “private treaty” purchases, with no public aspect—just hard, quiet
bargaining. No one knew what Dr. R. had paid for these mostly mint copies of
very old books, so nobody could complain about what he charged. It was a
perfect formula for turning Rosey into a millionaire.
You can get the whole story
of Rosenbach’s adventures in a 112-page catalogue ($15 for visitors, $12 for
Rosenbach members) printed with a grant from the Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission and put together with money from the Pew Charitable Trust.
Sotheby’s—ironically or aptly, depending on how you look at it—contributed
money to expedite the show.
After he and his
13-year-old brother, Philip, died, Dr. R.’s own collection of early American
children’s books was donated to the Free Library of Philadelphia and his collection
of American Judaica to the American Jewish Historical Society. His and his
brother’s estates, including the family home and its contents, are now the
Rosenbach Museum and Library—whose collection reflects the Doctor’s interests
in Americana, British and American literature, and illustrated books.
And who knows? Maybe your
dusty old books and curled-up letters will turn into a minor inheritance, if
not the sort of money the Doctor envisioned when he was eyeing Rosey days ahead
for him and his books.
Reprinted from The
Philadelphia Inquirer, Friday, Jan.
19, 1990
No comments:
Post a Comment