A Passion for Books Page 16

  Every college town should support a bookshop. It need not necessarily be so splendid an undertaking as the Brick Row Print and Book Shop at New Haven, over which Byrne Hackett presides with such distinction, or even the Dunster House Book-Shop of Mr. Firuski of Cambridge. And to make these ventures the successes they deserve to be, faculty and students and the public alike should be loyal customers; but it should be remembered that these shops need not, and do not, depend entirely upon local trade. Inexpensive little catalogues can be issued and sent to customers half-way round the world.

  Speaking of catalogues, I have just received one from a shop I visited when I was last in London, called “The Serendipity Shop.” It is located in a little slum known as Shepherd’s Market, right in the heart of Mayfair. It may be that my readers will be curious to know how it gets its name. “Serendipity” was coined by Horace Walpole from an old name for Ceylon-Serendip. He made it, as he writes his friend Mann, out of an old fairy tale wherein the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” Its name, therefore, suggests that, although you may not find in the Serendipity Shop what you came for, you will find something that you want, although you did not know it when you came in. Its proprietor, Mr. Everard Meynell, is the son of Alice Meynell, who, with her husband, did so much to relieve the sufferings of that fine poet Francis Thompson, and who is herself a poet and essayist of distinction. Is not every bookshop in fact, if not in name, a Serendipity Shop?

  I have no patience with people who affect to be fond of reading, and who seem to glory in their ignorance of editions. “All I am interested in,” they say, “is the type: so long as the type is readable, I care for nothing else.” This is a rather common form of cant. Everything about a book should be as sound and honest and good; but it need not be expensive.

  I have always resented William Morris’s attitude toward books. Constantly preaching on art and beauty for the people, he set about producing books which are as expensive as they are beautiful, which only rich men can buy, and which not one man in a hundred owning them reads. Whereas my friend Mr. Mosher of Portland, Maine—I call him friend because we have tastes in common; I have, in point of fact, never met him or done more than exchange a check for a book with him—has produced, not a few, but hundreds of books which are as nearly faultless as books can be, at prices which are positively cheap. As is well known, Mr. Mosher relies very little upon the bookshops for the marketing of his product, but sells practically his entire output to individual buyers, by means of catalogues which are works of art in themselves. We may not fully realize it, but when Mr. Mosher passes away, booklovers of another generation will marvel at the certitude of his taste, editorial and other; for he comes as near to being the ideal manufacturer as any man who ever lived.

  I would not for a moment contend that a man in the retail book business will in a short time make a fortune. We are not a nation of readers, but a young and uncultured people. It is not to be forgotten, however, that we graduate every year an immense number of men and women from our colleges. Potentially, these are, or ought to be, readers; they will be readers, if publishers and booksellers do their duty.

  If a library is the best university, as we have been told it is, the bookseller has his cue. Let him make his shop attractive—a centre from which culture may be radiated. Customers have to be educated. When a new line of goods, of whatever kind, is being introduced, “missionary work,” as we manufacturers call it, has to be done.

  New York City has several fine bookshops: for example, Brentano’s, one of the great bookshops of the world; but Brentano’s has its fine-book department, as have Scribner’s and Dutton’s and Putnam’s; and these so-called fine-book departments are doing expensively, as befits New York, what I would have every bookshop do according to its locale, as McClurg is doing in Chicago.

  The advantages that would accrue are several. More readers would be made. The book business of the department stores would not be interfered with in the least—they would remain, as now, the best customers for certain classes of publishers, who might expect to have some day, in addition, a more thriving class of booksellers than now. And better books would be published—better, that is, in print, paper, and binding.

  In the fine-book department, which I’m urging every bookseller to start without delay, I would keep out trash; I would admit only good books—good, I mean, in every sense of the word except moral. The department should be in charge of the most intelligent man in the shop, if there be an intelligent man; and I would get one if I had not one, and in these days of profit-sharing, I would give him an interest in the profit of that department. I would buy, too, good books from the second-hand English booksellers, who sell very cheaply; and above all things I would not forget the wisdom stored up in the distorted proverb,

  Early to bed and early to rise,

  Work like h——, and advertise.

  © 1988 by Sam Gross, reprinted by permission.

  Ten Memorable Books That Never Existed (and Where They Were Mentioned)

  Books titles are sometimes used to add to the plausibility of fiction or legend. Below are ten books that are alleged to have been written by fictional characters, or to have existed, but for the existence of which there is no evidence.

  The Curious Experience of the Patterson Family on the Island of Uffa by John H. Watson (alluded to in several Sherlock Holmes stories as a work Dr. Watson wrote before meeting Holmes)

  Mad Tryst by Launcelot Canning (mentioned by Edgar Allan Poe in The Fall of the House of Usher)

  The Memoirs of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood (a nonexistent autobiography found in several stories by P. G. Wodehouse)

  Modern Warfare by Gen. Tom Thumb (a fake book in the library of Charles Dickens)

  Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred (a manual on corpse-eating that appears in the horror tales of H. P. Lovecraft)

  Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep (another of the phony sets that Charles Dickens used to fill the shelves of his library and poke fun at his rivals)

  On Polishing Off the Canonical Hours by Master Greedyguts (a satirical manual for the clergy referred to by François Rabelais)

  The Seven Minutes by J. J. Jadway (the scandalous book in Irving Wallace’s novel of the same title; surprisingly never written by some enterprising writer)

  Practical Handbook of Bee Culture by Sherlock Holmes (a fictional contribution by the great detective)

  The Book of Adam (a book mentioned in the Talmud and in rabbinic literature that, it seems, never actually existed)

  The Last of His Race

  BY A. EDWARD NEWTON

  Not long ago there died a gentleman, scholar, and book-collector, whose place in the game we are playing it will be difficult and perhaps impossible to fill. Need I say that I refer to Beverly Chew? There have been and there now are greater collectors than he, but I feel quite sure that no other amateur has ever exerted in this country the widespread influence that he did, or had an equal amount of bibliographical learning.

  Mr. Chew was born in the beautiful little college town of Geneva, New York, on March 5, 1850, in a fine old mansion situated on a bluff overlooking the lake, and he died in another old-fashioned house not far from the spot where he was born. He was a graduate of Hobart College, a small college in Geneva, and throughout his life he remained closely identified with the institution in which he was educated. After his graduation he went to New York, and in due course he became a successful banker. For many years he was vice president of the Metropolitan Trust Company, until, a few years ago, he retired from active business. At the time of his death he was Geneva’s most distinguished citizen, but he was so modest and unassuming that perhaps not all of his neighbors knew this fact. The great passion of his life was books, and his knowledge of them inexhaustible and impeccable.

  I am able to place with some certainty the time when I first met Mr. Chew: it was almost thirty-five years ago, just before I was married, at a reception at th
e Grolier Club in New York, of which he was one of the earliest members, serving the Club with honor and filling every office from librarian to president. My ignorance in those days was abysmal compared with his knowledge, and somehow in the course of conversation he asked me what I collected, and, replying, I said, with some confidence, “The older poets,” meaning thereby not Longfellow or Tennyson or Browning, but rather Keats and Shelley. I shall never forget his look of reproach as he said: “You don’t call Keats and Shelley ‘the older poets,’ I hope”; and subsequently, when I came to know him better, I learned that his definition of “older poets” would be those who had died before 1640—men of whose very names I, at that time, had never heard. But with the passing of years we became warm friends, and those who knew him well will agree with me that no man was more kindly, generous, and courteous than he.

  Mr. Chew came of an excellent family, remotely connected with the distinguished Chew family of Germantown, Philadelphia. His grandfather was Collector of the Port of New Orleans and officially entertained La Fayette upon his last visit to this country. It so happened that his father, then an infant, was to be christened at the time of the visit, and the great man held the boy, who was named Alexander La Fayette, the name being handed down in the family.

  Shortly after his graduation he married Clarissa Pierson, with whom he lived in the most perfect happiness until her death in May 1889. He had been heard to express the wish that he too might die in May, and this melancholy wish was granted him: after a long period of unconsciousness, he passed away, peacefully on May 21, 1924. He was a high churchman and in New York was a regular and devout attendant of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction was a part of his creed; the number and extent of his kindly charities will never be known, for he almost never spoke of these things even to his most intimate friends. His funeral service was held in Trinity Church, Geneva, which he had loved as the church of his boyhood, and his body was carried up the aisle by college boys, members of his fraternity, the Sigma Phi, to which his father and his three brothers belonged. It was a gray day, but the light streamed in through the windows of yellow glass—of which he was so proud; glass made in Geneva a century ago, the manufacture of which is a lost art—and made a golden haze, a proper atmosphere for the beautiful and impressive service of the Church of England Prayer Book. Prior to the service at the church he lay at rest in his library, surrounded by his books, his closest friends, that he knew and loved so ardently.

  Next to books Mr. Chew loved prints; portraits, which are a form of biography; especially old examples of famous engravers like Marshall, who engraved the portrait of Shakespeare for the Poems (1640), the beautiful Sucklin [sic] for Fragmenta Aurea (1640), and the Herrick for the Hesperides (1648); or Faithorn, who engraved the superb portrait of Killigrew in the 1664 edition of Comedies and Tragedies, which Mr. Chew once told me he thought was the finest portrait in any book. And I do not forget the lovely little plates in another favorite book of his, Lovelace’s Lucasta. Lovelace! what a name for a poet! And Faithorne! “whose charm can save from dull oblivion or a gaping grave,” as his friend Mr. Thomas Flatman has it. Mr. Chew’s collection of portraits of Milton was, I suppose, the finest ever gotten together. But why call the roll? Whoever did fine work with pen or pencil or brush or type had in Beverly Chew his keenest appreciator.

  I have not yet mentioned Mr. Chew’s most remarkable characteristic—his marvelous memory. Certain great men are curiously endowed: I have been told that the late Pierpont Morgan could, merely by thinking of figures, make them dance about in his brain and finally add, multiply, and divide themselves while his confreres were looking for a lead pencil; Mr. Chew’s memory was of this same disconcerting order. He never seemed to forget anything relating to a book. And there is so much to be remembered! Think how many books there are; think, too, that every great book has some special characteristic which must be present or lacking, as the case may be, if that book is to pass the scrutiny of a collector such as Mr. Chew was and find a place upon his shelves. And these points, so important in what they indicate, are seemingly so trifling and insignificant in themselves: a date, a misplaced word or letter even. Many years ago, I bought at auction a first edition of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. When I got it home and examined it I found therein a long letter written by Mr. Chew to its former owner, in which he says, “When I returned home and examined page by page the first and second editions of the ‘Scarlet Letter,’ I find that I was correct in my statement, namely—” then followed a minute description, ending with: “and the book should have the word ‘reduplicate’ on page 21 instead of the word ‘repudiate.’ ” Of my personal friends, the only man that I would mention as in the class with Beverly Chew is Mr. Thomas James Wise of London, but Mr. Wise’s opportunities have been much greater than Mr. Chew’s, for he has sat at the gate, whereas, curiously enough, Mr. Chew never went abroad. No, I can hardly bring myself to think that the present generation of book-collectors is as distinguished as that to which Mr. Chew belonged. I suppose we fall naturally into the way of investing those who have gone with qualities which we may lack, perhaps; and yet, as I think of men like Robert Hoe and Samuel P. Avery, Charles B. Foote and Frederick R. Halsey, Edward Hale Bierstadt, and William Loring Andrews, it does seem as though there were a falling off in the present generation.

  I have referred to Mr. Chew’s taking me up so promptly when I spoke of the “older poets”; his own favorites, I came to know, were those of the seventeenth century; I suppose his knowledge of this period was unequaled. Wherever one goes among bookmen, either in this country or in England, the bibliographies published by the Grolier Club are constantly referred to; with the publication of these Mr. Chew had much to do. The librarian of the Club, Miss Granniss—who succeeded Mr. H. W. Kent, to whom book-collectors are under so many obligations—has told me of her work on the Club’s volumes of English bibliography from Wither to Prior. Most of the collations had been made by Mr. Bierstadt, and after his death the work was carried on by a committee. Mr. Chew, it appears, had been appointed to oversee the proofreading, a most tedious and difficult task, one of his countless services to the Club. Questions, of course, arose by the hundred; these Miss Granniss was in the habit of listing during the week for submission to Mr. Chew, and on Saturday afternoons he would punctually appear and, after settling himself in his chair and lighting his cigar, would exclaim, “Fire away!” Whereupon she would begin; and says she, in the letter from which I am quoting:

  I can hardly recall a question which he was not able to answer at once “out of his head,” though I remember occasional admonitions to verify this blank leaf, or that variation in spelling by such and such copies or reference books, but I am sure that I never found him mistaken. The information which he had spent a lifetime in acquiring was cheerfully and instantly put at the service of anyone really interested.

  Shortly after the war I went to London, and spending, as my custom is, some time in the British Museum, I chanced one day upon that distinguished gentleman, Mr. Alfred W. Pollard, then Keeper of the Printed Books, and in conversation with him I happened to refer to the Census of Shakespeare’s Plays in Quarto which had recently been published by the Yale University Press, under the joint direction of Miss Henrietta C. Bartlett of New York and Mr. Pollard. The book is a splendid example of scholarly bibliography upon an extremely difficult subject, and Mr. Pollard, referring to the exasperating annoyances and delays incident to sending proof backward and forward across the ocean during the war, said, “I thought the job would never get done, and at last I wrote Henrietta and told her that if she could prevail on Mr. Chew to read the proof I would be satisfied. I was quite willing to put my name to anything that had received his approval.” What a tribute from a great scholar to the busy man of affairs! “If you want a thing done, go to a busy man,” is an old adage.

  Of the many societies and clubs and institutions of which Mr. Chew was a member I shall not speak; th
ey all, I feel, as we of the Grolier Club do, mourn his loss. An old friend has been taken from us. One may make friends but not old friends—it takes time to make an old friend, as it does to make an old book.

  Was Mr. Chew a poet? I do not know, but he wrote at least one poem which has found its way into the anthologies, “Old Books Are Best.”

  It is a little more than a year ago that, after several days spent in Buffalo with my dear friend and fellow collector, Mr. R. B. Adam, I decided not to go on to New York without visiting Mr. Chew in Geneva. I am glad that I did. He met me at the station and conducted me—rather ceremoniously, for he was a gentleman of the old school—to his home, pointing out with something like pride the house in which he was born, on the main street of the pretty collegiate town. In the evening after dinner we sat in his library and smoked and talked, and put our hobby horses through their paces until late into the night; and as we retired he told me that my visit to him was a compliment, and I replied that my invitation was an honor. “And so to bed.” The next morning, being an early riser, seeing the door of his bedroom closed, I passed very quietly and silently tiptoed downstairs into the library; the old gentleman was there before me. In an easy chair by the window he sat with several newspapers, unopened, by his side. In his hand was a book, which by the help of a magnifying glass he was reading as I entered; he put it by to greet me affectionately and was I thought a trifle embarrassed at being seen with this artificial aid to failing eyesight. To change the subject, I spoke of the book he had in his hand; it was a first edition of Herrick’s Hesperides (1648), and I told him that my copy was a better one. This put him on his mettle at once, and he spoke of the fine copy—bound by Roger Payne, as I remember—that had been in the collection he had sold to Mr. Henry E. Huntington.