Old Books, Rare Friends Read online

  BOOKS BY LEONA ROSTENBERG

  English Publishers in the Graphic Arts 1599–1700

  Literary, Political, Scientific, Religious & Legal Publishing, Printing & Bookselling in England, 1551–1700 (2 volumes)

  The Minority Press & The English Crown: A Study in Repression 1558–1625

  The Library of Robert Hooke: The Scientific Book Trade of Restoration England

  Bibliately: The History of Books on Postage Stamps

  BOOKS BY LEONA ROSTENBERG AND MADELEINE B. STERN

  Bookman’s Quintet: Five Catalogues about Books

  Old & Rare: Forty Years in the Book Business

  Between Boards: New Thoughts on Old Books

  Quest Book—Guest Book: A Biblio-Folly

  Connections: Our Selves—Our Books

  Old Books in the Old World: Reminiscences of Book Buying Abroad

  BOOKS BY MADELEINE STERN

  We Are Taken

  The Life of Margaret Fuller

  Louisa May Alcott

  Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie

  Imprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers

  We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America

  So Much in a Lifetime: The Life of Dr. Isabel Barrows

  Queen of Publishers’ Row: Mrs. Frank Leslie

  The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews

  Heads & Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers

  Books and Book People in Nineteenth-Century America

  Antiquarian Bookselling in the United States: A History

  BOOKS EDITED BY MADELEINE B. STERN

  Women on the Move (4 volumes)

  The Victoria Woodhull Reader

  Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott

  Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott

  Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America

  A Phrenological Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Americans

  Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott

  A Modern Mephistopheles and Taming a Tartar by Louisa M. Alcott

  Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers

  Modern Magic

  The Feminist Alcott: Stories of a Woman’s Power

  BOOKS CO-EDITED BY MADELEINE B. STERN

  Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (with Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy)

  A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (with Myerson and Shealy)

  The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (with Myerson and Shealy)

  Louisa May Alcott: Selected Fiction (with Myerson and Shealy)

  Freaks of Genius: Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (with Shealy and Myerson)

  From Jo March’s Attic: Stories of Intrigue and Suspense (with Shealy)

  A MAIN STREET BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  Main Street Books, Doubleday, and the portrayal of a building with a tree are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Excerpt from sonnet “Not That It Matters” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. From Collected Poems, HarperCollins. Copyright © 1928, 1955 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

  Rostenberg, Leona.

  Old books, rare friends: two literary sleuths and their shared passion /

  Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern.

  p. cm.

  1. Rostenberg, Leona. 2. Stern, Madeleine B., 1912—

  3. Antiquarian booksellers—United States—Biography. 4. Book

  collectors—United States—Biography. I. Stern, Madeleine B., 1912—

  II. Title. III. Title: Old Books, Rare Friends.

  Z473.R77R65 1997

  381’.45002’092—DC21 96-37176

  eISBN: 978-0-307-87453-5

  Copyright © 1997 by Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  To Madeleine

  with love and gratitude from Leona

  To Leona

  with gratitude and love from Madeleine

  A friend may well be reckoned

  the masterpiece of Nature.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Beginnings

  You’re Suddenly a “Miss”

  Morningside Heights

  Strasbourg on the Rhine

  Glengarry and Alpenstock

  Ebb Tide

  Dual Apprenticeship

  Louisa May Alcott’s Mask

  Leona Rostenberg—Rare Books

  Books After the Blitz

  Finger-Spitzengefühl

  ABAA

  Our Double Lives

  The Blood-and-Thunder

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  PROLOGUE

  EARLY ONE MORNING IN SEPTEMBER 1995, THE TELEPHONE rang. We were still in the East Hampton cottage we had rented for the summer, and we thought that by now the deluge of calls would have diminished. Toward the end of August we had been interviewed by Dinitia Smith for the New York Times, and her article, “Of Faithful Friends and Alcott Experts,” had set our phone “ringing off the hook.” Dinitia Smith had made a delightful pastiche of our long friendship, our fifty-year partnership in the rare book business, and our writings, especially those concerned with the double literary life of the author of Little Women.

  “This is Doubleday calling. We’ve read the article about you in the Times, and we were wondering whether you would give us a book.”

  We were not sure we had caught the name Doubleday. “Who is this?” we asked.

  “This is Betsy Lerner, a senior editor at the publishing house Doubleday.”

  A little surer of our ground, but still taken aback, we asked, “What sort of book did you have in mind?”

  A few possibilities were mentioned briefly. Then Betsy Lerner suggested, “How about a joint autobiography? You do seem to have a different story to tell.”

  Now our reaction was a mixture of astonishment, uncertainty, and disbelief. We would have to discuss the possibility and get back to her. And, yes, we were returning to the city in a few weeks. Perhaps we could get together then.

  Between the September telephone call and the meeting with Betsy in October, we did talk about it. Not seriously at first—how could we be serious about a joint autobiography? Sitting together in the sun parlor, walking together on the beach, we toyed with the idea. Betsy had suggested we had a “different story to tell.” It was true, when we looked at our friends—all of them married, most of them retired; their lives differed from ours. But what precisely had Betsy meant? How, specifically, were we different? In what ways did we have a “different story to tell”?

  If we began at the beginning, there was difference there: in our background. Our parents were second- and third-generation German-Americans, comfortable, educated, admiring learning but taking it in stride. There was security in the home, financial and emotional, and the feeling of security settled into the bones and gave strength. Our parents took it for granted that we would move forward, and they helped the process along not only by precept but by example. They were the role models of our youth.

  Then, too, in matters of religion, we were minorit
ies of a minority. We were Jews, but descendants of Jews who had carved a radical path in Judaism, leaning less on Hebrew in our devotions than on English, eschewing Orthodox diet, knowing no Yiddish, taking the Union Prayer Book for our gospel. An Orthodox Jew could say to us Reform Jews, “Why, you’re not even Jewish!” and a Jewish member of the Ethical Culture Society could regard us as conservative. Here too there was a difference.

  We perpetuated the difference by living at home as long as we had a parent alive. Most of our friends (as well as our older brothers) moved out from under the parental roof as soon as they married or could afford their own flat. We chose to live at home because we were happy there. We enjoyed the company of our parents; we regarded them as companions, and in the course of our close relationship with our immediate families, we were nurtured and coddled. In a way it was almost a continuity of our childhood.

  The educational process that our parents began for us continued. Graduate school came after college, partly a result of the national Depression. Formal education was followed by self-education, and self-education became a habit. We never stopped studying. Even today, after fifty years in the rare book business, we learn something from every book that passes through our hands.

  The basic reason for much that has been different in our lives is of course the fact that neither of us married. There were men in our lives, but they remained on the fringe of our lives. Neither of us felt more than a mild interest in them, never enough involvement to contemplate a permanent relationship. As a result, we would have no children, but, as Mady’s mother said, “People don’t miss what they’ve never had,” and perhaps this is true.

  The Times article that generated the Doubleday call also generated some speculation about our sexual lives. Several readers inferred from it that our relationship was a Lesbian one. This was a misconception. The “deep, deep love” that existed and exists between us and that is mentioned in Dinitia Smith’s last paragraph has no bearing upon sex.

  Louisa Alcott wrote that she had taken her pen for a bridegroom. In a way, our children too were our books. Leona, dominated by the concept that the printer-publisher was an agent of civilization, took as her province seventeenth-century England and wrote several respected and distinguished books in defense of her thesis. Her original thesis, also substantiating the creative role of the printer-publisher, had been rejected as invalid when she presented it as her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in the 1930s. In the 1970s her later books were accepted in lieu of that dissertation. The rejection, along with the subsequent reversal, would change the course we both traveled and prove one of life’s most productive ironies.

  Madeleine, meanwhile, continued to consume reams of paper. She started, as so many writers do, with a tedious autobiographical novel, and later plunged into feminist biography with lives of Margaret Fuller, Louisa May Alcott, Mrs. Frank Leslie, and an anthology entitled We the Women. Her reaction to the 1960s resulted in two offbeat volumes, one on a nineteenth-century American eccentric reformer, the other on a firm of phrenologist-publishers.

  Before, during, and after all this, Leona made the startling discovery of Louisa Alcott’s pseudonym and her pseudonymous sensational shockers, and Madeleine traced those shockers and assembled them in a succession of anthologies.

  If books were indeed our children, we had large families.

  Basically, the principal difference between us and most of the world is that for more than fifty years we have been partners in an unusual, sometimes esoteric business—that of rare books. It is a business in which knowledge is power, and the arts of detection often play a leading role. The electrifying alertness to what is unusual or important in an early printed book has been given the name Finger-Spitzengefühl. When Finger-Spitzengefühl is coupled with serendipity, the gates of paradise open for the dealer in old and rare. Leona learned of those fascinations during a long apprenticeship, and Madeleine learned of them from Leona. We have both been lured by the fascinations for half a century and we continue to be lured by them.

  Through all that time our friendship has sustained us. Our partnership in business is also a partnership in life—the partnership of “Faithful Friends” who share “a deep, deep love.”

  Our Doubleday contract calls for a book in which detection and Finger-Spitzengefühl play a major role both in rare books and in the unmasking of Louisa Alcott’s double literary life. It also calls for a “different story.” We have thrilled to the chase in our hunts for rare books. With deerstalker and magnifying glass we have uncovered our finds. In the old and the rare we have made connections, connections between past and present, between our books and our selves. We shared the thrill of the chase and the joy of the find. But we shared something else too. We shared our differences. All that is here in the “joint autobiography” of two friends who led and are still leading their “different story.”

  BEGINNINGS

  Leona TO REACH back into the realms of childhood requires integrity and self-discipline. Time tends to gloss over all the events, the places, the loves, the hates, the fears. For me the passing years have embroidered childhood memories into a fabric of joy and love. But, of course, there is always so much more.

  My earliest actual recollection is reaching the first shelf of my parents’ bookcase at age two, and hearing my mother cry, “Leonchen is tall enough to reach the first bookshelf. She was looking at the books. She will be a writer one day and that I know.” Thus began a family prophecy that I would live out, here and abroad, when few women became scholars of bibliographic history.

  In the family pictures taken that same year, I am shown seated in a small armchair, laughing and gurgling as I hold a newspaper, my little silver eyeglasses adjusted, “reading” the news of 1910. My older brother, Adolph Jr., was also photographed, wearing a white sailor suit, his eyes alert, appraising the scene around him—the photographer in his studio bent over his camera, the camera covered by a large black cloth.

  My very lovely mother, Louisa, was the first-born child of a successful New Orleans wholesale jeweler, Leon Dreyfus, and his wife, Bertha, both émigrés from Germany. The oldest of seven, she held sway over her siblings and was spoiled by her father, who, intrigued by her talent for dramatic elocution, showered her with gifts and called her his little Sarah Bernhardt. She attracted men by her charm and her beauty, but somehow did not hold them, and by the age of thirty she was desperate for a husband. Finally, in 1902, when she was thirty-two, she ensnared a German physician six years her junior, Adolph Rostenberg, not entirely suited to her temperament. Imbued with German male superiority, he regarded women as suitable agents of Kinder und Küche (the nursery and the kitchen). They were married Christmas Day of that year. Despite my aristocratic mother’s social ambition, they settled in the Bronx, where my father had begun his practice of general medicine.

  I recall our tall dark house on Washington Avenue. Next door was a stable whose distinctive odor I loved, although my mother never failed to pull out a handkerchief to smother her nose as we walked arm in arm to the big shopping center on Tremont Avenue. Compensating for the stable fumes was the scent of a garden to the left of the house. It bordered a small red brick building bearing the words NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY. “Let’s go to the liberry,” I’d pester my mother almost daily. “Library,” she’d correct. “Liberry,” I replied.

  Once there, we walked into a room ominously labeled “For Adults Only,” where Miss Graves, the senior librarian, would greet my mother cordially. “I have saved a new book for you, Mrs. Doctor.” Maybe it was Somerset Maugham’s recent hit, Of Human Bondage. Maybe it was the latest Mary Roberts Rinehart. “Don’t you want to go to the Children’s Division, little Leona?” Miss Graves would always inquire. There, I was surrounded by rows of books bound in bright reds and blues, greens and yellows. One of the first I recall pouncing upon had large illustrations of the Presidents, entitled Picture Book of Our Great Leaders. “Can I take this?” I asked my mother. “Certainly, darling.” Proudly
I marched off with my selection, still sniffing the musty dusty odor of books, a smell that was somehow warm and comforting and exciting all at once and would remain with me forever.

  In the basement of our house were the kitchen and the dining room. The first floor was devoted to my father’s medical office—off limits to the children—the second to the living room and my parents’ bedroom, where we were always welcome. It was to the third floor, known as the children’s domain, where I’d take my book and sequester myself. There my brother, the strong, the valiant, the daring, the wild Adolph Jr., became the archvillain of my childhood—my brother, who not only dared me and double-dared me but triple-dared me to do every sort of childhood prank imaginable. He was a big fellow for his age (when I was four, he was seven and a half) and spent most of his time when not at school sliding down the bannisters or procuring worms from the backyard to frighten me. Mostly he triple-dared me to climb a snowy fence in my socks or stick my finger into boiling water or drink a formaldehyde concoction he’d made on the sly in my father’s office. And yet occasionally we played together, tearing around the dining room, Adolph violently knocking over the chairs until one struck him in the head. At that point I remember crying out with some concern but mostly glee. “A has another hole in his head,” I sang out until I noticed the blood that streamed from his forehead. Father came to the rescue and staunched it. Glaring at Adolph, he exploded, “Du wilder Junge, du!” (You wild boy, you!), and stamped out of the room.

  And so we grew up in the house on Washington Avenue, where most of my pleasures took place indoors. My mother did not permit me to play with the neighborhood children. Mostly Italian, they were born of immigrant parents, and, according to mother, were given to smoking, wild fights, and playing cards in the street. To the feeling of German superiority she had inherited my mother added a touch of snobbery. Her prejudices were grounded in the belief that her ethnic heritage was better than that of others.