Harry B. Smith. A
Sentimental Library Comprising Books Formerly Owned by Famous Writers,
Presentation Copies, Manuscripts, and Drawings.
[New York]: Privately Printed [by the De Vinne Press], 1914.
Appreciation by Luther Livingston. xxvi 332 [1] pp. Frontispiece, plates. 4to. Original quarter vellum and grey cloth; spine stamped in gilt
Inscribed, “To Sydney R. Smith from his affectionate father, Harry B. Smith, December 1914.” Bookplate of the recipient.
Sydney R. Smith (1893–?), was Harry B. Smith’s only child. Sydney early on made an attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps as a librettist, authoring a musical comedy in collaboration with his friend Augustus Thomas, Jr., with music by Jerome Kern. The musical, Love o’ Mike, had a modestly successful six-month run in New York City in 1917. Shortly thereafter Sydney entered the Army and served as an officer. When the war ended he did not return to writing (see John Charles Franceschina’s biography, Harry B. Smith [2003]). However, inspired by his father’s various rare book endeavors, he became a bookseller based in Canaan, New York, and specialized in sporting books, particularly foxhunting, racing, polo, and horses.
Harry B. Smith (1860–1936) assembled the first great collection of association material and produced this masterful private library catalogue. His catalogue notes are models of their type, written in an engaging style and providing detailed background on many of the items. Smith’s introduction and Luther Livingston’s appreciation are both distinguished. The collection focused on nineteenth-century English literature and included outstanding association items, letters, and manuscripts from the Brownings, Byron, Carroll, Dickens, Keats, Lamb, Shelley, Stevenson, Tennyson, etc.
Smith’s
library and catalogue influenced a whole generation of collectors and
ignited widespread interest in association material that is still in
full force today. It was also the first major acquisition of the twentieth
century’s greatest bookseller, A.S.W. Rosenbach, who purchased the collection
from Smith in 1914 for $79,000 (the purchase and its importance detailed
by Edwin Wolf 2nd & John Fleming in Rosenbach (1960),
pp. 89–92).
Smith writes in the introduction to the catalogue: “The collecting of books is inspired by a sentiment founded on reverence and hero-worship. It would seem to follow that the more interesting the history of a particular copy of a book, the greater the appeal to the collector and the lover of literature. If, as Byron says, ‘a book’s a book although there’s nothing in it,’ surely a book is more than a book when the extra something in it takes the form of a presentation inscription by its author, or notes in the handwriting of a famous man who once owned and read it…
“In the preface to his catalogue, Frederick Locker Lampson [The Rowfant Library] apologized for having so many books. I cannot conscientiously apologize for having so few; yet, when I think of the wonderful things that have been offered me which I perforce declined to buy, a feeling of sadness comes over me that is decidedly akin to pain…It is not the yielding to temptation that oppresses me; but oh, the remorse for the times I yielded not!”
Smith explains the origin of the collection in his autobiography First Nights and First Editions (1931): “At this time [1884], Eugene Field’s favorite haunt was the rare book department of McClurg’s store [in Chicago]…To this trysting place at McClurg’s, Field gave the name of the Saints’ and Sinners’ Corner because of the bookmen who there convened about half were clergymen and the rest mostly newspaper men and actors. The presiding genius of the place was George Millard, learned and amiable, now with the spirits of just bookmen made perfect. Field was to the group what Doctor Johnson was to The Club, and the good bald poet counted that day lost on which he failed to visit the Corner to commune with the Sinners and plague the Saints…
“It was in the Saints’ and Sinners’ Corner that I first took an interest in rare books, though my bibliomania is inherited and was only waiting for an opportunity to break out. One day I found among the books that Millard had just brought from England a copy of the first edition of ‘Pickwick.’ It was bound in old green Morocco and I discovered that it bore on the title-page the autograph inscription, ‘J. P. Harley, Esquire. From his Faithful Charles Dickens.’ There was a certain pleasure in holding in my hand a copy of ‘Pickwick’ that Dickens had held in his hand, in looking at the page he had looked at when he wrote the inscription. There was a charm even in the binding of the book, early Victorian gift-book style. The youthful ‘Boz’ had taken pride in having this copy ornately bound for presentation to his actor friend and it seemed to me to be a delectable volume to have and to hold. The price was sixty dollars! It would now be worth about three thousand dollars [1931]. Those were happy days! I was a newspaper scribe and the means did not justify the spend; but what pleasure is there in buying things that one can easily afford?
“The book was the beginning of my collection of presentation copies. At that time there was so little regard for books interesting because of previous ownership that the awkward and ambiguous term ‘association copies’ had not been invented. From the date of this purchase my bookish speciality was the collecting of presentation copies. It was regarded as a harmless eccentricity, and Field declared that I would never be satisfied till I possessed Shakespeare’s copy of Tennyson’s ‘Maud’” (p. 103–104).
Bookman’s Valhalla
Lathrop Harper’s Copy
Signed by the “Immortals”
English
Literature from the Library of Mr. R. B. Adam, Buffalo, N.Y. To be
Sold By His Order
New York: The Anderson Galleries, February 15 & 16, 1926.
[iii] 132 [1] pp. Frontispiece, text illus. 8vo. Original flexible pebble cloth, spine stamped in gilt, original wrappers bound in, as issued. Notes: 433 lots offered.
Bookseller Lathrop Harper’s copy. A most appealing association item signed by twenty-four bookmen during the pre-auction dinner party hosted by A. Edward Newton for the highly respected collector, R. B. Adam—an iconic gathering of heroes representing the Golden Age of American book collecting.
Signers include Ralph Isham, Seymour de Ricci, Barnet J. Beyer, Jerome Kern, Louis B. Shaw, A. S. W. Rosenbach, Owen D. Young, William Jay Turner, James F. Drake, Charles S. Osgood, Lathrop Harper, Walter M. Hill, Gabriel Wells, Carl Pforzheimer, Christopher Morley, E. Swift Newton, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, R. B. Adam, A. Edward Newton, Mitchell Kennerley, Edgar H. Wells, George H. Sargent, and E. Byrne Hackett.
Newton writes of the occasion in This Book-Collecting Game, “On the fifteenth of February, 1926, my great friend and fellow Johnsonian, Mr. R. B. Adam of Buffalo, had a sale at the Anderson Galleries in New York of a portion of his library—not of his wonderful Johnson collection, but of books of which he had tired or which did not fit into the period which he has made peculiarly his own. With the idea of paying him homage, I gave a little dinner in New York, the first night of the sale, to a small group of friends and booksellers (friends also). It was a speedy affair: including speeches we were at the table just one hour and fifteen minutes…whereupon the meeting adjourned to the auction room” (p. 316).
Rosenbach’s similiarly signed copy is pictured in Rosenbach with the caption, “The immortals.” Wolf and Fleming wrote about the sale: “It was one of those auctions, of which there were so many in the 1920s and so few thereafter, where the quality and rarity of the books were enhanced by the fact that collectors and dealers were universally fond of their owner. R. B.’s friends outdid themselves to pay him honor. Several of the items on which [Henry Clay] Folger gave Dr. Rosenbach bids went for ten times those bids. Once again, the Doctor represented most of the ‘boys,’ Newton, Pforzheimer, Bemis, Wilmarth Lewis beginning his methodical pursuit of Walpole, Owen Young, A. Conger Goodyear, and the broker Howard Sachs. But this sale was more than just books sold. There was a dinner party before it—the Doctor and half a dozen of the leading dealers, collectors like Kern, Pforzheimer, and Newton, Tinker of Yale and Osgood of Princeton, and, of course, Kennerley and R. B. Adam…There was fun, gossip, and repartee in the galleries. And of course there was a gathering at Rosy’s afterward, where Prohibition was not…” (p. 243).
I trace only four signed copies from the dinner: Lathrop Harper’s copy (this one), the Rosenbach copy, the Kennerley copy once in the collection of Matthew Bruccoli, later donated to the University of South Carolina, and the Kern copy, sold at his later auction, October 16, 1962, whereabouts unknown (with the auction caption “Bookman’s Valhalla”).