Bibliophilic Dreamscape

Over the past two years I have focused on looking forward. What we desperately need is a vision of a positive future for the Jewish people, the United States and for Israel, but it has been a really fertile time for despair. As Rabbi Ed Feinstein told us in one of my rabbinical school classes, the job of the Rabbi is to be a calm presence and I have done my best to fill that role. In order to keep myself on that path I am setting aside larger concerns for the  moment. As Noga Erez says, I need to stop watching the news (at least for a while).

I pulled a book out of my personal library at my warehouse off the shelf: “Second Reading: Selections from the Quarterly News-Letter 1933-1963,” compiled by Oscar Lewis for The Book Club of California. It is a look backwards for me towards things I wanted, or thought I wanted, earlier on in my life.

The Book Club of California is a private club for bibliophiles, centered in San Francisco, with activities in Pasadena as well. Lewis wrote in a book published later in his life, “On Reaching Seventy: How the Club Began Is A Story Worth Retelling”:
 

—

‘‘One morning in 1912, Dr. Edward Robeson Taylor, poet, physician and once mayor of San Francisco, joined W. R. K. Young, book collector and businessman; John Henry Nash, already widely known as a printer; and James D. Blake, then of Newbegin’s Book Shop and later to represent Harper Brothers, publishers, on the West Coast. Together they called on Charles C. Moore, president of the forthcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition, to suggest that a collection of rare books and locally produced fine printing be displayed.

Moore, himself an ardent bibliophile, approved the idea but advised that it would carry more weight with the exhibits committee if it came, not from a few individuals, but from an organized group. The petitioners thanked him and left, to return an hour or two later and repeat their request—this time on behalf of the Book Club of California, an organization they had dreamed up over the luncheon table.

The book exhibition they envisioned never came to pass, but the club they had so casually created fared very well indeed. By December of 1912, it was formally organized and could boast of fifty-eight charter members.’’
 

—

From this charter group one can see that from the beginning the BCC was made of up prominent leaders in the bookselling and publishing community as well as the local political leadership. In its beginnings it was another one of those vehicles for the white and wealthy to gather together and socialize and promote the public good as they saw it. I don’t mean to cast aspersions, just to point out that it was a creature of its time. That said, in time Jews joined in solid numbers and when I wanted to become a member, the first member I approached to ask to nominate me for membership readily agreed. I was a scruffy character then (and still am), but that was no bar, and I remained a member as long as I had the discretionary income to cover the membership fees.

As a bookseller in San Francisco, I looked up to the great booksellers of the city from times gone by. There was a time when downtown San Francisco was dotted with a fine variety of booksellers, new, used and antiquarian. Even in my time we had dealers like Jeremy Norman who specialized in rare medical books and handled the Albert Einstein letters, along with McDonalds Book Shop in the Tenderloin, whose dilapidated collection was known as “a dirty ill-lit place for books.”

One of the bookstores that remained downtown when I was first in San Francisco was The Holmes Bookstore, then managed by the third generation of Holmes. Harold C. Holmes, the owner of the second generation, wrote an article featured in “Second Reading,” entitled “Reveries of a San Francisco Antiquarian Bookman,” in 1950. The ambitions of a bookseller of his generation and the type of items that were viewed as the acme of collectible books is familiar to me, but are not the books on most collectors minds these days,

—

“Unlike most businesses, the antiquarian bookseller gets a greater thrill from buying than he does selling. The lure of the chase is ever present. He is forever dreaming that tomorrow, or perhaps today, fortune may grant him a ‘Bay Psalm Book,’ a ‘Tamerlane,’ a first-folio Shakepeare, or even that almost legendary broadside, ‘The Freeman’s Oath,’ noted in Governor Winthrop’s ‘Journals’ as the first printing struck off colonial America’s first press.”

—

Nowadays the assumed “he” is no longer an obvious assumption. I have never heard a living bookseller mention any of the above titles with the exception of early Shakespeare volumes. Much more stimulating interest is found in items like the Federalist Papers or in rare American Black literature. While interest in Judaica used to focus on Incunabula (printed books from before 1500) and illuminated medieval manuscripts and other manuscripts, collecting interests are focused more now on rabbinic letters, rare Hasidic works and items related to Mandate Palestine and the founding of the state of Israel.

Holmes concludes with a story of an actual dream find that he made on a European trip. “I visited the Giant’s Causeway at the most northeasterly tip of Ireland. In the little town of Portrush, I discovered an old, two-story stone house bearing a modest sign reading, ‘Antique and Old Books.’” The store is closed, but he manages to get the attention of the elderly proprietor who reluctantly granted him admission with the caveat that no books will be sold on a Sunday.

—

“After a half hour’s examination, I realized that most of the stock was of little value and my observation was confirmed when he told me that many people, including booksellers, were frequent visitors. I thanked him and was about to leave when he casually remarked that he had just purchased a lot of books two days before. I immediately requested to see them and was taken to a room at the rear of the house. There were about 300 volumes stacked on the floor and right on top was a two-volume set of Venegas’ ‘History of California,’ London 1759, in original old calf. A further examination produced a presentation copy of the first edition of Roosevelt’s ‘Ranch Life and Hunting Trail’ and a first edition, in German, of Goethe’s ‘Herman and Dorothea.’ I asked the man if I were to come in during a week day what would be the charge for these four volumes. Barely glancing at them, he replied ‘Four pounds.’ I was in a quandary as to what to do. Travel was difficult in 1947 and if I canceled my passage to Glasgow, I might be held up for several days. An idea occurred to me and I said,’Suppose I take these books with me and put four one-pound notes on the table; and then, on Monday morning, you could pick up the money?’ after a moment’s study, he agreed and assured me several times that the money would remain untouched until Monday.”

—

I frequently deal with situations where someone wants me to sell them a book or schedule a visit to browse my collection on Shabbat. I have also sold books for far less than their worth on a fee occasions. Perhaps I should learn something from the bookseller in the story who I most readily identify with. Oh well.

Another article in the collection, “A California Bookman,” by John Howell, describes the actual exhibit that came to pass at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Howell was a more well-healed bookseller than Holmes. He counted among his customers Henry C. Folger, the president of Standard Oil Company and founder of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the railroad baron Henry Huntington who later established the Huntington Library. With the aid of many of his customers and acquaintances he was able to assemble an impressive exhibit.

—

“At the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915, I had an exhibit in the Liberal Arts Building. It was designed by Bernard Maybeck and it was a cottage of the Anne Hathaway type, part timber, part plaster, with a thatched roof, two stories in height. On the shelves were the type of books which had been casually sold over the counter in the days when that style of building was in practical use. Included in the exhibit were illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and beautiful works showing the cloister’s art of decorating manuscripts with gold that glistened as brightly 700 years after it had been laid as it did the day the Flemish monk finished his task. In the exhibit, too, were rare books loaned to me by various California collectors, … Autographs of famous writers were on display also, as well as books which depicted the art of printing in its finest achievement for each generation.”

—

Glory, glory, glory, but despite it all, bibliophilic dreamscapes weren’t enough for me. On other occasions I’ll probably discuss the value of books and the specific pleasures of the printed word and the book as an object, but I chose the task of rabbi over devotion to books and the worlds of buying, selling and collecting. The future is unwritten.