Books: Folios & Frenzies

• Share

ROSENBACH (616 pp.)—Edwin Wolf II, with John Fleming—World ($10).

"I have been tormented with the desire for possession," wrote a languishing millionaire in 1921. "I am still in the position of a young man sitting on the rocks on a fine moonlight night in summer, holding the hand of a pretty girl and having a great desire to kiss her, but dare not do so." The passionate metaphorist. Frank Bemis, merely wanted to buy a particularly fine First Folio Shakespeare (he finally did, for $30,000), and his was the kind of passion only one bookseller could inspire.

The seller was Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, a randy, rowdy, penguin-shaped man who was the most successful and most flamboyant rare-book dealer in history.

Private book collecting in the U.S. reached its peak in the '20s, before its frenzy was cooled by taxes, the Depression and the increasing rarity of first-rate items outside institutional libraries. During that time it was customary for the great auction houses to announce after important sales that "unless otherwise noted, all books were bought by Dr. Rosenbach." The coolness with which the Philadelphia dealer, by an inclination of his head, would top a bid by £500 caught the public's fancy, and Dr. R. knew how to keep publicity afloat. Solemnly he advertised: "Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, 1609; First Edition; $12,500. No family can be happy without one."

Baronial Branch. The fascinating tale of book collecting's great days emerges from this densely written biography by two former Rosenbach employees, and few readers will mind that the book is too long by half or that its style sometimes flutters giddily. Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach was born in 1876, and sniffed book dust from childhood; his uncle Moses Polock was an early collector of Americana, and a bookseller who loved books too much to sell them. At the University of Pennsylvania young Rosenbach slighted his courses but stored up an amazing knowledge of books and their contents. While working for his Ph.D.—later he sported his doctorate and his pince-nez to much the same effect—he set out to compile nothing less than a comprehensive bibliography of English literature.

But hard scholarship palled; Rosenbach was better suited to hard selling. He learned quickly that a book was worth what someone would pay for it, and he became adept at nurturing the gluttony of those who could pay. An early client was a rich young Philadelphian named Harry Widener, who went down with the Titanic; his collection became the nucleus of Harvard's Widener Library. The doctor's Philadelphia shop was hardly grand enough for his new trade, and he opened a New York branch in a baronial town house on Madison Avenue. His hospitality was lavish; during Prohibition he entertained guests with the best whisky procurable and, frequently, with women of the same description.