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ADVENTURES IN
AMERICAN BOOK SHOPS
BOOKS BY GUIDO BRUNO
Eternal Moments
Sentimental Studies
A Night in Greenwich Village
Fragments From Greenwich Village
The Sacred Band
Moore Versus Harris
Adventures in American Bookshops
To be published in December,
Stories By the Way
A Handful of Contemporaries
Near the Night Lamp
_Adventures in American
Bookshops, Antique Stores
and Auction Rooms_
_By Guido Bruno_
_Detroit: The Douglas Book Shop_
_1922_
Copyright, 1922,
by
GUIDO BRUNO
Printed in the United States of America
_To RAGNA_
One thousand copies of this book have been printed and the type
distributed.
No.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface 9
The Romance of Buying and Selling Old Things 11
Auctions as Amusement Places 24
The Strange Discovery and Disappearance of
Stuart’s Washington 30
New York Book Shops 39
Den of a Pessimist
A Whitman Enthusiast
An Optimist
A Gambler
Bookshops of Enthusiasts
Book Dealers in Cobwebbed Corners
Specialists in Excitement
Dealers in Literary Property 71
Autograph Brokers 73
Our President’s Handwriting 76
The Romance of a Chicago Book Dealer 87
Chicago Book Shops 91
Chicago Revisited 95
In Boston 100
Small Town Stuff 108
New York Book Magnates 112
Snapshots in Art Galleries on Fifth Avenue 117
’Way Down in Greenwich Village 120
President Harding’s Favorite Book 126
Index 126
Preface
These sketches appeared originally in Pearson’s Magazine, Bruno’s Weekly
and the Book Hunter, and I make grateful acknowledgment for permission
to reprint.
On reading the proofs, I feel I have not done justice to my bookselling
friends. I wandered into their shops, I browsed among their books, I
listened to their talk and wrote it down ... pictures not studies,
impressions not descriptions. Some of my friends have since passed on to
a better world and in these pages will be found perhaps the only record
of their useful and laborious lives. This, I believe, is one excuse for
the existence of my little book.
In the April issue, 1917, of Pearson’s appeared an article of mine
telling about that wonderstore of Brentano’s in New York about the late
Deutschberger and about other old-time booksellers of Fourth Avenue and
Union Square. I was unable to procure a copy of this magazine and
therefore had to omit this important story in this compilation.
While in Detroit recently I met the charming Mr. Higgins, dean of
Michigan’s booksellers, and he objected to my statement in one of my
articles: “Detroit has not one second-hand Book Shop.” I gladly take it
back. Mr. Higgins has a whole houseful of gems and 27 packing boxes
filled with rare first editions and scarce Americana. His three shops
would make our metropolitan friends justly envious. When I wrote years
ago about Detroit’s bookshops I had not met Walter MacKee, who holds
open house in Sheehan’s and is not only a good bookman but also a
talented comedian. I had not signed my name in Mr. La Belle’s guestbook
in MacCaully Brothers’ store where authors passing Detroit are made
welcome. I had not visited Mr. Dennen’s Book Shop, where jeweled prayer
books, rare Shakespeare editions, can be had as well as the newest
novels and books on golf. I had not then visited Mr. Proctor’s Clarion
Shop in Orchestra Hall, the gayest little place, thanks to Mr. Knopf’s
love of vivid colors. Mrs. Morris, in the Hudson Department Store,
created a delightful nook for her book department. Finally, Mr. Gordon
came to Detroit as standard-bearer of the Powner’s Book Interests, who
acquired recently the Reyerson Book Shop. Allister Crowley’s beautiful
Equinox had something to do with the bankruptcy of this old firm, I am
told. Mrs. Gordon, who was Miss Powner before her marriage, is taking an
active interest and perpetuating the traditions of a family of
booklovers.
And there is Mr. Shaffat’s book store on Hastings Street, with its
framed letter by the late Roosevelt who purchased here an important book
on Africa during the last months of his presidency.
Now I have made amends for my hasty statement. I hope Mr. Higgins will
read these lines and accept my humble apologies.
GUIDO BRUNO.
November, 1922.
The Romance of Buying and Selling Old Things
Old things of all description may lose their value and desirability to
their temporary owners, but never to the world. Nothing disappears
completely. The smallest piece of tissue paper that has served as a
wrapper for an orange and is swept along the sidewalk by a stray wind
will ultimately be gathered by some one and again put to some use.
Objects which find their way through the back door of a Fifth Avenue
mansion into a rubbish wagon and are carried away will re-appear in some
flat of a tenement house as a new and welcome addition to somebody’s
comfort.
Articles discarded in tenement house dwellings and sold for a few
pennies to a ragman are triumphantly brought into the reception room of
a patrician mansion, treasured by the new owners, and admired by his
friends.
Curious and extraordinary are the fortunes of old objects on their way
to a new proprietor with whom they will stay for a while, and their
wanderings are eternal.
Old things in New York are sold in magnificent establishments on Fifth
Avenue, and they are sold in dungeons on the Bowery. Some people are so
poor that they have to buy “second-hand things” to furnish their homes
and clothe their bodies. Others are so rich that they are compelled to
buy antiques in order to possess something unique.
But the men who deal in old things, whose chosen calling it is to buy
and to sell antiques and second-hand wares are the true adventurers
among the business men of New York. No matter whether their finger nails
and manners are polished and they entertain prospective buyers in
luxurious display rooms, or, whether they walk in tenement house
districts from door to door, ready to buy anything and everything, or
whether they wait for customers in their stuffy shops on Park Row or
Baxter Street; they all possess the hope that some day they will make
_the_ find, and buy for a song something they will be able to sell for a
large amount. Not money but the game of hunting after the unexpected,
and the thrill in finding it, constitute the lure that attracts the
seeker after old things.
The Poor Man’s Hunting Ground
There are many people on the streets of New York taken for granted
without further question. Have you ever seen early in the morning when
people sit around the breakfast table, a cleanly dressed man, with
wrapping paper and cord under his arms, walking in the roadway, looking
up at the windows of private houses and ejaculating every five or ten
paces some inarticulate noises?
If you lean out of the window and watch him you will see him disappear
into some of the houses, and if you wait for his reappearance you will
notice that his wrapping paper has now become a bundle.
“Cash-Clothes! Cash-Clothes!” Untiringly he cries out these two words at
the people who dwell in the houses he passes. Servants frequently answer
the call of “cash-clothes” and let the man in through the back door as a
welcome buyer of discarded wearing apparel of their masters and
mistresses.
What does he do with his purchases?
Once I beckoned to a kindly-looking old man whose wrapping paper was
still neatly folded under his arm, to come up to my room. How he ever
found my dwelling place among all the other doors of the studio
building, is a riddle to me. I answered his knock. He remained quietly
standing at the door, his hat in his hand:
“What have you got to sell?” he asked very business-like, taking in the
appearance of the room with one glance.
“I have nothing for sale,” I told him. “But I would like to know more
about your business. I wish you would tell me what sort of things you
buy and what you do with them after you have purchased them?”
“Of course, I am willing to pay you for your time if you will be kind
enough to name your price, for say, half-an-hour.”
He hesitated a bit, looked around scrutinizingly, and something
evidently convinced him that I was “all right.” I invited him to take a
seat. He said half an hour of his time would be worth fifty cents, I
gained more of his confidence by paying the fifty cents in advance and
after some more questioning he told me his story and the story of about
two thousand other men who are following the same calling in New York.
“I start out every morning at seven o’clock. I take with me all the cash
I have in this world, heavy wrapping paper and cord, and then I walk the
streets. Just as I attracted you I draw the attention of persons who
really mean business. They sell for various reasons; some sell clothes
or shoes or bedding or underwear because they need money very badly;
pawnshops don’t lend them anything on their over-worn clothes, and I am
about the only purchaser they can find. Other people want to get things
out of the way. They are moving and their trunks cannot hold all the
stuff they have accumulated. I buy everything that I can carry.
“No, I have no place of business. I have to turn my money over at once
or I should be out of work tomorrow. I walk about picking up stuff until
eleven o’clock and then go to Baxter Street and sell.
“In the afternoon I go into another part of the city and again buy up as
much as I can get and in the evening between five and six, back to
Baxter Street.”
“What is on Baxter Street?” I interjected.
“That’s where all the dealers are. I sell to dealers only and they have
fixed prices. For instance, we get from seventy-five cents to one dollar
for a pair of trousers without patches, twenty-five cents to fifty cents
for patched-up trousers, according to the extent of the necessary
repairs. Waistcoats bring fifty cents, coats from twenty-five cents up
to a dollar. Shoes according to their condition, anything from five
cents to seventy-five cents. Hats, neckties, shirts, collars; socks
bring a few pennies only, according to their attractiveness. Overcoats
are in great demand in the cold season. They bring from one dollar up to
five dollars. Women’s dresses bring about the same prices. I usually
make from twenty-five to fifty cents profit on the dollar. Often I make
a hundred per cent and often, too, I make a mistake and lose money. Once
in a while I pick up a piece of jewelry, but people don’t sell jewelry
outright. They would rather pawn it, and then sell the pawn ticket.
“I’ve bought pawn tickets. I paid ten per cent of the loaned amount, but
I got stung so often by buying fake tickets that I don’t bother with
them any more. I know people who go about as I do who make ten and
fifteen dollars the day, but I call it a fair day if I clear from three
to five dollars. Ten dollars is about a fair capital to start with in
buying and selling old clothes, but I know a man who started with fifty
cents and in less than a year he owned a shop on Baxter Street.
“Once I had a great day. A man called me in. It was on Forty-fifth
Street, and I think he must have been an actor. He asked me to take away
all the clothes contained in a big trunk in his room. They were all
women’s clothes of expensive fabric. I had to come three times before I
had taken it all away.
“‘How much will you give me for it?’ he inquired. All I had in my pocket
was twelve dollars. I made him an offer of ten dollars, and I was never
more ashamed of myself than in that moment. But he didn’t pay any
attention to me. He smoked a cigarette and simply said: ‘That will be
all right, but take it out immediately.’ I made bundles and carried it
out in portions. I gave him ten dollars. I laid the money on the table,
and before I left the room the last time, I said: ‘Mister, here are the
ten dollars,’ pointing to the money that was still laying on the table.
‘Take it along, too,’ was his answer. ‘It would bring me only bad luck.
Take it quickly and get out with you.’
“I got frightened and took the money and went downstairs to the landlady
of the rooming house and asked her whether he was ‘all right,’ whether
it was safe to buy the things from him.
“The landlady answered: ‘Oh, yes, he’s all right, the poor fellow. His
wife ran away with some other man only yesterday, and he seems to take
it very hard.’
“Another time I found a five-dollar gold piece in a waistcoat that I
bought from a Jap in a big house on Madison Avenue. I went back with it,
and told him that he had forgotten the five dollars which I found in the
garment. He gave me two dollars and a half and told me that I was a
damned fool. I am sure the waistcoat and the money had belonged to his
master.
“If one wants to take chances, big money can be made in buying old
clothes. I have an uncle--he is dead now--peace be with his soul!--who
made thousands of dollars. But he was constantly mixed up with the
police and had to pay graft on all hands, and lived in perpetual fear
that something unfortunate would happen to him. I wouldn’t touch such
business.
“He went to the Tenderloin and to the bad houses: he knew girls who were
living a fast life. He would buy their clothes and their jewelry for
next to nothing if they needed money to pay fines in the Night Court, or
if they were driven out by the police and had to leave for another
dwelling. He would sell those things, perhaps on the same day for a
hundred times as much money to other girls who were flush. But the money
brought no blessing to him. His son is blind and he himself died of
cancer in the hospital, and he was in awful pain to the last moment.”
Again I interrupted my visitor, who seemed very generous with his time,
and asked him:
“But what happens to the things on Baxter Street after you have sold
them to the stores?”
“They go to the four winds,” he said, pointing characteristically with
his upturned thumb. “People buy them and wear them again; dealers from
uptown buy the better things and put them in their shops; there are
never enough goods on the market. But why don’t you go down to Baxter
Street and see for yourself?”
The Open Air Exchange on Baxter Street
Baxter Street is situated in the oldest part of New York. Fifty to
seventy-five years ago the houses were private homes occupied by
respectable and well-to-do citizens, by merchants after whom streets and
places are named today. The street is lined with shops. Clothes are
displayed along the house fronts; shoes in long rows lie along the show
windows; while boxes with neckties in profusion invite the lover of
colors to make a selection. Business is carried on in the street. The
stores are dark and seem to serve merely as workshops and store rooms.
About noon I strolled down the street and took in the sights which are
as confusing as the turmoil in Broad Street during the busiest hours of
the Curb Market. Men with bundles on their backs and with pushcarts were
constantly arriving. They offered the contents of their packages for
sale. Others stood about looking at the various wares and making offers.
Dickering was going on in all quarters. Things changed hands rapidly.
There was one dark overcoat with a Persian lamb collar which had
originally been brought in by a “Cash-clothes” man. The coat was sold to
the proprietor of one of these stores and resold at once to a man who
had watched the original bargaining. The same coat was thrown upon a
pushcart with several other overcoats and sold “wholesale” to a third
man who evidently took his purchases out of the district. In a basement
I noticed an unusually tall and dignified looking man wearing a sombrero
who didn’t seem to pay much attention to the buying and selling of his
clerks, or were they his sons? He really looked like a Western Colonel,
and I christened him at once “Colonel Baxter.” He was very friendly and
accessible. He answered my many inquiries: “You see these men with the
bundles and pushcarts? They have bought the stuff all over the city, and
now they are disposing of it at the best prices they can get.”
“I know,” I cried, “how they get it. But please tell me what you do with
it after you have bought it.”
“Come inside with me and I’ll show you,” was his answer. We descended to
his basement. Piles of clothes and shoes lay on the floor, they must
have been recently purchased. He opened the door and we entered a
veritable workshop. Several gas arms illuminated the room which had a
low ceiling. The air was thick and at least ten men and women were at
work.
“Here is our laundry,” and he pointed to one corner of the room.
“All underclothes, shirts and collars, overalls and linen suits are
washed and ironed here. We sell only by the dozen and to dealers
uptown.”
“Over there is the tailor shop. We clean the clothes which come in, sew
on the buttons, press them and make them look as good as possible. We
are wholesalers only. We sell old things by the dozen just as factory
owners sell new things in large quantities only. But there are many
shops on Baxter Street which cater to private customers. This part of
the city is frequented by “down-and-outers,” men who come from no one
knows where. They stay a while; they sleep wherever they are
undisturbed, they hang out in our saloons and then they disappear. These
men have to buy clothes. They very rarely have money; a quarter is about
the biggest sum which passes at a time through their hands.
“These people and their like from other parts of the city are the
customers of our shops. A man could get a complete and very decent
outfit with a couple of changes of underwear for about three dollars. He
can buy a collar for a penny, a necktie from two cents to a nickel, a
hat from fifteen cents or a quarter. Our shops here are cheaper than the
Salvation Army ‘department stores,’ and we don’t make any pretences to
be charitable or especially kind to people because we sell to them. And
we have to pay for things, we don’t get them for nothing.
“Before the war, immigrants used to come down on Saturday and Sunday in
great numbers and even fairly well-to-do immigrants who have been in
this country several years cannot get accustomed to purchasing new
things and pay us a shopping visit occasionally. In many countries in
Europe the laboring classes seem to be under the impression that they
must buy second-hand things to wear. They are our best customers, but
they also believe that if we ask a dollar for something we really mean
fifty cents, and so, therefore, we have to advance our prices fifty and
seventy-five per cent, and if we get a little more than we really
expected to get, the time it takes in dickering with these people is
worth the money.
“Men and women in all walks of life who have met with reverses steal
down to us in the darkness of the evening, afraid to be noticed by
someone who might know them, and they buy their overcoats or their
shoes.”
“But Colonel Baxter,” I interrupted him, “to whom do you ‘wholesale’
your own goods?”
He seemed pleased with the new name I had bestowed upon him, and
explained:
“In certain parts of Sixth Avenue, of Eighth Avenue and of Ninth Avenue,
there are ‘second-hand stores’ which cater to a peculiar class of
customers.” These want snappy clothes, shirts with modern patterns,
coats fashionably cut, but they have not the money to purchase them in
the shops where such goods are sold. They sneer at cheap clothes cut
roughly but made out of good material. They want to appear flashy. You
see them on the street corners and in police courts. We supply these
stores with their needs. We specialize in everything that they can
possibly use.”
In the meantime, the open-air exchange on Baxter Street had reached its
culmination, voices surged through the air like shrapnel bursting here
and there creating disturbance. Everybody seemed eager to buy, eager to
sell, money was exchanged in doorways, on sidewalks, bundles were tossed
from pushcart to pushcart.... “Much ado about clothing.”
The Salvation Army
Of course you have seen Salvation Army wagons on the streets. An elderly
gentleman usually occupies the driver’s seat. The horse moves on slowly
and solemnly as if to the air of a very slow litany. The wagon is loaded
with papers and books, with pieces of old furniture, and with bundles of
clothing. The wagon proceeds from door to door. The horse stops. The old
gentleman descends from his seat, rings the bell of the house and asks:
“Any old things for the Salvation Army?”
You have heard a good deal of the Salvation Army, and so you don’t
hesitate to turn over some things you cannot use to the wagon. The
elderly gentleman in Salvation uniform takes everything he can get hold
of. You, of course, think that the magazines are sent to hospitals to be
read by the poor lonesome patients, that the clothes are distributed
among the needy, and the furniture given to some wretched families who
have no beds to sleep on or to others whose hardhearted landlord
deprived them of chairs and tables. Let us take a walk to one of the
many industrial homes of the Salvation Army when the wagons come in, and
the things are assorted and assigned to the different departments, and
you will see what a gross mistake you made by assuming that your gifts
are given away. They go to the needy all right, perhaps to the neediest
of the needy, but for cash exclusively, and no credit is granted.
Books and magazines are turned over at once to the book department,
which conducts a book store on Fourteenth Street near Union Square, not
in the name of the Salvation Army, but in the name of the Reliance Book
Store. Its employees are experienced booksellers who do not wear the
Salvation uniform. In fact, every possible indication that this store
belongs to the Salvation Army is carefully concealed. Magazines are
here sold wholesale to other dealers or retail to you or to me or to
anybody. The magazines given to the Salvation Army by charitable people
are sold for from five to fifteen cents each. A very well-equipped rare
book department attracts collectors from all over the city; “Book Prices
Current” is the guide for the sales prices. School books are sold in
great quantities. I believe the profit of this shop to be far greater
than of any other book shop in the city, as its proprietors do not need
to pay for the books they are selling.
There seems to be a good deal of hypocrisy in concealing the fact that
the Salvation Army owns the Reliance Book Store. Why not put a sign out
that would tell everyone that the books and magazines sold have been
received as gifts for the poor and sick by the Salvation Army?
The so-called industrial homes sustain furniture factories where skilled
labor is employed to rejuvenate furniture collected by the wagons.
Antique furniture dealers have the pick of the really valuable things
and hundreds of dollars are often paid for something which has been
carted away as junk by the Salvation Army’s ragman.
The “Salvation Army Department Store,” a sort of a systematized and
orderly looking junk shop, contains and displays everything to fit out
men and women from head to foot. The things are scrupulously clean, but
sold at far higher prices than in the shops of our friends on Baxter
Street.
The buyers who come here are mostly people recently picked up by the
Salvation Army and employed in some of their shops. They are not treated
with the courtesy due to a customer, but with the brutality of a charity
worker.
It will not be out of place to interject here a few words about the
methods employed by the Salvation Army in recruiting its shopmen. They
are unfortunate people out of work without a home, down-and-out in
spirit, perhaps just released from hospital or prison. They receive
some food, a bed remembered with a shudder in years to come and they
receive a few pennies for work which represents many dollars to the
Army. Mental and physical constraint is constantly exercised over them.
The discipline of a Salvation Army Industrial Home is very similar to
the prison rules of twenty-five years ago. All these brokendown men to
whom the Salvation Army “grants a temporary home” were originally
promised regular work and employment through friends of the army.
Naturally, it is in the interest of the Army to keep them as long as
possible, especially if they happen to be good workmen, and only such
men are really welcomed with open arms. They will not receive the
promised employment as long as the Army can possibly keep them in its
own shops. To quit the “home” is synonymous with an escape from prison
and usually they are worse off when they quit the Salvation Army than
before they went in. The few cents they earned they were compelled to
spend in small purchases in the Salvation Army Department Store. Thus
the Salvation Army robs unfortunate men and women of the last shred of
their faith in humanity.
The Salvation Army is the greatest bargain hunter in New York. Trained
bookmen and art experts choose the most valuable among the books and
pictures brought in on collection wagons. They employ connoisseurs of
bric-a-brac and do a large business with the antique dealers.
Connoisseurs
When a man has made money in America he at once becomes a victim to the
craze for an artistic home. The tradespeople with whom he comes in
contact in order to achieve his artistic desires speak of art and rugs
and paintings. He reads in the newspapers about Mr. So-and-So who spent
thousands of dollars for antique furniture or for pictures in auctions,
and he begins his walks on these dangerous and costly grounds where one
may buy for goodly sums the ephemeral fame of a collector and a lover of
objects of art. The reputation of an art expert seems to go with the
objects as well as the wrapping paper and string.
It is the dream of every antique dealer once in his life to enter one of
those coveted garrets where treasures of six generations are stored in
boxes, in cases and trunks. To enter this garret at the invitation of
some real estate owner or lawyer who represents an estate anxious to
sell the house and to clear out the ‘rubbish’; to buy the contents of
such a garret for a few dollars and to find a painting by Rubens or
Tintoretto or Martha Washington’s wedding slippers or a suite of
magnificent Colonial furniture ... sure enough these are red-letter days
in the career of almost every antique dealer. Only recently, for
instance, in an old garret on Ninth Street, an old Persian rug was
discovered which no second-hand dealer would have paid fifty cents for,
an expert rug man realized its value, gave eighteen hundred dollars for
it in competition with other dealers and sold it to a famous rug
collector for twenty-six thousand dollars.
Some time ago a buyer of Marshall Field in Chicago saw a painting in one
of the minor art shops of the city. He liked it and purchased it for
fifteen hundred dollars. It was marked six thousand dollars and put on
sale in Marshall Field’s art gallery. It is a standing rule of this art
gallery to resell once a year all their purchases. This particular
painting seemed unsalable. It was reduced and reduced for a number of
years, but it could not be sold. Finally a picture speculator bought it
for six hundred dollars, took it back to New York, sold it in an auction
sale for ten thousand dollars. The picture was sold and resold eight
times during the following six months and ultimately found a final
resting place in the mansion of a very well-known man on Fifth Avenue.
He paid for it one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
Not the man who keeps shops and stores has the great adventure in
seeking after the old and antique. But people who are “picking up
things,” attending action sales here and there, visiting junk shops and
second-hand shops all over the city, constantly expecting to find
something and never tired or disappointed. I know highly educated men
unusually gifted, possessing expert knowledge that in many cases
surpasses the “infallibility” of our museum authorities, who prefer the
free life of buying and selling to high-priced positions in art shops
and in art galleries. I know one man who is “picking up” a living by
looking through the book-stalls of dealers and buying odd volumes for
small amounts of money and selling the same books to rare-book dealers
for as many dollars as he pays cents.
1917
Auctions As Amusement Places
Real enjoyment of life is caused by life’s contrasts. And what greater
contrast than to witness Mrs. Astor, for instance, bidding against a
second-hand furniture dealer from Second Avenue for a curious
crazy-quilt, soiled, torn and catalogued as genuine, direct from some
old farmhouse?
Amusement? Galore. And more than that. Studies in human nature, scale
exercises of human passions. Everybody has his chance in New York
auction rooms. The gambler, the collector, the book hunter, the shrewd
dealer, the speculator, the bargain fiend; these auction rooms are a
paradise for those who know their own wants, needs and desires. A Dorado
for the careful and cautious who have taken advantage of the exhibition
on the previous day who have examined the articles for which they wish
to bid, who know the condition of the offered wares.
But these auction rooms are a dangerous playground for the emotional,
the weak, who really doesn’t need the objects on sale, whose eyes and
voice seem to miss constantly proper telephonic connections with his
central, his seat of thinking. Disastrous prove these auction rooms for
those who bid without seeing properly what they are bidding for, who bid
higher and higher because perhaps they do not want the other fellow to
have the thing, or prompted by pure gambling instinct.
Fascinated by their surroundings, they are easily moved to action; by a
look of the auctioneer, by a nod or a word, that places them all at once
(though only for a second) in the limelight of public attention. They
pay their bills and do not know what to do with their purchases. What a
comedy!
Exactly as you know where to go to when you wish to see a musical comedy
or an opera, so do I know in what particular auction room I can get a
view of human vanity, a peep at greed, an exhibition of plain,
delightful collectors’ mania.
“Follow the red flag,” I would have almost said, but the auctioneers
have done away with their old emblem during their recent convention in
Rochester. Red flags nowadays are supposed to symbolize revolution,
socialism, brotherhood of men, an equal chance for all, and their
display is prohibited by city and State legislation. Therefore, blue is
now the auctioneer’s color, and you must follow the blue flag.
The auctioneers themselves are wonderful entertainers, psychologists of
the first rank: Virtuosos, who play wonderful tunes on the emotions of
their audience; golden tunes, tunes that turn into gold in the
auction-room proprietor’s pockets.
“Something for nothing” is ever attractive. There wasn’t an American
born yet who would not stop, look and listen at the word “bargain.”
But then there is a mystery back of it all. You don’t know where the
things come from. They are jumbled together in the picturesqueness of
everyday life; a painting by an old master may be followed by an iron
bedstead that only yesterday harbored the maid of some bankrupt actress.
Napoleon is supposed to have dined from one of the offered china plates,
and a much-worn fur coat is offered ten minutes later.
I love auction rooms without catalogues, without plush chairs, where
specialists have not been allowed to separate the goats from the sheep.
“Finds” are rare in our times when every grocer’s wife who inherited a
library from her great uncle, the preacher, knows more about
auction-room prices than the average collector of books; when every
push-cart peddlar examines his ill-smelling day’s collection for
antiques.
Books and works of art have become objects of speculation. Daily papers
are the sources of information on the prices of values in auction rooms
as well as on bonds sold on the stock exchange. And still bargains are
found almost daily. Little fortunes are made by buying things in an
auction room on University Place and selling them in another one on
upper Fifth Avenue.
Here is a little amusement calendar for lonely afternoons:
Do you want to see splendid gowns, magnificent jewels, society manners,
etchings of priceless value, paintings, sold for thousands of dollars by
the square inch? Witness Mr. Kirby’s performance at the American Art
Galleries. He is a dignified gentleman: never talks above a whisper:
very discreet in advice, but irresistibly urgent in his discreetness. A
magnetic fluid seems to emanate from him, and he has the power to direct
it properly--believe me!
But what an education to see the great works of great artists put up for
public sale: Whistler, Zorn, Degas, Corot, the greatest--and how
wonderful to think that they will find an honored place in so many
American homes. And the books! Rows of wonderful bindings and old
yellowish tomes with broken backs. Rich and poor have an equal chance;
and money does not always acquire the most precious, the most coveted
prize. Money usually searches for outward beauty; real value is left
unobserved in a shabby garment. This is the consolation of the bookworm,
but dealers spoil his chances now-a-days. They have learned that it pays
to put beautiful clothes on valuable books.
Would you like to see an actor of the old type? Drop in on Mr. Hartmann,
in the Fifth Avenue Auction Rooms on Fourth Avenue. Listen to his
good-natured talk:
“Madam, you ought to buy this divan,” he urges an undecided, elderly
lady, who perhaps lives somewhere in the Bronx, in a little flat and
wonders how she could get the monstrous divan into her tiny living room.
“Let me advise you to take it,” Hartmann continues. “You will never have
another chance at such a magnificent piece of furniture. If I wouldn’t
have bought one last week I surely would keep it for myself.” Or, he
would lift up some old Steins: “I take any bid for these things,” and he
would give his audience to understand how hard he is hit by prohibition.
He knows the dealers among his audience.
“All right, if you don’t want to bid any more I will knock it down to
one of the dealers who will take it to his shop and sell it to you at an
exorbitant profit,” is his remark when he cannot get the people
interested in some object or another. Every dealer has a nickname with
him. There is a second-hand furniture man from Baxter Street, whom he
calls “General Darrow,” much to the delight of the old gentleman who
does not look like a general at all. Then there is another one, a very
studious looking man, whom he calls “Doctor.” Everybody in the audience
really thinks the purchaser is a doctor and a collector of valuables. He
is a jovial man who makes you feel at home. A sort of old-fashioned
cabaret performance. Everybody seems to take part in the show.
If you would like to see a “dandy,” who feels one with the best of his
listeners, whom he wishes to make out society people of the highest
order, listen to Mr. Clark on Forty-fifth Street, near Fifth Avenue. His
is a society play with an everlasting ripple of shallow laughter on the
surface. The auctioneer speaks with a broad English accent, makes little
bows every once in a while, and his right hand reaches instinctively for
an invisible monocle. I always wonder if he really wears one. And he
sells things. Every one has his own methods. But he is a sort of “bon
vivant” on the stage of New York auctions.
Would you like to see an old-time Broadway comedy and an actor with a
manner that was in style forty years ago? Would you like to listen to
well-set flowery speeches? Get acquainted with Mr. Silo and his auction
rooms on Vanderbilt Avenue, near Forty-sixth Street. He wears a cut-away
and a goatee. He has the distinction of having auctioned off during the
past forty years a greater part of the contents of many Knickerbocker
Mansions. He seems to love each and every article that comes before his
auction table. Everything is “exquisite, beautiful, grandiose,
magnificent, stately.” He looks in the ecstasies of an overjoyed
connoisseur at his paintings and drawings. He interjects once in a while
his sorrow that Mr. Astor is not alive any more, who would have
appreciated at once this or that painting. After such exclamations, he
looks with sad contempt over his audience, shakes his head as though he
wanted to say: “You poor simps, you do not appreciate real art.” He
constantly urges: “Don’t buy this, don’t buy it, please don’t buy it.
You will do me a favor if you do not buy it, because next week such and
such a millionaire collector from California will be in town and he will
pay me a far greater price than you intend to offer.”
To emphasize his sincerity at least once during each sale, he would get
up from his seat, stand erect with the solemnity of a preacher and
declare: “If you are sorry to have purchased this article, please return
it to me. I am forty years in the auction business; my word is as good
as a bond and I will return the money.” And he makes good; at least he
made good to me. In the folly of the minute I bought something that I
had no earthly use for. I told him so and a couple of days later he
refunded my purchasing price.
What wonderful tales could the hundreds, often thousands, of gowns,
wraps, dresses, suits, slippers, stockings, lingerie, furs, hats, gloves
and many other intimate garments of pretty women tell, if they had
voices to speak while they hang in long rows in Mr. Flatau’s auction
rooms on University Place.
Twice a week he conducts an auction of ladies’ wearing apparel. Do not
think that poor people go there to buy cheap, second-hand dresses; that
they slip in shyly, shame-facedly, make their purchase and disappear
into their own somewhere in New York. Ladies with limousines waiting
outside bargain for and buy evening gowns, while shop-girls purchase
impossible dresses. Here you can learn in one hour more about the tastes
of America’s broad masses than in all the museums, art institutions,
shops and exhibitions over town. The grotesque seems to hit old and
young, beautiful and ugly, slender and fat. The color schemes scream to
the heavens. If an invisible power would grant me the fulfillment of one
wish I would ask the good fairy who would make me the offer: “Please
let all these women that were in Flatau’s auction rooms last Friday wear
the clothes they bought there and assemble them for me in the ballroom
of the Vanderbilt Hotel.” It would be an unforgettable sight.
And because you were in Flatau’s, drop into Koliski’s, across the
street.
The East Sider is very strongly represented in his back rooms, while in
the front, the art dealers and peripatetic gentlemen dealers bargain for
everything under the sun that you can imagine. Marble lions that stood
in front of a library in East Oshkosh are sold with the same nonchalance
as the slippers that are supposed to have been worn by Martha Washington
during a reception given to Lafayette. Stately furniture from gambling
dens is offered immediately after a series of undertaker’s outfits had
been sold.
Koliski’s is a great exchange of all antique dealers in New York, as
well as second-hand dealers. Here the bids go up a quarter at a time.
Human emotions are voiced unrestricted by polite considerations. Here is
the atmosphere of an old-fashioned arena.
1917
The Strange Discovery and Disappearance of Stuart’s Washington
Antique shops are isles of romance and mystery in the commonplace
everyday life of New York, but if you wish to enter into the real thrill
of adventure, you must forget the fashionable shop, where antiques have
found a temporary resting place and you must not talk to the
shop-keeper. Antique shops along Fifth Avenue and the main streets are
conducted as up-to-date business places, and up-to-date business has a
romance of its own, a twentieth century romance that has little to do
with the individual and less with sacred time-honored traditions that
touch the heart. Most antique dealers kill the charm their curios and
works of art awaken in us.
They know the prices of the beautiful and ugly things on sale in their
shops, but they don’t know their value. Antique dealers are painful
whenever they try to impress you with their knowledge of art or of
association or history, or when they simply play on the vanity of
prospective customers, telling in whose possession the priceless object
has been, quoting prices like stock brokers.
Whenever I spend some time in an antique shop I think of George Bernard
Shaw’s essay: “On Going to Church”: “What wonderful and ideal places
would churches be if there were no priests and no services to disturb
the sublime quiet and the elevating beauty of the edifices.” What
charming places for dreams and revery would antique shops be if there
were no antique dealers and no ambitious millionaires, who wish to show
their appreciation of art by paying exorbitant prices for art objects.
“Then the museum is an ideal place,” I hear you say. No, it isn’t. The
museum is a mausoleum of art. The art objects there seem to me buried
forever in costly catacombs with beautiful monuments and tombstones, but
buried away from our world, separated from life forever; yet the
beautiful things done by past generations should be a part of our own
throbbing life.
The great antique dealers are not the high-priests of the beautiful in
New York. Suave and well-meaning gentlemen; their words come not from
their hearts and their love is tied to the price of their wares and not
to their merit. Some of these gentlemen have sold shoes, shirts,
furniture and cash registers before they went into the “antique
business.” Works of art are mere merchandise to them. Money-changers
they are in the temple, but the temple is theirs, too; no one ever can
chase them out.
“Names” are their gods. Authenticity their dogma. The art of persuasion
their greatest asset. To find big names (names that bring high auction
prices) is their constant desire and to sell these names to the highest
bidder at fabulous prices is their daily dream.
What do I care who painted a portrait? Perhaps it is a priceless
Velasquez or Rubens or Botticelli or by some unknown artist of several
hundred years ago? But I like to contemplate the person who sat for the
portrait; the beautiful girl in her strange attire; I like to dream
about the love, hatred, contempt, affection, about all the hopes and all
the despair mutely witnessed by some old-fashioned writing cabinet with
secret drawers and dozens of pigeon-holes, where once letters reposed
that meant so much to the writers and recipients. I like to think of the
soft, well-cared-for hands of some Prince of the church, who wore the
beautiful Bishop’s ring hundreds of years old that will adorn perhaps
tomorrow the jewel-case of an American millionairess.
There are divans and chairs.... Who used them? In whose home have they
served? Where will they go to from here? The mystery and romance woven
around all the various works of art and useful objects that have
withstood the destructive powers of time and men is captivating. How did
all these things get into the fashionable antique stores?
Most of them were purchased from other antique dealers; some were
bought in auctions and obscure places and a few were purchased from
another kind of antique dealer who are not very infrequent in New York.
Where there is mystery there are surely people who wish to solve the
mystery, and very curious people are these “detectives of the antique.”
The peripatetic antique dealers are in a true sense connoisseurs. They
prowl about all sorts of out-of-the-way places; storage houses, auction
rooms, in garrets of houses that will be torn down and in cellars of old
family dwellings, unoccupied perhaps for generations. They sense the
value of a thing the moment they see it. Some of them are scholarly
gentlemen who have a great book knowledge, who know more than professors
in our universities and curators of our museums. Others know by
intuition. And a few have the instinct of a Sherlock Holmes and the
sense of adventure of a pirate.
Some weeks ago I noted the following advertisement in the American Art
News. It sounded mysterious as well as promising:
=W A R N I N G!=
=The Original Sketch of the Head=
for the
=Lansdowne Full Length=
All Collectors, Museums, Dealers and other interested parties are
advised to take no part in the buying or selling of a certain oil
painting:--
=Portrait of
Washington, by Gilbert Stuart=
This portrait head is entirely my personal property. It is now
being held by a certain party without my consent, who refuses to
return it to me. I wish to warn anyone interested that the present
holder of it has not my permission to negotiate its sale and that
he cannot deliver title.
Very respectfully,
J. F. MacCARTHY.
=339 Lexington Ave., N. Y. City.=
Any portrait by Gilbert Stuart is worth from ten thousand dollars up.
That there should be a new discovery of a Gilbert Stuart painting,
especially one of George Washington, was a great surprise to me. And I
know J. F. MacCarthy. He is one of those ideal antique dealers who could
not help being one. Of course he sells the paintings, engravings and
etchings he discovers, but I am sure he would prefer to keep them if
circumstances did not compel him to earn a living, even as you and I.
MacCarthy is a well-known figure in auction rooms all over town. He is
well known down on Fourth Avenue, where old clothes, damaged shoes,
cheap furniture is sold, together with works of art, tapestries,
paintings, as well as in those fashionable auction rooms on Fifth Avenue
and Madison Avenue, which look like the orchestra of a theatre, where
the visitors sit in comfortable plush chairs.
On Fourth Avenue, the auctioneers urge the people to buy, use all the
tricks of their much-maligned trade to bring up the price a quarter of a
dollar at a time. In the fashionable parts of the city, the auctioneers
are well-posed orators who seem to beg the crowds not to buy because
they will get so much better prices tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
These auctioneers are studies in themselves. At any rate they are
excellent psychologists. And MacCarthy is their great friend. He knows
perhaps more than they do. He gives them valuable pointers and he is
such a pleasant chap to talk to because he knows stories and tells them
well.
So I went up to his shop, which really is not a shop but a sort of
connoisseur’s den, and asked him about the “ad” he inserted. “Tell me
about it,” I cried. “Was the picture stolen from you? How did you ever
get hold of a real Gilbert Stuart? How long have you had it? Why didn’t
you ever show it and where is it now?”
MacCarthy is rather slow in his movements and in his speech. He settled
himself comfortably in an old Chippendale chair, supposed to have been
owned by General Beauregarde, and began in his epic manner:
“You did see the picture. I had it almost eight years. I had it long
before I moved to Lexington Avenue. I bought it at the James Sutton
sale. It was catalogued as a painting by Wertmuller, supposed to
represent George Washington. Wertmuller was a Swiss painter of fame, who
came to this country about 1790. Washington sat for him and later on he
made several copies of the original portrait. His picture evidently
didn’t interest the public very much during that sale and I bought it
for little money. I had it in the shop for years. Many people looked at
it, but not one seemed to pay any attention to it. It was not a good
painting of Washington; the likeness was rather poor and the whole thing
looked unfinished.
“One afternoon last year I was looking for some painting in my attic and
there I ran across the Washington portrait. I took it downstairs to this
room, where we are now sitting. I looked at it for a good long while,
perhaps for the first time since I had bought it, and it struck me as
strange that Wertmuller should have painted Washington’s eyes as brown,
when everybody knows that Washington had blue eyes. The paint seemed
very heavy in certain spots and the idea struck me that the whole
portrait had been overpainted. I took a little solvent, touched up the
eyes and you can imagine how astonished I was to see that the color came
off.