Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE (June 28, 1977)
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO (June 28, 1977)
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE (July 26, 1977)
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO (July 26, 1977)
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE (August 2, 1977)
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO (August 2, 1977)
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE (August 9, 1977)
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO (August 16, 1977)
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE (August 16, 1977)
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI [video session] (September 9, 1977)
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE (September 29, 1977)
- 1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO (September 29, 1977 and October 4, 1977)
- 1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE (October 4, 1977)
- 1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO (October 4, 1977 and November 30, 1977)
- 1.15. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE (November 30, 1977)
- 1.16. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO (December 13, 1977)
- 1.17. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE (January 17, 1978)
- 1.18. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO (January 17, 1978 and February 14, 1978)
- 1.19. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE (February 14, 1978)
- 1.20. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO (February 21, 1978)
- 1.21. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE (February 21, 1978 and March 14, 1978)
- 1.22. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE TWO (March 14, 1978)
- 1.23. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE ONE (April 25, 1978)
- 1.24. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE TWO (April 25, 1978 and May 9, 1978)
- 1.25. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE ONE (June 27, 1978)
- 1.26. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE TWO (June 27, 1978)
- 1.27. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE ONE (September 21, 1978)
- 1.28. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE ONE (September 24, 1979)
- 1.29. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE TWO (September 24, 1979)
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
(June 28, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- I'd like to start out by recapitulating some of what you already talked
about, but to a degree discussing your intellectual underpinnings and
background, especially in Fort Worth. You mentioned the group of people
that you were involved with in Fort Worth when you were very young. The
names I have are [Bertha] Blatt, Resnick, [Morris] Greenspan, and
[Aaron] Shamblum. How did you get involved with them when you were a
teenager?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, of course, these particular people were all Jewish, and they were
all connected with the one Jewish synagogue that there was in the town
(it was an Orthodox synagogue). Mrs. Blatt, for instance, was not really
religious, and certainly was in no way devoted to Orthodox Judaism. She
was one of these intellectual Jewish socialists, of which there were
quite a few, who actually were actively anti-religious; they repudiated
religion as much as they could. But, of course, because she was Jewish
and she was living in a small town, she gravitated towards the other
Jews in the community. I don't remember where she'd come from. Her
husband was a typesetter—compositor, I guess I would call him--who
worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the
composing room. She was like so many women—much more, had much more to
give. She was a woman of considerable intellect, she had read widely,
she'd lived in a big city, and here she was in a small town with a great
deal of energy and no outlet. We had a small group, really a very
harmless group, of no more than seven or eight people in all, who used
to meet socially and then, about once a month on a Sunday afternoon,
would hold a meeting offering culture to whoever wanted to come and get
it in the local Hebrew Institute. (The Hebrew Institute had a small
library, which consisted mainly of a set of [Charles William] Eliot's
Five-Foot Shelf [Harvard Classics] and a few
other books.) Somebody would undertake to give a talk on some subject.
Now, on one occasion, I think she decided to talk about Karl Marx and
the history of the communist movement, and word got around about that,
so we were immediately labeled as a bunch of Reds. But most of our
meetings were in somebody's kitchen, or on the hot nights on the front
stoop of somebody's house. We would often go down to the one local
delicatessen there was in town, order corned beef sandwiches, argue, and
stay until it was closing time--not any different in that way from the
big-city coffeehouse groups.
-
GARDNER:
- About how old were you at this time?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think I must have started in with these things when I was about
sixteen.
-
GARDNER:
- Were there others your age?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No. I was the youngster of the crowd. I still can't understand how I
happened to circulate as I did and develop the friendships that I did.
For one thing, I was never self-conscious, and I must have been a
bumptious young man, because I never thought anybody was taller than I
was, so that if I heard of somebody that was an authority on geology or
botany and that I wanted to learn something from, I would just go and
knock on their front door and then tell them I was interested, would
like to talk to them. And they were all very kind and hospitable, and
lent me books, and invited me back, and took me on field trips and so
on. So I think maybe my curiosity bump was bigger than normal,
[laughter] and as a result of that I would seek these people out, talk
to them, listen to them, and I learned. Practically all I learned was
either through reading by myself or through these informal tutors that I
sought out.
-
GARDNER:
- Was it about the same time that you met Ben Abramson? His role with you
must have been an important one.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I guess I haven't recorded there how it happened that I met Ben
Abramson and Jerry Nedwick. My father [Louis Zeitlin] had a business
which involved the bottling of vinegar, the manufacture of table
condiments, the packing of spices; and we would take these out to the
various grocery stores. First we had a salesman, who would go around and
take the orders, and then we would make up the orders and go out and
deliver them. My brother [Sam] or I had to go on the truck with whoever
did the delivering. I had forgotten why that happened, until my brother
reminded me the other day that when we would send out deliverymen on the
trucks and they would deliver the goods, they usually got paid cash by
the merchants; they would take the bill along. And when they collected
enough cash, they would just leave the truck on some street corner and
walk off. [laughter] And so after a few times of that experience, why,
my father decided that either my brother or I would have to go along and
handle the cash. My father had an understanding with the local police
that if they arrested any Jewish boys, he was to be notified, and he
would come in and find out what kind of an offense they were being held
for. And if it was a serious offense, he'd bring a lawyer in to the
thing; but if it was a minor offense --most of the boys were picked up
for riding the rods, for hoboing--why , he would just pay their fine and
take them over to his place, help them find a place (usually a
boardinghouse in town) to stay, get cleaned up, and he'd put them to
work. They'd work off the money that he'd paid out to get them out of
jail, and then they'd stay and work awhile until they went somewhere
else. Now, sometimes they were not Jewish; sometimes they were Russians,
who, strangely enough, would get way out there in Texas, without being
able to speak a word of English. So, after a while, anybody who spoke a
strange language that the police couldn't understand was likely to have
my father called to go and talk to them. Well, if they spoke Russian, he
could talk to them; or German, he could communicate with them. On this
particular occasion, he was called in, and there were these two young
men there who had been picked up in the railroad yards riding the
freights. One of them was named Ben Abramson, and the other was named
Jerold Nedwick. Now, Jerry Nedwick was put to work inside the place,
washing bottles and packing the various goods that we sold, but Ben was
assigned to work on the truck with me.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, they weren't foreign-speaking.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, they were English-speaking. This man, Ben Abramson, was a rather
squat-looking man, a stubble of red beard and red hair.
-
GARDNER:
- About how old?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He was in his twenties. And he wasn't very talkative for quite a while.
This big truck that I drove had to be cranked to start--we didn't have
selfstarters on trucks in those days; that was about 1919, and I think
it must have been June of 1919--and this fellow Ben Abramson was
left-handed, and he couldn't crank the truck. So I would have to get
down and crank it. And one day I got back up beside him, and, a little
bit irritated, I said, "You know, somebody recently published a study in
which he said that left-handed people were not as bright as right-handed
people." Well, he started off right away and gave me a lecture on
left-handedness. It seemed that he was very well informed on the whole
subject, how many great men had been left-handed and so on. I was quite
surprised. I asked him more questions, and it turned out that he had
worked in a bookshop in Chicago, McClurg's bookshop, which had the
famous Saints and Sinners Corner that Eugene Field had written about.
There he had met the great Middle Western writers of the day--people
like Sherwood Anderson; he'd seen Amy Lowell smoke a cigar. He knew
about Harriet Monroe and Poetry magazine, which I
had read about; and he knew Carl Sandburg, who was my great idol.
-
GARDNER:
- Were you already writing poetry at this time?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I was already trying to write poetry. I'm not sure whether I'd
already won a prize. Baylor College for Women at Waco, Texas, offered a
state poetry prize every year, and I won a first or a second prize one
year. And this, of course, immediately made me something a little out of
the ordinary among the people in my town. And so, of course, the fact
that he knew Carl Sandburg excited me very much. Well, every day from
then on he talked. The fact is, he was a nonstop talker. He had a
tremendous memory. He had memorized a great many prose passages, and he
had also memorized Oscar Wilde's "Panthea," Oscar Wilde's "The Sphinx,"
and, of course, Ernest Dowson's "Cynara," which was the favorite poem of
every bohemian in the English-speaking world at that time. And, as we'd
drive along the Texas prairie in the sunset, he would recite "The Feet
of the Young Men" of Rudyard Kipling. Well, I was enchanted, and I
decided the greatest thing in the world would be to be a bookseller.
Jerry Nedwick, who was Ben's friend, didn't act or talk like he was
interested in books or culture at all. As soon as he could, he quit and
used to sit around down by the railroad tracks and watch the baseball
games. He and Ben lived in a roominghouse run by a Mrs. Levine, who had
a very homely daughter [Ida]. Well, after no more than three months, Ben
suddenly announced that he and Jerry were leaving and going back to
Chicago. To go back a little bit, the circumstances under which he left
Chicago were kind of interesting. He was on his way to getting married.
Jerry Nedwick was his best man. Jerry said to Ben, "Do you really want
to marry this girl?" Ben said, "No, I really don't know why I said I
would marry her. I don't think I'm ready to get married, and I'm not
sure she's the one I want to marry," and so on. And Jerry said to Ben,
"Ben, I'd like to stop over here at a bar and get a drink, because I
think I need one to sort of prop me up when it comes to the wedding." So
they stopped at a bar, and the next thing Ben knew he woke up in a
boxcar outside Oklahoma City. [laughter] By the time they got to Fort
Worth, Texas, they had been stripped of their tuxedos and were wearing
blue jeans with sash cords for belts. What they did with their clothes,
I don't know, unless they hocked them for food, or may have been
stripped of them by the other hobos on the road. Ben had evidently been
romancing the landlady's daughter in my town, so he decided it was about
time to get moving before the daughter pressed her demands for him to
marry her. Well, they caught a freight train, went back to Chicago, and
they went into business. They opened the Argus Bookshop, which became
one of the most successful bookshops in Chicago in its day, and Ben
published a number of catalogs, which were entitled "Along the North
Wall." He would just stand there with a bottle of whiskey in his hand,
look at the books on the shelves, and talk about them. And he kept a
whole string of stenographers there taking his dictation. And as they
would get tired, he'd have another stenographer come on, and the other
one would go back and transcribe her notes. He published this whole
series of catalogs, which have become quite famous. One interesting
thing about all this was that the landlady's daughter and her mother
decided they were going to follow this guy Ben Abramson and his friend
Jerry back to Chicago. And so one day Jerry Nedwick came to his house,
and here was Mrs. Levine and her daughter sitting there talking to his
mother. And Jerry said to his mother, "How come they're here?" And she
said, "Why, Ben sent them to us. He said she was your girl." The mother
and daughter stayed there in Chicago. The daughter never did get
married, but the mother met a man who became a very rich real estate
operator, and she ended up a very rich and very happy woman. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- You remained friendly with him. Did you keep up a correspondence?
-
ZEITLIN:
- We kept up a correspondence through the years. It was quite
voluminous--mostly on his part—but I never saw him again. He was quite
successful in Chicago — he was immensely successful--but he wasn't
satisfied. He was a curious sort of an egomaniac, and he was so
successful in Chicago he thought he could conquer New York. He sold out
his business and moved there, and he wasn't the same thing in New York
as he was in Chicago. His kind of a rough-talking bumptious way didn't
suit the New York collectors and dealers, and he had to rent a place in
a loft instead of on the street—nobody could afford a street store in
New York, even in those days — and book people just forgot he was there.
Finally, he did so poorly that he had to give it up, and he moved out to
Lake Monhegan [and] took an old school building. His daughter lived on
the middle floor, his wife lived on the top floor, and Ben lived on the
lower floor and had all his books there. The sad thing was that Ben was
right the first time. He shouldn't have gone back and married the girl
that Jerry had tried to shanghai him from marrying. That was an unhappy
marriage, and there seems to have been a lot of friction between them
over the years. The daughter was the chief means of communication. Her
name was Barbara, and she used the name of Barbara Benson. Later it
turned out that she got the name of Benson because Ben called her in one
day and said, "You know, I've never had a son, so from now on you are
'Benson.'" And she has continued to use that. She has a book business--a
mail-order book business-- up in Connecticut now, and she uses the
business name of Barbara Benson. She's also a very talkative, longwinded
letter writer, very interesting person and very much like her father.
And I've kept in touch with her. I never saw her until a couple of years
ago when I went to Norwalk, Connecticut, to a meeting of the History of
Science Society; and while I was there, she and her husband came down
from Hartford and picked me up, and we went back to New Haven and went
to the Beinecke Library. I got a very good chance to talk to her and get
acquainted. And since then, she has published a sketch of the life of
her father, more or less. And I sent her copies of all the letters that
he had written me, and she wrote me very enthusiastically and said that
she learned more about her father from these letters than she'd ever
known before. The curious thing is that when she published the book, she
only alluded once to the fact that we had corresponded all these years
and that she had these letters. So this meeting with Ben Abramson was
what got me into this rare-book business, or what might be called my
life of shame. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- You were in your late teens at this point. Was there any thought of your
going to college?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It was hardly possible. My family was struggling along. My father had
this business which was just barely making a living for us, and my
brother and I were needed to help him. I got to be the salesman, my
brother got to be the manager of everything that went on in the plant,
and there just wasn't enough money. My brother left school in the sixth
grade, and he was really a much more talented person than I was; and I
think if he had had a chance to have an education, he would have
accomplished a lot more. He was the one that they could depend on. I
wasn't a very dependable boy. I would up and disappear at almost any
time. Even at fourteen, I got up one night, and got on a freight train,
and rode off. [I] was gone for- I think it must have been two or three
months, until my family found out where I was in Austin, Texas. I can't
account for these impulses, why I would just get up and run away, but it
certainly didn't improve my appearance of stability or dependability
with my parents. My brother, on the other hand, was very dependable and
had none of these characteristics.
-
GARDNER:
- About this time, too, you got involved with the Cosmos Club. Now, it may
be described to some degree in [previous tapes] , but again, how did you
get involved with this group?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there was a man by the name of Peter Molyneaux, a rather colorful
character who was the chief editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Peter was a very interesting man and
was sort of the intellectual ornament of this paper, which to begin with
was owned by a Colonel Louis J. Wortham. Later on. Colonel Wortham got
himself a circulation manager by the name of Amon Carter. Now, Amon
Carter was a very resourceful character not above a little hanky-panky,
such as hiring a gang of distributors who would go out and throw the
opposition papers in the gutter, and harass their newsboys, and so on.
And in time Amon Carter worked himself up to being the controlling
stockholder and ultimately owned the paper [and] became the great Mr.
Fort Worth. But at the time I first met Amon Carter, he was circulation
manager for this paper.
-
GARDNER:
- How did you meet Molyneaux?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I met him in a bookstore. The one bookstore that had a fairly good
assortment of current books in town was the book department of a place
called The Fair; it was part of a string owned by the Schermerhorns .
And the manager of it was a man by the name of Mack Pegues. I would go
in there and look at the new books that came in, and Peter Molyneaux
would come in there, and he was a very striking gentleman with a rather
large nose (probably the result of a substantial appetite for good old
southern bourbon) , a shock of gray hair and a typical Southern
gentleman style. I met him there, and he invited me to his house, which
was where I saw the first private library in my experience. He had read
[Alfred] Edward Newton's Amenities of Book
Collecting [ and Kindred Affections] . He
lent that to me, which, of course, inoculated me with the virus of book
collecting. And because he was the editorial writer for the paper—the
paper's intellectual—he used to get a great many review copies of books,
and some of them he didn't care for, and he'd pass on to me. And he
would invite me to write reviews. So I did do a few reviews there for
what passed for a book section, a book page. Well, there was another man
whom I also owed a great deal to. I did owe a great deal to Peter
Molyneaux. He was a great talker, and he loved to instruct. And also, he
and his wife had no children, and he felt very paternal towards me. And
then I met another man, by the name of Franklin Wolfe. Franklin Wolfe
was there working on a paper that really was a swindle sheet. It was the
Independent Oil and Financial Reporter, I
think it was called. It was supposed to report the happenings in the oil
fields of Texas, but its real purpose was to build up the enthusiasm. .
. . [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] Wolfe was the editor of the
Independent Oil and Financial Reporter, it
was called. The chief purpose of it was to sell oil stock to a lot of
New England schoolteachers. Middle Western farmers, and small merchants
all over the country. And they used to send this out beating the drums
for certain phony oil companies. It was during the days of Blue Sky. But
Franklin Wolfe himself was a very interesting man who worked on the
Chicago Daily News . He had been a friend of Carl Sandburg's, he had
been a very close friend of Clarence Darrow, and he had been very active
in the progressive movement and the labor movement in California. In
fact, he had been one of the original organizers of the Llano Del Rio
colony, which was headed by a very interesting, hypnotic sort of a
character by the name of Job Harriman. His wife had been a city
councilwoman very early in the second decade of this century in Los
Angeles, and they had been very active at the time when Job Harriman ran
on the Socialist ticket and almost became mayor of Los Angeles. He would
have been elected if it hadn't been for the [Los
Angeles ] Times [Building] bombing. So,
of course, Franklin Wolfe was a great star to me, and he was a
delightful old gentleman, with wonderful manners, and as gentle as a
child. They didn't have any children either, and so he encouraged me and
invited me to contribute poems and things to his paper. I would write
some poetry and some prose for his editorial page.
-
GARDNER:
- Despite the fact that it was about oil.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, about oil. But he had an editorial page which he kept full of all
kinds of his own essays and recollections and columns that he kept
running. And Peter Molyneaux, Franklin Wolfe, and I were approached by
some other people in the town—I've forgotten. One of them was a doctor
whose name I can't remember, the other one was the head of a laboratory
that manufactured vaccines and serums, anti-tetanus serums and so on.
Another one was a kind of a spectacular personality, a lawyer, whose
name I can't remember; and another was a young man—a very striking,
handsome young fellow—who was a great dresser, and as a very young man
had made a tremendous amount of money in the oil business. Somehow or
another, we decided to have a dinner club. I was then only about
seventeen; the rest of these were men, mature men, anywhere from thirty
on. And they invited me to be a member of this Cosmos Club, they called
it; they modeled it after the Cosmos Club in Washington, but it was
hardly comparable. And we would meet, I think it was, one night a month.
Later we invited one or two other people, or they invited one or two
other people in the town, and somebody would give a paper--very much
like dinner clubs of the same sort. But once some member would prepare a
paper on some subject that he knew a little about—he knew a lot about
very often—and this was, of course, very exciting to me. They all
dressed in dinner jackets, but I didn't have any dinner jackets. I was
very lucky to have a clean white shirt, but they accepted me and paid my
dinner bills and so on. And they would have good wines. I learned--the
first I ever learned about anything like good wines and good food was
with this group. We met in what then was the best hotel in town, the
Westbrook, and now when I go past this run-down, shabby-looking little
thing, I can't imagine that this was the glamorous place, the glamorous
Westbrook Hotel, which I was so pleased to be invited to come into with
those people for a dinner with waiters, dressed up for the occasion.
They made quite a thing of this. I don't remember how long this
lasted--It couldn't have lasted longer than a year or two—but it, for
me, was a great experience and, of course, it set me up quite a lot to
be the young mascot, as it were, of these people whom I looked upon as
great intellectuals.
-
GARDNER:
- At this point, then, I suppose "bohemian" would be the best description
of you. You were a young poet. You remained a young poet, I suppose, the
rest of your time in Fort Worth.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I suppose--you know, it's curious. . . . Well, I published a poem
or two in the local paper; I did a review or two; I won this poetry
prize; the local paper published a feature story on me. I'm surprised
that I didn't become more conceited than I was, considering the amount
of attention I got. I seem to--I must say this with all immodesty--I
seem to have always had a knack for getting publicity without trying.
-
GARDNER:
- How did you meet Edith Motheral?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I met Edith Motheral through the sister of a girl that I had been
quite mad about, one of the girls that I used to go swimming with down
on the river, Elizabeth Fish. I taught her to swim, and later she went
off to the University of Texas, on the swimming team and everything; and
Elizabeth Fish became quite a sophisticated young woman, far beyond my
limits, very quickly after she went off to the university. Her sister,
Stella, was also a very attractive young woman; she was followed around
by a whole crowd of young men. And she got a job at the telephone office
working as a switchboard operator, and I used to come by in the evenings
to pick her up to take her out for Chinese dinner, or just to talk and
then take her home. She was the older sister of Elizabeth, whom I had a
great passion for and whom I taught to swim and who used to go swimming
with me. And one night she came down from the office. I met her at the
front steps, and she had with her this tall young woman by the name of
Edith Motheral. Well, Edith was a very striking, very beautiful, young
woman, and she wrote poetry. It turned out she did very good lyrical
poetry, and, my, I fell head over heels. And the first thing you know,
we were going swimming in the river. (That was my chief way of courting
the girls--taking them swimming, and persuading them that the best way
to swim was to swim naked on the river at night in the moonlight.) Well,
we got so we would go swimming in the wintertime, and then build a fire
on the banks of the river, dry off, and dress. Naturally, after a little
while, we became quite passionately involved, and ultimately we were
sleeping together. Well, I didn't dare tell my family. Her family was
quite receptive to me because she was a very tempestuous young woman who
had a temper and was headstrong and was uncontrollable, and about the
only way she would calm down was if I came by and took her swimming and
out for a hike in the woods. Otherwise, she was always at odds with her
father and brothers. So ultimately I commenced to have a strong feeling
that the only thing for us to do was to get married. We went over to
Dallas and got married without telling my family, and then shortly
afterward the natural thing happened: she got pregnant. She was living
with her folks, and I was living with my family, and my family didn't
know that we were married.
-
GARDNER:
- She was not Jewish, I assume.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, she was not Jewish. My family was very strongly Orthodox, and it was
a terrible shock, of course, when they ultimately found out. And
finally, I went to my friend Franklin Wolfe and said, "I'm married to
this girl, Edith" —he had met her; I'd taken her over to visit him and
his wife and to have dinner--"and she's pregnant, and I just can't stand
to tell my family, and we've got to go away." And he said, "Well, where
would you go?" And I said, "Well, I thought maybe I'd go to Chicago and
get a job with my friend Ben Abramson in his bookshop. I don't know any
other place." And he said, "Well, why not California?" He said, "I've
got some friends out there, the Calverts, and I'd think they'd put you
up for a while. And I've got a friend who is the advertising manager,
the public relations manager, of a cafeteria there. Boos Brothers, which
is a big going outfit." And he said, "You could go out there." So I sent
her out on the train to California, and she wrote back that the Calverts
had been very nice to her and had taken her into their house. And then
one day I just walked out of the place, left a note saying I was going
to California, and hitchhiked. Franklin Wolfe lent me about twenty-five
dollars, and I started hiking, and I hitchhiked across from Texas to
California.
-
GARDNER:
- That looks like a good place to end this side of the tape.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
(June 28, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- Now, you're leaving Fort Worth for Los Angeles.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. I think this must have been in April of 1925, and as I said, I
started out to hitchhike. I remember walking along the road crossing
Pease River, which for me had great romantic appeal because it was the
river named in a song that Carl Sandburg used to sing called "The
Buffalo Skinners." "'Tis now we cross Pease River, / And homeward we are
bound, / And no more in that goddamn country / Will ever we be found." A
very gory western ballad. Then I stopped in Clarendon, Texas, to see the
man who managed the Wagner Ranch properties, whose name I can't remember
right now [Bob Moore], but he was known then as a great amateur
ornithologist. And I stopped to see him, and he was very hospitable to
me--fed me; and I went on my way and crossed over into Arizona. I think
I went up by way of Roswell, New Mexico. I remember going through
Gallup—almost got mugged by some tramps in the railroad yards in Gallup.
The only thing is, they were talking Yiddish because they thought I
didn't understand it, and they were going to get me off into a boxcar
and take whatever money I had and my shoes. So when I answered them in
Yiddish, they were kind of surprised, and I got away from them. Well, I
think it must have taken two weeks for me to get across. I picked up
rides as I went along; I walked long distances, crossed the desert; I
got hungry. I'm not clear how I got across the Mojave; I think I
hitchhiked a ride which took me across most of the Mojave into Daggett.
In Daggett I had fifteen cents, and at the Chinese restaurant all I
could get was a slice of bread for a nickel. And a man selling dairy
products —cheese, milk, and other things--came along in his truck, and I
asked him for a ride, and he gave me a ride, and we crossed over into
lush, green California. And it certainly did look like paradise to me
after that long, parched desert. We came down into Los Angeles, and I
finally found my way to the house of the Calverts with a dime in my
pocket. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Down to the last dime.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I arrived here with ten cents and a pregnant wife and no job. These
people [the Calverts], I found, were very poor and hardly had room for a
bed in one small room in their house, so that of course we couldn't go
on staying there, and I started looking for a job. How I came to get a
job for a local Jewish paper [ B'nai B'rith
Messenger ] , I don't know; but I remember a man by the name of Joe
Cummings who said, "Go out and interview Marco Newmark. We're going to
do a series about the history of the Jews of Los Angeles, and this is
your first assignment." So I went and called on this man, Marco Newmark,
and we got to talking. He was very friendly. And when he got through
talking, I went back to the paper, and I said, "You know, I don't know a
damn thing about California history. I wouldn't know where to start to
do a story about this man. And unless you can give me some time to do
some reading up on this, I can't get you a story." The guy said, "Well,
I'm sorry, but you're fired." I think he gave me five dollars, and off I
went. I guess then I must have got the job at Boos Brothers Cafeteria,
where I got fired for eating an orange.
-
GARDNER:
- A wonderful story.
-
ZEITLIN:
- A friend of the Calverts was a woman by the name of Miriam Lerner.
Miriam was a very interesting woman who owned a house up in the hills at
the end of Echo Park Avenue, close to what was then the Edendale
Station, where the Red Cars stopped. She was a girlfriend of Edward
Weston's, and she had been a model for a number of his photographs.
She'd been very active in the Young People's Socialist League in Los
Angeles. And she was E. L. Doheny's secretary, which was kind of a
curious anomaly, but E. L. Doheny was pathetically dependent on her, and
she was, of course, very close-mouthed, very loyal. No matter what her
personal views were, she never in any way let that interfere with doing
her job for Doheny. And she ultimately decided she wasn't going to be a
secretary for the rest of her life. She went off to Europe and was
secretary to Frank Harris in Nice and helped, I think, with the writing
of My Life and Loves. She ultimately came back to
this country and worked for [Richard J.] Walsh, who was the husband of
Pearl Buck. She was the editorial assistant for his publishing company,
John Day and Company, and she helped edit Asia
magazine. Ultimately she came back here to California. But that time,
when she was Doheny's secretary, my friend Mellie Calvert spoke to
Miriam Lerner and told her about me, and Miriam Lerner got me a job
driving a gardener's truck for E. L. Doheny's oil company. My job was to
drive this truck and help mow the lawns of all of the oil stations all
over Southern California. I got a marvelous orientation because from
Santa Monica almost to San Bernardino, and from San Pedro as far as
Burbank, I would drive this truck with this gang and trim the lawns. One
of my jobs, of course, was to load the truck every morning with
fertilizer, so that I was always covered with this brown fertilizer dust
when I would come home. . . . By that time, Edith and I had found an
apartment —an apartment house on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood. It was
called the St. Katherine Apartments, and it was run by one of the
meanest women in the world. In return for the rent of this tiny
apartment, it was Edith's job to do all the slavey work in this
apartment house--all the cleaning.
-
GARDNER:
- She had had your child by then, I assume.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No. Yes, she'd had our child by then. . . . No, the child was on the
way.
-
GARDNER:
- She was still pregnant.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. When I would come home, this woman said, "You can't have your
husband coming in the front door covered with all that smelly
fertilizer. He's going to have to come in the back door." And Edith and
I said to her, "We're not used to going into back doors, and we're not
going into back doors," so she fired Edith, and we had to leave and find
a place to live. So we rented a little house out on what now is part of
the grounds of University of Southern California. And I got a job. I
went to see Holmes--Norman Holmes--of Holmes Book Company. And I think I
have covered that.
-
GARDNER:
- I think that story is in there, right.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. That was my first job in the bookshop in Southern California. I
lasted, I think, about three weeks and then was fired for incompetence.
And the night I got fired, Saturday night, I went home in tears. We paid
the rent, which had been overdue, [and] bought some groceries. I had a
friend living with me--one of the crowd that had come out from Texas-—a
man by the name of Bates Walter Booth. He was sick at the time; he lived
in this little house, in one room. And the next morning, by God, the
house burned down. Well, we couldn't do anything but laugh—it was too
tragic to do anything but laugh about—and we stood out, fought the
flames, and laughed. That evening, there was part of the house still
standing, and the rafters were opened to the sky. We had some food left,
and we made a meal, [and] sat down with candles. My friend Bates said,
"Well, Jake, I guess we've had it. We're licked. I think the best thing
to do is to get in touch with our folks back in Texas, and they'll send
us money, and we can all come home." And I said, "No. I'm gonna have the
best bookshop in Los Angeles someday."
-
GARDNER:
- Ah, you didn't really say that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes I did. Absolutely true. I said, "It's going to have the finest rare
books in it; it's going to have hangings on the walls; it's going to
have Oriental rugs on the floor; and I'm going to have Rembrandt
etchings [and] Dlirer prints in it. And I'm going to stay here, by God,
till I get it." I must say, that like a lot of things when you're young
and you don't know what's ahead of you, you've got a lot of spunk and
optimism—and it's a good thing. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Apparently at that time that's about all you had, was your spunk and
optimism.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. We were all broke, and that night we slept in the attic of a
neighbor's house. The next morning we went out to some distant relatives
of Edith's that she had found out here. (South Los Angeles—not Compton,
but something like that. It may have been Compton.) And we stayed there.
The next day I went into the May Company and went to the woman in charge
of the book department, a woman by the name of May Perks. May didn't
look like much, but she was a very smart woman; and she also was a very
sympathetic and good-hearted person. They didn't have much of a book
department. As I look back on it now, I hardly see how it could have
been called a book department, but it was. And I told her that I was a
bookseller, that I'd had experience. I'd worked for Holmes, and I had
worked in Texas for a few weeks in the book department of The Fair
before I came out here, and I needed the job. And she said, "Well, go
down and see the employment manager. I'll call him up and tell him that
I'd like to have you in my department. And the next day, I went to work
in her book department. Well, she was a very smart woman. She was the
first person to get the idea of products connected with the movie stars.
And she developed all of the Shirley Temple products--Shirley Temple
dolls, books, and so on-- and she ended up a very rich woman. I was
there, I suppose, about a month, but I could see I was selling more
books than anybody in the place. I could walk up to people and talk to
them, and I knew the techniques of selling, which I'd learned partly in
working in my father's business; so I was doing very well in terms of
sales compared to the other people in the department. But I wanted to be
in a place where there were better books, and at that time, one of the
better book departments in town was in Bullock's. I went over there, and
there was a kind of a burly, feisty woman there, very stern, by the name
of June Cleveland. I think I've talked about her in some of the other
things.
-
GARDNER:
- That was where you made your first . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- I told her that I was working at the May Company, but that I wanted to
do better, and I wanted to sell better books, and asked if she would
give me a job. So she did give me a job there, and I worked there for
about a year, and that gave me not only the opportunity to sell books,
but also to meet a lot of people who became very important friends to
me.
-
GARDNER:
- Right—some of whom were mentioned in that first part, Mrs. [Milton] Getz,
for example.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, no, [not] Mrs. Getz. I didn't meet [her] until after I had gone
off on my own.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, I see.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The people I met there were Will Connell and Phil Townsend Hanna and
Maurice Warshaw.
-
GARDNER:
- Did you meet them through that? There's an area of confusion in my own
mind. I'll try to clarify it. Is this now simultaneous to your having
Whispers and Chants published, and having
done the interview with Carey McWilliams and so on?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Carey McWilliams came to see me before I met any of these other people.
-
GARDNER:
- So, in other words, you had the book of poems published then, or at least
about to be published.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, this is kind of confused. I was working in Bullock's book
department. I hadn't had a book of poems published. And the first person
that came in to the department that I met was this fellow Phil Townsend
Hanna. He was interested in books; he was interested in Southwestern
history. He was kind of a dandy in his dress, and later organized the
Wine and Food Society here. He came in, and I started to wait on him and
talk to him, and we got acquainted. And he was commencing to edit a
magazine called Touring Topics, which was the
forerunner of Westways. It was the magazine of
the Automobile Club of Southern California. And after he'd come in, he
brought in Will Connell. Will Connell had some friends--one of them was
a young woman artist by the name of Grace Marion Brown, a very striking,
very fine young woman. And her boyfriend was a fellow by the name of
Louis Samuel, who was the business manager for Ramon Novarro. He had
gone to school with Ramon Novarro, and then he became the business
manager. And these people sort of took me up. They invited me to their
houses, and pretty soon we had quite a circle going. That was the
beginning of a circle which later published a magazine called Opinion. But I met all these people there through
Bullock's. One man that came in one day was Julius Jacoby. He owned a
wholesale men's-accessory business; he had the franchise for BVDs for
Southern California. And somehow or another we started to talking, and
he became interested in me. And then one day Carl Sandburg came to town.
Well, Sandburg looked me up, and he said, "I'm going out to give a
lecture in Beverly Hills at Mrs. May's house. They're paying me to give
a lecture there." This was one of these cultural circles of the Jewish
patricians of this town. I went with Sandburg, and this man Jacoby was
there. The fact that I'd come with Sandburg, I think, impressed him very
much, so in a few days he came back into Bullock's and said, "How did
you happen to be there with Sandburg?" And I said, "Well, I knew
Sandburg in Texas. I met him there, and we've exchanged some
correspondence. He asked me to come out with him." And Sandburg also, by
that time, had published his American Songbag, in
which he had a number of songs that I had given him when I met him in
Texas. So I think this fascinated Jacoby. Anyhow, he said, "What can I
do for you? Is there anything I can do for you?" Well, I said, "Quite
frankly what I need right now is a doctor. I need to go and see a doctor
because I'm having trouble. I'm losing weight, and I'm coughing, and so
on." And he said, "Fine, we'll just fix that up." He arranged for me to
see a Dr. Richmond Ware, who in later years became a very close friend.
Richmond Ware was the nephew of Dr. Walter Jarvis Barlow, who founded
the Barlow Sanitarium. And Richmond Ware looked me over, and then he
reported back to Jacoby and to me that what I needed was to go into a
sanitarium for a while: I had a spot on my lung. And, of course, I had a
wife and a child; I had no money-- [I] was getting twenty-seven dollars
a week. And I said to Jacoby there's no way I could quit work. He said,
"Don't you worry about that. We'll take care of that." At that time the
Jewish community here was headed up by a very fine man by the name of
George Moschbacher, who was the father-in-law of George Behrendt. George
Behrendt later was the father-in-law of Olive Behrendt, who is now
active in [the] Hollywood Bowl and a lot of other things locally.
Moschbacher said, "Don't you worry. We'll take care of you. We'll
provide the money for your wife and child. We'll give her an allowance
enough so that she can live off of it, and we'll pay for your expenses
at the Barlow Sanitarium." And then I asked Bullock's if I could leave,
and I went out to Barlow Sanitarium. I wasn't there very long--I suppose
about seven weeks in all—but it was a very interesting seven weeks.
While I was there, I realized that I couldn't go back to work in the
book department at Bullock's. One day a man by the name of Arthur Mayers
came to see me, and he said, "You know, we've got a printing company,
and I am interested in knowing what you're going to do with yourself and
whether we can help you in any way. What do you plan to do?" And I said,
"Well, frankly, I think the best thing I could do would be to start a
business of my own selling books." And he said, "How would you do that?"
And I said, "Well, I've put together the names and addresses of all the
people that I sold books to when I was in Bullock's, and I think they're
friends of mine and would probably buy from me if I went to see them. I
know a man by the name of Odo Stade, who is the manager of the Hollywood
Book Store, and I think he would let me have books to deliver to my
customers and give me a discount off of them." And so Arthur Mayers
said, "All right, we'll print you some business cards and some
stationery." Before that, while I was at Bullock's, I had met a man by
the name of Jim Blake, who was the western representative for Harper
Brothers. I'd actually met him back in Texas--and I don't know whether
in the course of this previous tape* I told the story of the princess
from the Pecos. [* See Interview History—ed.]
-
GARDNER:
- That was the . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Beatrice Molyneaux.
-
GARDNER:
- Yes, you did.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, that's how I happened to meet Jim Blake. And Blake had—I'd met him
again when I was working at Bullock's; and while I was in this
sanitarium, he arranged to have a book a week sent out to me. And one of
the books he sent me was Thomas Mann's Magic
Mountain, just about the worst book a man could read when he was in
a sanitarium, [laughter] but it made a tremendous impression on me.
Later I had the opportunity of meeting Thomas Mann, getting him to
autograph my copy of The Magic Mountain, and
telling him the story of how I'd gone through all the experiences of his
characters. And he told me that this book had grown out of his
experiences while he was in a sanitarium in Switzerland.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, how do we dovetail back now to Carey McWilliams and the poetry?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, yes, I think we can do that. When I got out of the sanitarium. ... I
don't know whether I mentioned it; I just wanted to say a word or two
about the sanitarium. While I was there, we started a little paper
called The Temp-stick. There was a fellow by the
name of Karyl Marker, who was an actor, a very fine-looking fellow, and
he had been quite a success in the local little theater [and] had
performed in some of the early presentations of Eugene O'Neill here, and
he and I became fast friends. The other man I met there was a man by the
name of Sigurd Varian. Sigurd Varian had been a flier. He had developed
TB . He had been fired from his job as a pilot on commercial airlines in
this country, so he went down to South America. And there he was flying
very high altitudes over the Andes, and of course the first thing he
knew he was hemorrhaging, and he had to come back to the United States
[and now] was in this sanitarium, Sigurd Varian and his brother were the
founders of the Varian Associates.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, my.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No one could have guessed this by the looks of the fellow that was there
in that sanitarium at that time. And he and I and Marker used to play
chess, and we sort of created a little circle. Right away we generated
more excitement than the people in the sanitarium wanted, and they told
me that I couldn't stay any longer because the patients were not
supposed to be getting excited by all the things that Marker and Varian
and I were doing. So that was mainly why I was dismissed. They also felt
that I didn't have a serious infection, that it was arrested, and the
best thing to do was to let me go out and go to work. So I went back to
my house at 1623 Landa Street, which was down a dirt road--without a
telephone—and I took my little pack of cards, and I started calling on
the people that I had sold books to when I worked for Bullock's. I said,
"Now, if you are buying books, tell me what you want, and I'll get them
for you. They won't cost you any more, and I'll make a little profit."
The first order I got was for twenty-seven dollars' worth of books, and
I went to see Odo Stade at the Hollywood Book Store. He gave me the
books at one- third off, which was his cost, and I took them out. I
borrowed eighteen dollars to pay Stade for the books, took them out and
collected the twenty-seven dollars, and I had nine dollars profit. Now,
the people who really bolstered me up then were Louis Samuel and Grace
Marion Brown, who were living together. They bought books from me. And a
fellow by the name of William Conselman--Bill Conselman and his wife
[Mina] —he was doing very well indeed as a writer at Twentieth
Century-Fox, or Fox Studios, as they were called then, and he had
started a comic strip called "Ella Cinders." And very soon he was
zooming up, making a great deal of money, and they took practically any
book I would bring to them. Soon I had a little chain of people that I
could go to once a week or so with a pack of books, and they took most
of what I brought them. Jim Blake got me a line of credit with some of
the publishers, and I started writing circular letters—direct mail--to
my little list, promoting some of the books that these publishers were
bringing out; just using the copy on their lists. And this brought me
mail orders. I suppose that now, as I look on it, I'm surprised at all
of the different things I did, [and] the fact that I had the gumption to
do them. Well, I had collected some of my poems, and I wrote to Carl
Sandburg and asked him if he'd do a foreword. He wasn't really too
enthusiastic about this, but my friend Frank Wolfe wrote to him and
said, "You know, Carl, it would be a great boost to Jake, and you would
do him a lot of good, if you would write a foreword." So Carl wrote a
very nice brief foreword. It was a kind of a noncommittal thing, saying
that if I kept on I might write some good poetry someday.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, it's much more positive than that, but that does paraphrase it in a
way.
-
ZEITLIN:
- And I got Louis Samuel—he said, "I'll put up the money to publish your
book of poetry. Let's go up to San Francisco and see the Grabhorn
Press." Well, we didn't go to see the Grabhorns, we went to see Gelber
and Lilienthal, which was a bookselling firm in San Francisco. It was a
very fine firm, selling rare books and first editions, and the financial
backer of the firm was Ted Lilienthal, one of the fine families of San
Francisco. And Leon Gelber had worked in the book department of the
White House, or the City of Paris, up in San Francisco, and had learned
the bookselling game. So Gelber was the bookman, and Lilienthal was the
backer. And they had a publishing imprint; they called it the Lantern
Press. So we went to see them, and Louis Samuel bought quite a few books
from them, which buttered them up very nicely. And he said to them that
he would like to get them to be the publishers for a book of poems if we
could get the Grabhorns to print it. So they said, "Of course." They
introduced us to the Grabhorns, and I remember that not only did I meet
Ed Grabhorn, but I met Erskine Scott Wood, who was one of the great men
of his time. And Ted Lilienthal and Sara Bard Field and Erskine Scott
Wood all took me to dinner at Coppa ' s in the Alley, which was a great
Italian restaurant--a sort of bohemian gathering place — the walls of
which had been decorated by Maynard Dixon. It was San Francisco's
bohemia. And I had lunch there; my, I was bug-eyed. And I came back down
to Los Angeles, and I got the Grabhorns to put out a little circular on
the book, so that by the time the book was out I'd circularized all the
people I knew and all the people that were buying books from me and
everybody else I could think of, and had enough orders to pay for the
printing of the book and pay back my friend Louis Samuel for backing it.
And when it came out, it was reviewed extravagantly in the Times here, and it gave me a kind of a little
name. And Carey McWilliams looked me up. At that time Carey McWilliams
was in law school at USC, and he was part time doing stories, personal
interviews, and so on for a magazine called Saturday Night . He called
me up and came out one evening to my shack down on this dirt road at the
north end of Echo Park Avenue, spent the evening with me, and did a
story about me.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, that opened up another circle, didn't it? Or it seems to have.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well. . . .
-
GARDNER:
- I'm thinking of Merle Armitage, Lloyd Wright, and so on.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, these people all were part of the Will Connell circle--in one way,
as soon as I opened a shop, I started introducing these people to each
other.
-
GARDNER:
- I see. So you were really the locus, then.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, in a way. Will Connell was very much a friend of all these people.
Merle Armitage was the manager of the Los Angeles Opera Company, and
Arthur Millier was the art editor of the Los Angeles
Times, and all these people more or less clustered at my shop.
And then we would have one of the more affluent ones--like Bill
Conselman would give parties. And this grew into a rather wide circle.
It included Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright; and it included
Lawrence Tibbett, who in those days was a very famous opera singer. And
whenever somebody interesting would come to town, we'd rope them in. We
had Louis Untermeyer one evening, and Lewis Mumford. And the routine was
usually they would come into the shop, then I would take them over to
Will Connell, and Will would pose them and shoot these oldfashioned,
cabinet-type photographs of them. Then we would all go to dinner to a
French restaurant on West Sixth Street, Rene and Jean. The food was—I
think dinner cost seventy-five cents, and a bottle of wine cost another
fifty cents, and we would then gather at my shop and talk and make a lot
of noise and argue and generally have a hell of a good time.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, that gets us ahead of the game a little bit. I should probably
double back and get you into the shop. Now, here you are toting your
satchel around from place to place. What was it that gave you the
impetus to settle down in a store?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, that also grew out of this circle of people. Lloyd Wright was one
of the people in this circle, and Lloyd said, "Jake, you know you just
can't go on this way dragging this heavy satchel of books"--he would see
me dragging this book bag around--"and you know, you're going to have to
start a bookshop." So I said, "Oh, that's very good, but you know I
haven't got any money to start a bookshop with, and I haven't got any
stock. I'm doing business out of other people's stocks." And he said,
"Well, we'll find a place. We'll find a way to do it." So we went
downtown, started looking around, and on the corner of Sixth and Hope
Street, there was a T. J. Lawrence Real Estate Company, and they had a
back doorway; this was about twelve feet deep and about eight feet wide.
Lloyd said, "Why don't we ask those people if they would rent us that
with the idea of your putting a bookshop in it." So we went and talked
to Mr. Lawrence, and I told him what I wanted to do, and he said, "All
right, I'll do it." I said, "How much will you charge me?" And he said,
"Thirty-five dollars a month." [laughter] So then Lloyd drew up the
plans for this shop, and it included a lot of cabinet work. All the
bookcases and the tables and everything were to be prefabricated and
then just brought in and put together and stained. And I went again to
my friend Julius Jacoby and told him what I wanted to do, and he said,
"Well, go out and see a man by the name of Bob Raphael. They've got a
cabinet-making plant that's called Southern California Hardwood Company,
and they put in store fixtures and things. Take him your blueprints and
tell him I sent you. I'll call him up." So I went to see Mr. Raphael,
and he looked them over. He said, "Well, it will cost you about $500,
and you can pay me fifty dollars a month."
-
GARDNER:
- There you are for eighty-five dollars a month.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. Then I went to Louis Epstein, who had a bookshop on West Sixth
Street. Louis, as you remember, had the Acadia Book Shop. One day a man
by the name of [Ralph] Howey came in and said, "Will you take"--I think
it was—"$1,600 for your bookshop?" And Louis said yes. So he walked out
of the store, gave the man the key, and he was at loose ends. So he
would come to see me, and he and I would go out looking for books
together. And I told him about this, the fact I didn't have any books on
the shelf—and Louis had already started accumulating stock for another
bookshop. So he said to me, "I'll lend you some books. I'll let you have
some to put on your shelves, but when I start my own shop I want back
anything that you haven't sold." So I started with books that Louis lent
me, with a few that I was able to buy, and with some books out of the
collections of some of my other friends [which] they didn't want
anymore; and they said, "Take them and put them on your shelf." So. And
that was the way I started my bookshop.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
(July 26, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- As I showed you in the outline, number I is bookselling and letter A is
early strategies of buying and selling, so I think you might begin
talking about your perspective on the book business when you went into
it--what you had in mind to sell, what you had to sell, and so forth.
Let me intersperse here, when you finished last time, you mentioned
Louis Epstein's giving you the stock . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Some stock.
-
GARDNER:
- ... to open the first store. I thought that might be a good point to
begin.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it was not only Louis Epstein but several other people who lent me
books so that I could fill my shelves. For instance, Louis Samuel let me
have quite a few books, and there must have been others whose names I've
forgotten now. I really started with the encouragement of a few friends.
Some of them were in the book trade, and some were not. In the book
trade there was Jim Blake, who represented Harper and Brothers and whom
I'd met originally in Texas in a very peculiar way. Blake had been a
bookseller in San Francisco many years ago; he had been actually a
partner of Newbegin's and had started a bookshop of his own, and had
failed, but had really found his best medium as being a publisher's
representative. And I'm sure that there was no one ever in the book
trade who performed the wonderful function he did, had the great role
that he did, with all of the booksellers, the book clerks, the book
collectors and authors, that he did. He seemed to attract friends
everywhere he went, and he seemed to spend more of his time doing things
for friends than he did selling books. Every bookseller saved his
problems and his troubles for Jim Blake to come around so that they
could unload onto his ample shoulders and get his advice and get his
help. And he was very willing and eager to help, and I have an idea that
he must have lent thousands of dollars to indigent booksellers and book
clerks in guaranteed credit. As an example, when I first left Bullock's
in the spring of 1927 and went into Barlow Sanitarium, Jim Blake
arranged for one of the bookstores in Los Angeles to send me a book a
week so that I would have something interesting to read, and I must say
that it gave me a great sense of having a friend in the outside world at
a time when I had very few. Among the books which he arranged to send to
me was Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain --hardly the
book to read while you're in a TB sanitarium. But certainly I had the
time and leisure to read it, which I have never had since. Jim Blake,
when I told him that I was going to start up on my own, suggested that I
get out some letters to possible customers, and he arranged with his
publishing house and several other publishing houses to guarantee my
credit to a reasonable extent, so that I could write a letter promoting
a book and then be sure of being able to supply it if I had any
customers. And among the first books that I wrote a letter about,
promoted, was Angel's Flight, by Don Ryan, one of
the very good early books about Los Angeles, the Los Angeles newspaper
world, and the world of cranks and religious freaks. I had a mailing
list made up primarily of the people who had bought books from me when I
was at Bullock's—I had managed to put together a card file of their
names and addresses—and in addition I was furnished with lists of names
by friends; so I had perhaps a couple of hundred names that I could send
out mailings to. And as I look back, I think I can say without undue
modesty that they were very good letters. It's surprising what good
results I got from them. It wasn't enough, however, to really make any
money. What it did mainly was to bring me to the attention of quite a
few people --100 people or more around town --so that my name was
recognizable. I had a great deal of help, and I can never stop
remembering that. There were people who went out of their way to buy
books from me who I am sure really didn't want them. There were people
who gave me credit, like Odo Stade, who was the manager of Hollywood
Book Store, who gave me a [one-] third discount on books, on which I am
sure, in many cases, he didn't have that much net profit.
-
GARDNER:
- To what do you ascribe all the generosity?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I have no idea, except that I was young, enthusiastic, innocent, and
eager.
-
GARDNER:
- And all those other Horatio Alger adjectives.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, all the other Horatio Alger adjectives. I think that the fact that
I published in 1927 this book of poems with an introduction by Carl
Sandburg must have given people the idea that I was a promising young
poet. It was reviewed in the L.A. Times by Paul
Jordan-Smith, who became a good friend of mine very early. And this, I
think, gave me a certain standing, a certain distinction,
-
GARDNER:
- You mentioned also, after telling that Louis Epstein had given you the
books, that there was an interesting story having to do with his wanting
them back.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, at the time Louis Epstein lent me these books, he had sold the
bookshop which he had on West Sixth Street—the Acadia Book Shop—to the
Howey brothers, and he set out immediately going around and buying up
books. So pretty soon he had a roomful of old books. He would go to the
Salvation Army and the Goodwill, the other thrift shops, and go through
their books, and pick out the reasonably good ones, and buy them, and
just stow 'em away. He also learned about the auction houses and taught
the auctioneers that they could get more than ten cents a volume for
their books when they put them up in lots, and so they very often would
accumulate their books and let Louis Epstein have them at a knockdown
price, rather than put them out at auction at the mercy of the merciless
public. In time, the auction houses became a very good source of books
for Louis. For some months after I started, he continued to accumulate
books, and then, after a while, he found a place of business over on
Eighth Street [and] decided to open up again. So he came to me and said
he wanted his books, the ones that I hadn't sold and accounted for. And
I said, "Louis, you can't have those books because if you do my shelves
will be empty." This was all very goodnatured; neither one of us got
mad. And I finally turned over to him what books were still unsold. But
he's always made a big thing of it and a great joke that I wouldn't give
him his books back.
-
GARDNER:
- Were your interests in books similar? It would seem to me that . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, at that time, any decent book interested me. I had a strong
interest in English literature, contemporary English literature. And I
remember I started in buying from a firm in London by the name of
William H. Jackson, who were distributors. They were brokers for
publishers, and they would send me over packages of books of the
prominent authors of the day. First they would send me lists and I would
order five or ten copies of Martin Armstrong, and A.E. Coppard, and H.E.
Bates, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the other prominent authors of
the day, so that they came to me in bundles. And I was the only
bookseller, for some reason, who was importing these books. They were
seven shillings and six pence, and I think the average retail price was
$1.75. I think one of the things that attracted people to me is that
they learned very quickly that these English books in fine
condition--the original dust wrappers all new—were coming in, first
editions, and that they could get them from me. And as Larry Powell has
had occasion to mention, books smell different: a book produced in
England smells differently from a book produced in the United States,
and pretty soon the place becomes permeated with the smell of the glue
and the cloth and the ink which is used in those books. So I think my
shop, after a while, developed the odor of English bookshops rather than
the typical American bookshop. [laughter] Now, at that time, I had a
young woman who came to work for me. She had been a newspaper reporter
on the Los Angeles Record. Her name was Marjorie
Butler. Marjorie was the most versatile, capable person you could
imagine: She could type, she could use a paint brush, she could wrap
packages, and she was willing and eager. And I actually gave her a
fourth interest in the business and later had to buy it out.
-
GARDNER:
- Would that be on Sixth Street now?
-
ZEITLIN:
- That was on Hope Street. That was at the very beginning. Later I moved
around on Sixth Street. But we sort of grew in different directions. We
were different personalities. We sort of didn't continue to be
simpatico. There was never anything but a friendship and a business
relationship, but something didn't work. And at the same time, a very
remarkable young man by the name of William Blaine Wooten came to work
for me. Bill was a man who, if he had continued along the lines that he
was developing when he worked for me, would have become, I think, one of
the greatest modern calligraphers and designers. He had a very fine
instinct for lettering, he knew types, he was extremely well read, he
was interested in the whole movement of William Morris and Cobden
Sanderson, he knew good graphic arts, and he had the techniques of
lettering and binding and anything having to do with the book arts right
at his fingertips. It was he who mounted some of my shows, and did the
window cards, and arranged the windows in a very tasteful manner, so
that before long I think we had a unique quality about our place, in
terms of the taste and the way that his taste reflected the then-growing
tradition. We were getting books like the Nonesuch Press books in 1928,
after they really got going; we were buying books from Douglas
Cleverdon, who was just beginning his bookselling in Bristol--I think we
were among the earliest and the largest customers that Cleverdon had in
this country. I remember we filled a whole window with the book on the
prints of Eric Gill which Cleverdon had published.
-
GARDNER:
- How did you know to—how did you find some of that Cleverdon? Here you
were a bookseller in Los Angeles.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know. I think that I just had the curiosity and the interest,
and that I naturally gravitated towards that sort of thing. Where I got
my models, I can't say—I think I must have come in contact with them
even before I came out to California, but I have no remembrance of just
what I encountered which started me off with a sense of the kind of
printing and typography that was being produced by Cleverdon, the
Nonesuch Press books. I think that together with that fact, I didn't
hesitate to write to these people and tell them, that I liked their
books, and I would like to sell them.
-
GARDNER:
- Did you find yourself influenced by any other of the downtown
booksellers? It seems that even at the beginning, you're setting off in
a completely different direction.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think, of course, everybody was influenced by and admired Ernest
Dawson. Ernest Dawson was a very generous man. He was a good-spirited
man, and he was also a tremendously energetic man who inspired and
stimulated other people. I remember that in 1928 on Christmas day, I was
in my shop because I'd come down to get caught up on some things. I got
a phone call from Ernest Dawson. He said, "I just got in a big shipment
of books which Marks and Company" (who were his agents in London)
"bought for me, cases and cases of incunabula." These days if somebody
has four or five incunabula, it's quite remarkable. In those days Ernest
Dawson would bring over a shipment of maybe 150 or 200 incunabula at one
time. And he said, "Would you like to come over and see them?" I went
over and, of course, here were these beautiful books in contemporary
binding, some of them chain bindings. And he said, "I've got a lot of
these here, more than I need for my shop, and if you would like to have
some of them for your bookshop, you pick out what you would like, and
you can have them for 10 percent above my cost." He didn't need to do
it; he could have sold them all himself. I have no reason--I cannot
understand why he was moved to do this, but I certainly am grateful for
the fact that he did. So I was able to take over to my shop maybe twenty
or twenty-five of these beautiful fifteenth-century books. And when I
opened after Christmas, I had something to show people that was really
outstanding—would be distinguished today, more distinguished even I
think than then, when fifteenth-century books were being brought over by
Dawson and other booksellers--although nobody as much as Dawson--in
large quantities.
-
GARDNER:
- I read a story—and I can't recall where it was, I'd have to shuffle
through my notes, and I don't think I will--that Maggs came over here at
one point and made contact as well.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, in 1928, I think it was, Ernest Maggs came over. I had written to
Maggs Brothers, and I said, "I would like to have your catalogs, and if
you need someone, I would like to represent you in the United States and
do anything I can to show your things to people. If you want to send
them over for me to show, if you have things that you think I can sell,
I would appreciate your giving me an opportunity." So Ernest Maggs came
to town, and he stayed at the Ambassador Hotel, and he called me up. I
came down to the hotel, and he said, "I want to go out to Mrs.
Getz"--who was then one of the most important book collectors in this
part of the world —"and would you like to come with me?" So I went out.
He was very well received, and she had known me before [and] was very
nice to me. And then he went out to see Mrs. Doheny. I don't remember
that I went with him then. He had brought along with him a collection of
first editions--The Deserted Village, Tom Jones, Gulliver's
Travels. He had, oh, thirty or forty outstanding books, among other
things a very good copy of, as well as I remember it, the second or
third folio of Shakespeare. And he said, "Why don't you take these? I'll
leave them with you. I don't want to take them back to England. Sell
what you can. The rest of them, we'll let you know when we want them,
where you should send them. " And I said, "Mr. Maggs, you know, I'm not
worth a cent. If those books were to be damaged or lost, I couldn't
possibly pay for them." And he said, "Don't be foolish. Just take them,
and I'm sure that you will be responsible." He loaded me into a taxi and
sent me home with these books, so here I was right away with a beautiful
collection of important English first editions. I never realized,
really, what an exceptional collection I had, and I didn't know who to
go to. At that time I hadn't yet contacted William Andrews Clark. I
showed them to the people that came into my shop. I tried to sell some
to Mrs. Doheny, but she wasn't prepared to take them seriously, so that
instead of my selling them to her direct, one of the New York
booksellers got an order from her for a set of Tom
Jones, or something like that, which I sent to him in New York,
and he sent it back to California. But the same thing worked the other
way around. There were collectors in New York who wouldn't buy from New
York booksellers. I would buy from those booksellers, quote them to the
collectors in New York, and mail them back there. That was true in the
case of a man by the name of Charles Kalbfleisch. Charles Kalbfleisch
was a stockbroker on Wall Street. His office was a very short distance
away from Byrne Hackett's Brick Row Book Shop. Byrne Hackett didn't have
a very good reputation, unfortunately. He had a tremendous nose for good
books and was a very imaginative, creative bookseller, but he evidently
had a bit of the rogue about him. His brother was a well-known writer of
the time. He did a book about Henry VIII. I'm trying to remember . .
-
GARDNER:
- Francis Hackett?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Francis Hackett, yes. But Byrne Hackett had a distinguished stock of
books, and he was a very brilliant bookseller, but he unfortunately had
this tendency to want to play the rogue once in a while, and this got
him in bad with quite a few people. So I would order books from Byrne
Hackett, or Byrne Hackett would write me and offer me books; I would in
turn offer them to Mr. Kalbfleisch a few doors down the street from
Hackett; Mr. Kalbfleisch would order them from me, and I would have to
have them sent out here and then sent back to New York because I didn't
want Mr. Hackett to know where I was selling the books. And so this
thing works two ways. There's always the glamour of distance. People
seem to feel that if you offer them something, it is as if you've newly
discovered it, that it has been buried in cellars or attics for 100
years, or that it's been created out of nowhere, there's a certain magic
about it if it comes from a long way off. So that I have customers here
in Los Angeles that would rather buy from dealers in New York and
London, and in some cases the books they buy are books which these
people have bought from me. And it works the other way around. I have
customers in New York and London [and] other parts of the country that
buy books from me that they wouldn't buy around the corner.
-
GARDNER:
- Early on, who did your clientele consist of? Was it through the circle
of friends that you made, or were there a lot of people who dropped in
the shop?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I had wonderful support from a man by the name of Bill Conselman and his
wife, Mina . If I needed money, I could just load up a pack of books.
They were mostly interested in authors like James Branch Cabell and
Theodore Dreiser, so I'd go out to their house, and they'd feed me and
buy a couple of hundred dollars' worth of books. It saved my solvency
more than once. Then along about 1928, Elmer Belt came in one day on the
way to his office.
-
GARDNER:
- This is when you were still on Hope Street?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I was still on Hope Street, and he and his nurse, a Miss Theil, stopped,
and he was so warm and friendly. And I remember the first book I ever
sold him. It was a great big thick book, bound in vellum, and the title
was Sepulcritum, and before long I'll remember
the author. It was a book of post mortems, a seventeenth-century book,
the first large collection of pathological case histories that I think
had ever been put together. Bonetus was the author. This book had been
left with me by a man by the name of Charles Lincoln Edwards. Edwards
headed the department of natural history with the Los Angeles public
schools. It was a sort of teaching museum, and he also used to go around
to the different classes and lecture. He was a lovely, inspiring man,
and his wife was a charming woman, too. They were extremely well read
people of very good taste. He had been a professor at Stanford
University. He was brought out from the University of Texas, where he
taught before, by [David Starr] Jordan, who had been hired by Stanford
to form Stanford University, and put together a staff. Charles Lincoln
Edwards had then come down here to Los Angeles and had set up this
department connected with the public schools, but finally the politics
of the public school system closed up his whole museum, and his library,
and all his lectures. There were lots of people until very recently who
used to remember Charles Lincoln Edwards and his nature lectures. He was
a very fine man, who, among other things, published what is probably the
first American book of folk songs. It was a collection of songs from the
Bahamas, Bahama Songs and Stories (Boston, 1895)
, which, I am glad to say, I have a copy of inscribed by him. He was
quite an elderly man when I got to know him in 1925, and he was very
kind to me. He and his wife took me into their house, encouraged me,
treated me with great consideration, talked to me about all of the
people they'd known in the world of science. They'd known David Starr
Jordan very well, [and] a lot of other people; they were full of
anecdotes, good spirits. I think they were very sad in their later
years. They made unfortunate investments in avocado groves in Southern
California, which everybody hoped to make their fortune with. They
didn't go. And they had a son who was a newspaperman and worked on the
Los Angeles Examiner. I remained friends with
him after they died. But Charles Lincoln Edwards had accumulated a
number of good books over the years, and when I think back on it now, I
think what a pity it was that I didn't appreciate these books more. He
had bird books of Gould and Elliot; he had very fine color-plate books
of flowers. And he turned these over to me to sell for him. And it was
out of the work that I did describing them and the research that went
with it that I developed my interest in early science and the history of
science.
-
GARDNER:
- Is that so? That was the origin.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I think that, probably more than anything else, except of course I'd
always been an avid reader of what now would probably not be looked upon
as very high grade scientific thought. I had read Karl Pearson's Grammar of Science, and I had read everything,
every line, that John Burroughs ever wrote. I had read everything of
Jean Henri Fabre — The Life of the Bee, The Life of the Fly, and so on—and I still think
that he is one of the most poetic nature writers that ever lived. Of
course, along with that I read Ernest Thompson Seton, and a man by the
name of Roberts--some of the people who substituted fancy for fact in
their treatment of animals. But generally, somewhere along the line, I
acquired a sense of the difference between science, the rigors of
scientific logic, and the non-scientific way of thinking. I think that,
really more than anything else, sort of set my course.
-
GARDNER:
- Mrs. Getz was also one of your important early clients, wasn't she?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, she was really the client upon which I depended most, and I think
without her I would never have gotten started as a real book seller. And
it was her friend Julius Jacoby who called me and said, "Call up Mrs.
Getz. She is collecting rare books, and she'll buy some from you if you
call her." Well, as a matter of fact, she called me first. She called me
up, and she said she wanted a set of the [Konrad] Haebler portfolios on
incunabula, which at that time were being distributed in this country by
E. Weyhe. The whole set probably didn't come to more than $1,000 or
$1,200. Recently I sold a set for $10,000. But I naturally didn't have
that kind of money, and I knew that Weyhe wouldn't give me credit, so I
called up Mr. Jacoby and I said, "Your friend Mrs. Getz has given me an
order for these books, and I haven't got any money to buy them with. How
am I going to supply them if I can't get the money?" And he said, "Go
down to the Union Bank and ask for Mr. Joe Lippman." Well, it happened
that Mrs. Getz's husband was the vice-president of the Union Bank. His
name was Milton Getz. Her father was Kaspare Cohn, who had founded the
Union Bank. But of course, Mrs. Getz didn't want them to know that she
was buying rare books--at that clip, anyway. It wasn't good for your
business associates to know that you were indulging in luxuries like
that. Her brother-in-law, Ben Meyer, was the president of the bank also.
So I went to Joe Lippman and said, "Julius Jacoby sent me to see you and
borrow some money. And he said for you to call him up." So he called up
Jacoby, and Jacoby said to him, "This young man is a young man with a
future. He's a very respectable young man who's in the book business,
and he doesn't have any money, and I want you to lend him some money. I
will guarantee his account up to $5,000." There was absolutely no reason
for this. And as a matter of fact, Julius Jacoby has always had a
reputation--as a misanthrope. When I talk to people now, they say, "He
was a mean son of a bitch. How did he ever do that for you?" But he did,
and he never expected anything back. I never could do anything for him
to compensate. In any event, with this guarantee, I had some credit, so
that I could go to the bank and borrow a couple of thousand dollars and
buy books and deliver them and get the money and pay them off and take
the profit. The first thing I bought was this group of Haebler. There
were five volumes in all. There was German incunabula; west European
incunabula, which included Holland and England and Spain and the Flemish
country; and then there was the Italian incunabula. And these were
beautiful portfolios which contained single sheets from a number of the
outstanding printers of all Europe. And among others, the set on west
European incunabula contained a Caxton leaf, which in itself has become
more valuable than the full set was then. It was Merle Armitage who told
me to write Carl Zigrosser, the manager of the print department at
Weyhe. That was then the outstanding art-book store in the United
States. Weyhe himself was a real genius, a man of tremendous taste and
great energy, and a very sharp businessman. And the man in charge of his
print department was Carl Zigrosser, a young man who was just commencing
his career, and in the course of time became the outstanding American
authority on the graphic arts. Artists were attracted to Weyhe. He
exhibited them in a little gallery upstairs. It wasn't much of a place.
I had an idea this was a great big handsome gallery. It wasn't. It was
just a wall and a balcony upstairs over the bookshop. But Weyhe had a
great talent for accumulating books and for attracting artists, and he
showed a great many of the first American printmakers, along with a lot
of the very good prints of older artists. But what he really specialized
in were people who for the moment aren't so well known—Erail Ganso,
[Yasuo] Kuniyoshi, Rockwell Kent, Marie Laurencin. And he had prints by
Picasso and Matisse for very little money. He had an enormous business
built around his very special taste, and people flocked from all over
the country to Weyhe ' s to see his exhibitions and to buy these new
printmakers. He had a great deal to do with the graphic arts renaissance
of the twenties and thirties. Carl Zigrosser responded very kindly to me
and sent me out several exhibitions for my one wall which I always
reserved for prints. I had an exhibition of Marie Laurencin; I had an
exhibition of Rockwell Kent. The prints were provided to me; they gave
me a discount, I sent back what I didn't sell. And then my first local
show was Peter Krasnow, the lithographer who lived in Glendale and is
still alive. My second show was the photographs of Edward Weston.
-
GARDNER:
- By this time, of course, you're on Sixth Street.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, I was still around the corner. Then I moved. I'm shuttling back and
forth, but it's all in the 1927, 1928 period. And I think the fact that
I was giving these exhibitions generated some excitement. Arthur Millier
of the Times gave me little reviews; there were
people who came in who were aware of all these new developments in the
arts--in the graphic arts--[who] came and bought prints from me. There
wasn't anyone else who was doing this. And small as my effort was, it
was the only thing of its kind.
-
GARDNER:
- As small as your shop was.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. But I had a lot of encouragement from people like Arthur Millier,
who was the art critic of the Times; Merle
Armitage, who was the manager of the Los Angeles Opera at the time and a
collector of prints and graphic arts. And very soon this little shop of
mine was a very busy place. I started getting out little brochures. I
would send out postcards in which I reproduced an artist's work and
announced that I had an exhibition. I didn't have any idea how
insignificant these things were by comparison, and I was right.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
(July 26, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- We were talking about the relative insignificance of . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, my wall was about 6 feet x 8 feet, but it was the only wall in
which these things were being shown, and through some peculiar stroke of
luck I managed to get publicity for it. At that time no one else was
doing this sort of thing; today it wouldn't be exceptional. Now, showing
Edward Weston was for me the beginning of what I continued to do through
the years, and that is to show photographers. I didn't really know much
about Stieglitz. I simply knew that in my opinion photography could be
an art in the hands of a man who had the right eye. And I decided that I
would show and offer for sale prints of photographers along with prints
by wood engravers, lithographers, and etchers. Strangely enough, while
they sold for very little, there were people who bought them. Now, they
bought very few in the long run, and I can remember—I have letters from
Edward Weston in which he speaks very gratefully of my sending him
twenty dollars. Finally we accumulated a tremendous number of his
photographs and offered them for sale. Edward decided to change the size
of his print, the style of his mounting and everything, and suggested
that I offer them for sale for $2 apiece. So now some of the prints
which turn up on the market for $1,500 and $2,000 each—and now even
$10,000 — are those prints which I had for sale for $2.
-
GARDNER:
- I'd like to stop you here and get some digressions on some of these
people you've mentioned-- just short sketches, personality
sketches--because so many of them were crucial in the era. Merle
Armitage, of course, became an important man around Southern California.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, at that time Merle Armitage was the managing director of the Los
Angeles Grand Opera Association. There were two impresarios in Southern
California at that time; as usual, they were spectacular personalities.
One of them was L. E. Behymer, who really deserves a monument, and for
whom there should be a special biography because I think that Behymer
brought more culture to Southern California from the turn of the century
on into the thirties than any other individual. He was the concert
manager of Southern California, and every great musician of any sort was
presented by Behymer. When Merle Armitage came out here, it was as
assistant to Behymer, in association with a concert manager in New York
by the name of Charles Wagner. Before that. Merle had been a sort of an
assistant to Charles Wagner. He had been the company manager of the
Diaghilev ballet when it arrived from Russia and traveled across the
country, and that was very exciting, a very strange and bizarre
adventure. This taught him a tremendous lot about being resourceful and
dealing with temperament. For a while, he was associated with Behymer,
but then he broke off from Behymer and I think he became a concert
manager on his own or in association with Charles Wagner, who managed
certain important American stars. He had a very close association with
Mary Garden, and soon he was the manager of the Los Angeles Opera
Association. He was a spectacular personality. He had style about him;
he dressed as an impresario should. He had been born in Iowa. He had
grown up in the Middle West. His name was originally Elmer Armitage, but
he saw the advantage of changing it to Merle.
-
GARDNER:
- It's an anagram, too.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. And he, as is the case with a lot of impresarios, was a combination
of genius and con man. But I'm glad to say that I enjoyed the benefits
of the best sides of his character. He had a great zest for living. I
met him first in this group which circulated around Will Connell, this
group that never had a name, that used to meet at my shop occasionally
and that published this magazine called Opinion.
And in October of 1927, I think it was, Arthur Millier said, "Why don't
you come on a trip to the Sierras with me." And I met Merle and Arthur
at the end of Echo Park Avenue at the corner of Altivo Way. They picked
me up, and off we went. Merle sported a Packard roadster, which was just
about the peak of smartness. The only thing that exceeded it was a Stutz
Bearcat. We started out and traveled along the east side of the Sierras.
We swam in the streams; we ate at all of the out-of-the-way
restaurants—and there were some very good Basque restaurants, there were
some very good lumberjack restaurants, in places like Sonora. We went up
the east side of the Sierras. We stopped at towns like Bridgeport and
Carson City. We went past Mono Lake when it was really a very dramatic,
somber place, to June Lake in the snow. For me it was a great
experience, a really coming into life again. We stopped at Reno. We
visited the cribs of Reno, which have just been closed down. (I read in
the paper today that a last-minute effort to make them a cultural
monument had failed.) Lawrence Tibbett, the great baritone, was a friend
of Arthur Millier, and he had given Arthur some extra money to spend on
the trip, and Arthur shared it with us. We drank good cognac, and I
remember reading to them from John Masefield's "Dauber" in the midst of
a storm in one of our camps. We then proceeded to go over the Sierras
through Truckee in the snow and down into Sacramento. We went to the
State Library Building, which was just being finished then, and Maynard
Dixon was painting the murals on the walls. They are there still, and
they are really outstanding murals. And this was the beginning of my
acquaintanceship with Dixon. We proceeded to San Francisco, where we
enjoyed the company of Albert Bender, one of the fabulous characters,
Mr. San Francisco of his day. We ate at Coppa's. We met a man who later
became one of the outstanding composers in Hollywood, Hugo Friedhofer; I
think he was playing an organ in a movie theater or something like
that—he was just barely living. We turned back and went up into the
Mother Lode country; visited Angel's Camp and Columbia when they were
still in fairly good shape. I remember going to Virginia City and going
down into what had been the print shop where Mark Twain had worked. We
went to Gold Hill, Nevada. We stopped at the Yellowjacket Mine, which
was closed down, and the old-timer who was guarding the mine told us the
story how Senator Jones of Nevada had gone down into the mine to look it
over. It wasn't producing, and they were going to have to decide whether
to continue it or close it down--it meant the end of the economic
well-being of a whole area. He came up, turned to the reporters who were
there and said, "Boys, she's a sucked egg." That struck me as a truly
apt description. We went to Gold Hill, Nevada, which was partly in
ruins, and there we went to the ruins of a bank, the Gold Hill, Nevada,
Bank. The vaults had been broken open, and all the old certificates and
the papers and the records of the Gold Hill, Nevada, Bank were laying
around on the ground. I took a carton and put these papers, without any
selection at all, into a carton and brought it back and just put it away
at home. And over the years I have sold hundreds of dollars worth of
stuff out of that carton of rubbish that was lying there in the rain and
wind. We turned back after going to the Mother Lode country, into San
Francisco again, and then came down and stopped to visit Erskine Scott
Wood, the man who had written Heavenly Discourse,
a man who had had a great reputation. He had published the first edition
of Mark Twain's 1601. He had been an Indian
fighter on the frontier, and later in Portland had been a great defender
of labor and a great liberal, and later moved down to San Francisco and
married Sara Bard Field and remained until his death one of the great
American symbols of independence and defenders of free ideas. He looked
like the Sunday school leaflet picture of God, with the halo of white
hair around his head and his long white beard. He and this lady of about
seventy, Sara Bard Field, had built a beautiful house at Los Gatos. Some
sculptor up there--I don't remember his name just now, but I will
[Benjamin Buffano] --had done a pair of stone cats which stood at the
entrance to his estate, and we drove up the winding road. He met us
standing out on the balcony, this grand patriarchal figure. He and this
very dignified lady were living in sin, and would have remained living
in sin if her grandchildren hadn't forced them to marry. I remember that
he showed me Garrick's copy of the second edition of Shakespeare, and I
opened it up. And I had a glass of wine in my hand, and I said, "Wait a
minute, I have to put this wine aside." And he said, "Oh, no, no. Don't
worry. If you spill wine on it we'll just say that it was spilled by
Boswell or Johnson or Reynolds or one of Garrick's other friends." From
there we went down to Carmel. We stopped and called on [Robinson]
Jeffers. He was very hospitable; so was Una Jeffers. They didn't repel
us. It was before Jeffers had really got to be very famous. He had
published Roan Stallion and I think possibly The Women of Point Sur, but it was before the
masses had started to invade his privacy. And in spite of the fact that
he was supposed to be a recluse, we found him very friendly and
hospitable. And instead of being the closemouthed character that he
appears from his photographs, I learned then--and confirmed later in the
times when I saw him--that if he got a chance to be alone without Una,
he was talkative to the point of being garrulous, which I'm afraid I am
being now.
-
GARDNER:
- That's precisely what you're supposed to be. Did you have any
introduction to Jeffers? Had you corresponded, or Armitage or Millier
corresponded, with him?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I think I may have written him a letter. When his Roan
Stallion came out, the Liveright edition, I was in the book
department of Bullock's. And I read it, and I said, "That guy is an
important poet, and I think this guy is going to be one of the important
American poets, and certainly the most important poet of the Pacific
Coast." So I persuaded the manager, June Cleveland, to order a quantity
of the books, and I started selling them. And I don't know just how it
was; I may have dropped him a note. In any event, when I got to Carmel,
I wasn't unknown to him. Una was very hospitable, too. She was, of
course, very protective, as she was later on completely possessive; more
and more as time went on, she cordoned Jeffers off, partly because he
couldn't stand the pressure of all the people that wanted to get at him
and partly because she was so terribly possessive and didn't want to
lose him. There was one rift in our friendship, and that was a few years
later when a man by the name of Ramiel McGehee, who lived in Redondo
Beach, turned over to me a group of letters and postcards which Robinson
Jeffers had written to a foster mother, a woman that lived in Redondo,
about himself and Una at a time when Una and Robinson had left Una's
husband and gone up north (I think they went to Seattle, Vancouver, and
they wrote a number of postcards to this foster mother) . Well, Ella
Winter, who was married to Lincoln Steffens, was eagerly collecting
anything having to do with Jeffers. And when I got this material, I
immediately sent a list of it to Ella Winter. She in turn told Una
Jeffers about it, and I got a very heated, very... well, I guess you
could call it "disagreeable" letter from Una asking me how I dared offer
these things for sale; how could I think of selling anything that was so
intimate. And so I wrote back and said to Una I was surprised to
discover that these offended her; that these were for sale, that they
had been brought to me by a man who owned them who was offering them for
sale, and that I had no interest in trying to cause her any
embarrassment, and that I had returned the letters to this man and told
him I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I'm very sorry I did;
I should have bought them from him and put them away [laughter] because
today they would be worth a great deal of money. And not only that--they
would be essential to the story of the relationship of Una Kuster, as
she was then (she was married to a man by the name of Kuster in Carmel),
and Robin Jeffers.
-
GARDNER:
- Did he ever do anything with the letters?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know what happened to them. I haven't the slightest idea.
-
GARDNER:
- You never saw them on the market, though.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I never saw them on the market. He died, and they disappeared. And
whether they survived and came into someone else's possession, I don't
know. This man Ramiel McGehee was an interesting character who had gone
to Japan with Ruth St. Denis. He lived in a little house in Redondo, and
he was a friend of Edward Weston, and later of Merle Armitage. He helped
Merle Armitage produce a cookbook. He stimulated a couple of young
fellows living down at Palos Verdes—they were longshoremen who had
turned lifeguard--into writing. One of them was Lee Jarvis, who had been
an Olympic swimmer, and the other was a very beautiful young man by the
name of Grant Leenhouts, who managed the swimming club at Palos Verdes.
Grant wrote several good stories, one of which appeared in the American Mercury, and then one of them was
reprinted in the O'Brien Best Short Stories. The
group sort of ... some of the group--Merle Armitage; Ramiel McGehee;
Edward Weston; an interesting woman, a lesbian by the name of Tone
Price, who followed me out here from Texas; and a very beautiful young
woman whose name I can't remember right now—well, there were a
considerable group of us which used to go down to this swimming club in
Palos Verdes. We would hold great parties there at night after the
natives of Palos Verdes, who were paying for the club, had gone to bed.
[We would] broil lobsters, and have great songfests, and dance, and
talk, shout. Later, I introduced a novelist by the name of Myron Brinig
into this group, very much to my regret. Myron Brinig was a sort of a
sulky baby elephant, and he had a certain way of winning your
confidence. He had published a couple of books about his family in
Montana, a couple of novels. I took him down there, and later he
published a novel called Flutter of an Eyelid in
which he tried to do a Southwind about this group. He made me into a
very ugly character. It was, I thought, very unkind; and it was, more
than that, a betrayal of an effort to be a friend to him when he was
lonely and needed friends. The publishers made the mistake of sending me
a set of the galleys before it came out, whereupon I immediately
notified the publishers that this set of galleys, if they published the
book in that form, constituted libel, [and] that I was going to take
action. And I got in touch with a friend here, a young lawyer by the
name of Homer Crotty, who later got to be one of the very important
figures in Southern California. Through him, I got in touch with a man
I'd known before, John J. McCloy, a rising young lawyer and a member of
the firm of Cravath, Somebody, Somebody, Somebody (DeGardsdorf, Swaine,
and Wood) , one of the leading law firms in New York City. John McCloy
later became the high commissioner to Germany for the United States and
is now, I think, the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank. But at that
time he was a relatively young man of promise. I asked him what he
thought could be done about this book. Well, he got in touch with their
lawyers, and their lawyers immediately sent someone out here who got a
hold of them and told Farrar and Rinehart, the publishers, that I had
one of the most important law firms in the United States representing
me. [laughter] They couldn't believe it. They thought this little jerk
out here in California couldn't muster any influence or force, and it
was purely by accident. So they sent another man out here. First they
had Leslie Hood, who was the head of A. C. Vroman company in Pasadena,
call me up and come to see me and try to persuade me that it would be
all right, that there was nothing wrong about this book. And then they
sent their own representative out, and I made a mistake. He persuaded me
to go ahead and strike anything I wanted out of the book and let them go
ahead and publish it. I should have consulted McCloy and said, "What do
you think I ought to do?" I think McCloy would have had them on the
carpet for a half a million dollars. In any event, I agreed to their
proposal. In the meantime, they had issued advance review copies of this
book, and they sent out telegrams and sent personal representatives to
every reviewer that received a copy asking for it back. And, I'm told,
they've destroyed these. I kept mine, and I have from time to time been
able to buy a copy or two. One of the copies I bought was from a dealer
in Beverly Hills, Max Hunley. He showed me the book, and he asked me if
I wanted to pay fifty dollars for it, and I said. "No, that's
blackmail." And he said, "Well, if you won't pay fifty dollars, will you
write something in it?" And I said "Sure," and so I wrote, "This book is
inscribed in memory of a louse I once knew. —Jake Zeitlin." A few months
later the book turned up with an inscription underneath: "Says you.
--Myron Brinig."
-
GARDNER:
- That's amazing.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The book was not much of a book. There needn't have been any fuss about
it because it didn't sell. Nobody took any interest in it. None of us
were prominent enough to make good news stories. The book died on the
book counters and was forgotten.
-
GARDNER:
- To return to your trip with Armitage and Millier, was the Jeffers visit
in Carmel the last stop?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. We stopped in Carmel—I think those are the last people we saw. We
may have stopped in Santa Barbara, where Brett Weston was living at the
time and doing photography. And then we came down the coast. It was like
an Arthur B. Davies landscape as we drove through it, not knowing how
much road there was ahead of us or what there was beside. It was like a
dream sequence in a fantasy movie.
-
GARDNER:
- You've described Armitage. Could you describe Arthur Millier a little
bit—what he was like then, perhaps, and something about your friendship
with him?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Arthur Millier had been born in Great Britain. His father was a music
teacher. He came to San Francisco, I think, when he was in his teens.
His first job was as an artist in the Schmidt Lithograph Company, who
specialized in labels for bottles and cans and boxes. They were the
biggest producers of lithographic labels on the Pacific Coast at the
time. Now, how he got down to Los Angeles and how he got to be the art
editor of the Los Angeles Times, I don't know.
The man who preceded him was also an Englishman, and I can only remember
his first name, Anthony [Anderson]. Arthur became the art editor of the
Los Angeles Times without any training, I
think, either as a newspaperman or in art history or art criticism.
Newspapers in those days, if somebody came along who said, "I will write
the music criticism" or "I'll write the art criticism," didn't examine
their credentials any more than they do now. I mean, a guy like Bill
Wilson or Henry Seldis was never really trained to be an art critic;
they're journalists. Arthur had an engaging way about him. I think he
tried to stay free of any commitments to the people who had art
galleries, but naturally he couldn't help but develop certain
friendships, like those with Earl Stendahl, who had a leading gallery at
that time and who was really showing some very important things here. I
know the first showing of the Guernica of Picasso
was in Earl Stendahl's gallery. After all, it's the art dealers who
provide the medium through which art is exhibited. Without them, you
would not have an art world anyplace. And a city like Los Angeles owes a
great deal to all the different men—like Earl Stendahl, and Dalzell
Hatfield, and Frank Perls--who had the enterprise, the courage, to
present some of the important artists of their time, and promote them,
sometimes without very much financial success but always with great
enthusiasm. I think they proved what artists need to learn over and over
again: that art dealers are entitled to make money off of art because
they will give half a dozen shows or a dozen shows in which they make no
sales at all, and then they have to hope that they will have one
exhibition that makes some money. And when they do, very often the
artist whom they've put on the map will turn around when he's successful
and leave him, try to sell the clients direct or go to a bigger, more
influential gallery. I've had that experience myself, and that's one
reason why I don't deal in living artists' work. I think the most
manageable artists and the most grateful ones are dead artists. [
laughter] Well, anyway, I'm not talking much about Arthur Millier.
Arthur Millier was a good talker, a good conversationalist. He wasn't a
great intellectual, but he certainly wasn't an ordinary man. He had
immense charm, and he had great attraction for women --and I think he
had great attraction also for men who liked his conversation and his
company. He lived in Santa Monica Canyon. When I met him first, he was
married to a beautiful dark-haired, dark-skinned woman by the name of
Francine. She was half-Indian, and before he had met her she had been
part of a racetrack, sporting-world crowd. She was a great friend of
people like Baron Long, who ran the Agua Caliente racetrack and built
the Los Angeles Biltmore, operated some of the famous nightclubs of the
day. But she had married Arthur Millier, and they had had three children
and were living quietly in Santa Monica Canyon, and it all seemed like a
quiet and settled life. Then they moved out near El Monte, to a small
place which had more ground on it. The children could have horses, and
they were out in a semi-rural atmosphere. And then Arthur became a great
Lothario. Ultimately he became involved with a Southern woman by the
name of Sarah, a public relations woman. And he completely went to
pieces. He and Sarah took to drinking. They became impossible at social
events and art openings to which they were invited, and they finally got
down to living in a single room on Skid Row with nothing but a mattress
on the floor, drinking and just down in the gutter. They seemed
absolutely helpless. And something happened, something I've never
understood and could never explain, but they got out of it. Somebody got
them into Alcoholics Anonymous. By that time his wife had divorced him.
He ultimately married Sarah. They stopped drinking; they straightened
out; they cleaned up; they got an attractive apartment; she again became
a public relations woman, which she had done very well before. And in
the last years of their lives, they lived very stable lives. He died of
lung cancer about five years ago. The one tragedy of Arthur Millier was
that he was really a very fine watercolorist and a very fine etcher.
About 1936 or '37, I gave an exhibition of his watercolors, and I think
they were outstanding. They were in the tradition of the English
watercolors. And about the only person that bought any of them was the
woman who was the most generous and one of the finest patrons that
Southern California ever had, Susannah Dakin. Susannah bought some of
his watercolors; I don't know who else did, but very few of them sold.
His etchings were in the tradition of Rembrandt and Seymour Hayden. They
had great richness and, I think, a very fine feeling for the medium, and
they sold very little. I think I had two exhibitions during his
lifetime. In his later years, there was an exhibition at Barnsdall Park,
and I made an effort to get the sponsorship to publish a book of his
etchings; but they never were published, and I think they still should
be. And I hope if I live long enough and can assemble the capital that a
catalogue raisonne of his etchings will be published, because I don't
think a finer etcher has ever worked in the western United States, and I
think it's a tragedy that he remains unrecognized.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
(August 2, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- We finished up last time talking about Merle Armitage and Arthur
Millier, and I thought it would be interesting to go from that and talk
a little bit about Opinion magazine, which was
the joint product of yourself and a number of the members of the young
literary community of Los Angeles.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Opinion magazine was the outgrowth of the
social activities, really--the getting together of a number of different
kinds of people who used to circulate around my shop, have parties, and
eat and drink together. It was a very widely diversified crowd. It
contained people of the extreme right, like Phil Townsend Hanna, and
people who would have been characterized as pretty far left, like Carey
McWilliams. There was Judge Leon Yankwich, who later became a federal
judge, who was one of the members of the group. There was a man by the
name of Jose Rodriguez, who was a very lively, talented, charming Latin
American, and quite a rapscallion besides, who wrote the perfect kind of
yellow journalism that Mr. Hearst liked on his Examiner. There was Lloyd Wright, the architect; there was
Arthur Millier; there was another newspaperman, by the name of Ted
Leberthon; Will Connell, the photographer; Kem Weber, who was a
furniture designer; Grace Marion Brown, who was a graphic designer;
Henry Mayers, who was in the printing and advertising business and quite
a tight-laced teetotaler, quite the opposite of most of the other
members of the group. I can't remember the names of all the rest. There
was Paul Jordan-Smith, who had written several novels and had edited
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and Merle
Armitage. And somehow or another these people managed to enjoy the kind
of free-wheeling exchange of ideas and ribaldry and storytelling and
joking that went on in the group. So the idea occurred to some of us
that it would be great to publish a magazine. Well, there were about
twenty people in the group, and each issue was supposed to be edited by
one or more members of the group. They were to gather material from
various contributors, and then we each contributed $5 apiece, which made
a total of $100. Phil Townsend Hanna had a connection with a printing
plant, a commercial printing plant, called Wolfer Printing Company; I
don't think Wolfer Printing Company made any money out of Opinion. We managed to get out a total of seven
issues. They had a variety of contributors--Leroy MacLeod, a novelist;
Hildegard Flanner, a poet; Carl Haverlin, Gordon Ray; E.T. Bell; and I
can't remember who else.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the content?
-
ZEITLIN:
- The content was quite varied. Some of them were essays, and some of it
was poetry. Some of them were political opinions, and some was fiction.
And finally, of course, it sort of collapsed. It ran out of steam. And
it had no opinion, so there was no unifying philosophy behind it and no
motivation that would keep it going. This random self-expression wasn't
enough. We did get out these six issues. My bookshop was the address of
the publication. There was no actual publisher listed, and few copies
were distributed. We got a few subscriptions. We mailed out some to
other magazines on exchange, and we sent some to libraries, and a lot of
them remained undistributed.
-
GARDNER:
- They must be quite a collectors' item now.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know. I don't think anybody is really bustin' his britches to
get together a set. [laughter] Certain issues are harder to get than
others, and I'm not sure that even I have a complete set of them. The
group was never anything like a fixed group. People came and went. They
swam in and out of the school, and there was certainly nothing like one
directing personality.
-
GARDNER:
- What exactly was your role? Did you have a specific role?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the only role I had was that I would sort of announce to these
people, call them up, or get in touch with then as they came in and say,
"Well, we're all going to get together next Friday night." Or I would
say to one of these people, "Well, you're the editor of the next issue,
so you better start calling on all the other people to get some material
together." I would set deadlines. And then my chief function other than
that was to mail them out and to collect the five dollars apiece and pay
the printing bill.
-
GARDNER:
- Did you do any poetry?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it had some of my poetry in it. It had translations of Japanese
haiku by Carl Haverlin. It had political essays by Carey McWilliams. It
had a short story or two. I can't remember who all the contributors were
now; there were contributors outside the group. It turned out, however,
that being nonpaying and not promising a very wide circulation, there
wasn't much of an appeal. I don't think we ever got anything out of John
Steinbeck or Faulkner or Jeffers, but we really never solicited them,
either. We might have gotten. . . So this was a little bit of a symptom.
I think it can be characterized as sort of a symptom of a ferment that
was going on in a place that really hadn't arrived at anything like the
cultural maturity that it has now. A great many of the people that were
part of this group became successful in one way or another. Some of them
reached their limit of success fairly soon and didn't go anywhere beyond
that. But it was an interesting symptom of the kind of vitality that
there was in the community, and of the variety of interests and impulses
that wanted to find expression.
-
GARDNER:
- Was it a monthly?
-
ZEITLIN:
- More or less. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- And what was the style of printing, and who was responsible for the
printing? Oh, you mentioned the shop.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The cover was designed by Grace Marion Brown, and that was uniform
throughout. Some of the design was done, I think, by Merle Armitage and
some by Henry Mayers. I really have no idea how it happened to get the
particular format it did, because there wasn't anyone among us that was
really a typographer. Grace Marion Brown was a designer, and she
designed the cover; the general format followed from that.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the size? Was it a regular magazine size or larger?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It was approximately—I suppose it was 8 X 12 or thereabouts. Yes, it was
normal magazine size.
-
GARDNER:
- And how many pages per issue?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It must have been twelve to sixteen pages.
-
GARDNER:
- It's a fascinating and little-known part of Los Angeles history.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, well, I don't think that it blasted any new pathways or created any
great convulsions, but it certainly had a touch of the big city about
it--the big city that was coming to be.
-
GARDNER:
- The next area that I've mentioned to you was the area of your own
publication. (I don't mean Primavera Press, because we agreed that we'd
try not to talk too much about that since it's so well covered
elsewhere.) In going through the archives I found publications like Booksworm and Booksheet,
and of course you did catalogs from the time you were on Hope Street.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't remember anything called the Booksworm. I
used to get out—I would try to write something a little lively for a
Christmas sheet. It would be a large sheet that would fold down into a
mailer, and it had some exhortations and essays and enthusiasms about
books and art. I think that my whole idea of reaching the book
buyers—partly influenced by Henry Mayers, of Mayers Company advertising,
and then by Dana Jones, a very nice man who loved books, had a
particular addiction to Christopher Morley and McFee (both people who
are forgotten now, more or less—they certainly have been eclipsed and
aren't noticed very much--but who had a large following in their day:
William McFee, who wrote stories about the sea; and Christopher Morley,
who wrote charming, sentimental essays about books and bookish things,
and also wrote one very good novel, aside from several lesser
sentimental things like Where the Blue Begins,
and Parnassus on Wheels, and The Haunted Bookshop—all which had to do with everybody's wish
to be a bookseller or to have a bookshop on wheels and travel around the
world, in other words to have all the advantages of an establishment and
not be confined to one place). Dana Jones was in the advertising
business. He took an interest in me and made suggestions about these
large sheets, which could then be folded up so that you could do the
whole thing in one press run without having any stitching or binding to
do. And they became a sort of a standard style, if I ever had one
standard style. The other thing is, when I first started my bookshop, I
made it a point the first thing in the morning to sit down and write ten
postcards to ten customers telling them something about some book that
might interest them, or just reminding them that I was still there and
would like to see them stop in. So as time went on, this did bring a
good many people in, the fact that I remembered to write them and say,
"There's something in here that interests you." In those days, of
course, postcards only cost one cent to mail. Later on, I got a larger
mailing list; and when I would have an exhibition, I would put some
artist's drawing on the back of the postcard together with a message
saying that there was an exhibition—and these went out once a month to
everyone. I think they did a lot to get people's attention to the shop.
-
GARDNER:
- What about catalogs? Did you do catalogs from the earliest moment?
-
ZEITLIN:
- The first catalog I did was, I think, in 1928, and Wilbur Needham, who
had come out here recently. . . . He'd been a book reviewer on one of
the Chicago papers, and his wife, Ida Needham, a very lovely
person--both of them really very much loved people. They were innocent
like children; they never did grow up. He was deaf, and he was as
beautiful as we think the young Shelley must have been. They started a
little bookshop out in Santa Monica. He also did reviews for the Los Angeles Times. But after a while somebody
labeled him a Red, and he was no longer allowed to do the reviews under
his own name. So he did reviews, and in return for the reviews he would
get the review copies of the books, which he could sell to bookstores.
That was what he and his wife lived off of for a long time, but he did
the reviews under pseudonyms.
-
GARDNER:
- What were some of them, do you know?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I can't remember now. But he did the foreword to my first catalog, which
was published in 1928 and was a very nicely designed catalog on
cream-colored paper-- a pocket-sized catalog, not a large one but one
that I figured that people could slip in their pocket and read while
they were riding home on the streetcar. And it did fairly well. It could
hardly have been called a financial success, but on the other hand, it
succeeded in bringing a lot of people in. At that time I had a logo
which was a grasshopper. People used to ask me why I used the
grasshopper, and I said, "Because like the grasshopper in Aesop's fable,
I fiddled and sang in the summertime and froze and starved in the
winter."
-
GARDNER:
- Even in Los Angeles. Who did you send the catalogs to at first?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I sent them to libraries. It was easy to get lists of university
libraries.
-
GARDNER:
- Nationally?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I sent them around fairly widely. I'd send them to places like the
University of Chicago Library, University of Illinois, University of
Iowa, University of Texas, and then I would send them to certain public
libraries; for instance, Cleveland Public Library was then a very active
buyer of old books, and the New York Public Library, of course, was
really in its prime and bought very heavily. And the Library of Congress
was also buying. And then I sent them to booksellers. And of course the
directories of booksellers, the names that would appear in the Book
Wanted section, the Out-of-print section of the Publishers' Weekly. There was no AB
[Antiquarian Bookman] when I started; there
was a separate section of the Publishers' Weekly
which was edited by Jacob Blanck, and later on it became a separate
publication, the AB, and it was bought by Sol
Malkin, and set itself up as a separate business from Bowker. Publishers' Weekly originally was the medium
through which all booksellers and all publishers advertised.
-
GARDNER:
- Bowker still does Publishers ' Weekly, doesn't
it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, yes, it still does Publishers' Weekly , and it's the chief medium
for the publishers to get their books to the attention of the
booksellers. It's the outstanding book-trade journal. It does a very
good job. I think that I was also responsible for the first book fair
that was held in Los Angeles, and that was held at the Los Angeles
Public Library. June Cleveland of Bullock's, Leslie Hood of Vroman's in
Pasadena, and myself formed the committee. And we got the publishers
interested in sending exhibitions and got their representatives to come,
and we had a publishers' book fair (it was really not a booksellers'
book fair) at the Los Angeles Public Library, and that I believe was in
1927. I even have a letterhead of that. And that was, I'm sure, the
first book fair held in Los Angeles. I was the secretary.
-
GARDNER:
- What sort of business were you doing in those days?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think I mentioned before that I had learned about a firm in
England that was exporting English authors, and they would get out a
regular weekly bulletin describing what was being published by Martin
Armstrong and A.E. Coppard and John Galsworthy and whoever was popular
in the late twenties and early thirties. And I would order quantities of
them--anywhere from five to twenty-five copies--of these first editions
of Virginia Woolf and Robert Graves, [and] a great many other of the new
authors of the time. They would arrive in packages smelling differently
from American books—the peculiarly different smell of the glue and paper
and printer's ink--and I would stack them up with their
different-colored jackets and designs from the American books ; and
people would come in and buy , and it got to be a regular thing. Some
people even said, "Send me everything by a certain author as you get it
in." So I had a certain number of customers to whom, for instance, I
could send anything by Virginia Woolf or anything by Martin Armstrong,
or anything by A.E. Coppard-- these were some of the popular people--or
Sylvia Townsend Warner, whom I remember particularly. This, of course,
helped keep the business going. There wasn't much profit in any one of
these things; in fact, I think that probably they were a loss. The money
that a small bookshop makes has to be made out of secondhand books and
buying large groups of secondhand books for small prices per unit. You
can't make money out of handling new books in a small bookshop, because
too many of them remain afterward, and in those days there was no
returns policy.
-
GARDNER:
- Especially to England; it would have been impossible.
-
ZEITLIN:
- There was no returns policy to England; and the American books which I
ordered, I had to either sell 'em or swallow 'em. And very often I was
very much in debt to the publishers for books which hadn't sold and kept
accumulating in the shop. I think the easiest way for a bookshop to
commit suicide is to buy new books from publishers when it hasn't got
the volume of a bookshop like Pickwick or Hunter's or so on, with
hundreds of people coming through the place.
-
GARDNER:
- What kind of money were you making in those days?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Very little. I have no idea yet how I managed to keep the doors open.
The landlords were very indulgent. West Sixth Street wasn't the street
it is today, and there wasn't a great deal of demand for locations.
There were some cheap hotels and restaurants along the street, and there
were secondhand bookstores and other such things in the area below
Grand. We made hardly enough to feed ourselves [or] to pay the rent, and
very often we fell very far behind on the rent and very, very far behind
in paying the publishers. Maybe after a couple of years and the
publishers kept on digging at us, we'd write to them and say, "Look, we
can't pay you. Do you want us to shut up our place?" And they'd say,
"No, pay us half of what you owe us, and we'll be glad to let you go on
doing business." Because they needed the outlets, too, and everybody was
in the same boat.
-
GARDNER:
- You must not have kept carbons of those because not very much of that
remains in the archive that I went through.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, there is a lot of correspondence concerning settlements with
publishers.
-
GARDNER:
- Yes, that's true. There is some.
-
ZEITLIN:
- If you read Kathy Thompson's account of the shop in those days, you'll
find quite a bit of reference to those ups and downs.
-
GARDNER:
- There's a lot of reference, but very seldom is there a copy of a
publisher saying to you, "Well, that's okay."
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, well, there were plenty of them saying "Pay your bills or else."
-
GARDNER:
- "Or else," right.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, in those days I was looked upon as a promising bookseller and used
to get visits from Bennett Cerf, who was just starting in; he and Donald
Kloepfer had worked for Horace Liveright. They had been stockboys and
just worked in the place, and they broke off and went into publishing
for thermselves--started Random House. Cerf used to come out and visit
me. At that time Bennett Cerf had an interest in fine printing, partly
because of Elmer Adler, who was a member of the firm and who separately
had a printing plant that he called the Pynson Printers. I was
interested in press books and used to buy a lot. In fact, I think I was
the largest outlet on the Pacific coast for the Nonesuch Press books and
the Golden Cockerell Press books that were being published at the time.
Things like the Four Gospels of Golden Cockerell Press with Eric Gill's
engravings were seventy-five dollars, and I would take four or five of
them, which was really considered phenomenal. Today those same things
bring twelve-, fifteen hundred dollars apiece. The Golden Cockerell Canterbury Tales, with Eric Gill's illustrations:
I had customers who had subscribed for sets, so that I think I may have
at one time had standing orders for six or seven sets. And then I
remember the Nonesuch Press Shakespeare, for which I think I must have
had about ten standing orders; there were projected to be seven volumes,
and they were coming out, oh, two or three a year. This was considered
quite phenomenal by Random House, which was distributing these books in
this country. So they took an interest in me and were very friendly and
encouraged me. And at one time Bennett Cerf sent an uncle of his out
here with the idea that maybe I would get together with the uncle and we
would found a handpress and do some hand-press publishing, but nothing
came of that. [tape recorder turned off] A good many of the book
collectors in Los Angeles after a while discovered that they could find
some of the new press books in my shop. I'd also taken an interest in
some of the young printers. The first one that came to see me was a chap
by the name of Gregg Anderson, who was working as a page in the
Huntington Library. Gregg had the best taste and really the finest
character of the whole group of us younger men. And he knew what to
select in the way of matter to print; he was able to instinctively pick
out good paper and good types. And he printed on a little proof
press--whatever he could get ahold of. He called this press the Grey Bow
Press, and he would print anywhere from five to twenty-five examples of
various things. The best of them was a thing of Llewellyn Powys, an
essay which I wish I had kept. I must still have it; I hope it's still
around somewhere. Later, Arthur Ellis, a lawyer here in Los Angeles who
had an interest in printing, sent over to England for an Albion
handpress from the Caslon Company. It took a great deal of trouble for
him to get that Albion handpress because they wanted to know what kind
of a person he was and whether he was entitled to have one of their
presses. And then we got the press over here, and the Treasury
Department wanted to know what he was going to do with this press. Was
he by any chance thinking of printing dollar bills on it? But the press
arrived, and it was lodged in his barn out in the south part of town,
and we tried to get Gregg Anderson to come and work with it. Arthur
Ellis quickly recognized the fact that Anderson was an unusual person
with a true instinct for printing and types and paper. But Gregg
Anderson wrote and said, "I am not ready to do that sort of thing. It's
a mistake to think that I'm equal to your expectations." Well, he was
then an undergraduate out at Claremont, and later he went up to San
Francisco, and he worked as a printer's devil for the Grabhorns. He
learned printing, every operation that went into the printing of a book,
there with the Grabhorns. Later he went to Boston, and he worked for a
while with D. B. Updike, who was really the best printer in the country
at the time, a man of exquisite taste and sense of proportion and
quality in typography. And then he went to work for the Meriden Gravure
Company, a company which pioneered the use of collotype and other
reproductive processes and became an outstanding concern in Meriden,
Connecticut. Following that, he came back to California. Ward Ritchie
was working for me, and I could see that Ward Ritchie didn't really want
to be a bookseller. He was standing back in the shipping room doing
layouts of books on the wrapping paper instead of wrapping books with
the paper, and so I said, "Ward, I don't think you want to be a
bookseller. I'm going to fire you and give you a printing job." Phil
Townsend Hanna had brought me a book called Libros
Californianos, which was a selection of the twenty-five best
books, rarest and most important books--which is a difficult set of
conditions to meet all within one group of twenty-five books. He got
Leslie Bliss, Robert Cowan, and Henry Wagner each to select what they
considered the twenty-five rarest books, and then he contributed an
essay on California books, and he contributed his list of the five-foot
shelf of books one should read in order to become familiar with
California history. And we got it out in paperback for a dollar and a
half, and cloth binding for three dollars, and it sold very well to
people who were interested in California books. Mr. Dawson took quite a
number of copies. Well, Ward Ritchie, and Gregg Anderson, and some
friend of theirs who already had a printing plant all got together and
produced these books, and that was the beginning of Anderson, Ritchie,
and Simon. Anderson and Ritchie was first, and then Anderson, Ritchie,
and Simon. Simon came along much later.
-
GARDNER:
- Then it eventually became Ward Ritchie Press.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Ward Ritchie Press was the publishing outfit, which was separate
from Anderson, Ritchie, and Simon.
-
GARDNER:
- I see, which was the printer.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Which was the printing concern. And Ward Ritchie owned and operated
separately the Ward Ritchie Press. Now, I don't know how they kept their
affairs from becoming commingled and entangled. The Primavera Press was
started because of an out-of-luck poet by the name of Leslie Nelson
Jennings --a man who wrote rather good sonnets but was an old auntie of
a character-- [who] had drifted out here. He had worked for Harold
Vinal, a poet who did some publishing in the thirties. Leslie Nelson
Jennings was a Southern gentleman. He needed something to do and needed
something to make a living at, and he persuaded me that we could do some
vanity publishing; that is, we could publish books for poets who wanted
their poetry published. He would be the editor, and he would supervise
the production, and we would distribute them through the shop. And that
is how the Primavera Press came into being. Primavera Press was in its
beginnings a vanity press. A few months--I 'd say no less than a
year--after the Primavera Press got started, and had published, oh,
maybe three or four vanity books, the income from the Primavera Press
was not enough to sustain Mr. Leslie Nelson Jennings. He was unhappy and
felt it was a disappointment, so he withdrew. And I found myself the
owner of the Primavera Press, which was nothing but an imprint and a
stock of books of poetry, most of which were unsalable. [laughter]
However, that gave me the idea of getting together a few people, like
Phil Hanna, Carey McWilliams, Ward Ritchie, and Lawrence Clark Powell,
and forming a corporation--the Primavera Press, Incorporated. So that
came into being by taking over the books that Jake Zeitlin had
published, and then the Primavera Press had published. Now, my first
publication in Los Angeles was a book that I got out in 1929 with Bruce
McCallister. It was called Los Angeles in the Sunny
Seventies, and it was the translation from the German of a book
by Archduke Ludwig [Louis] Salvator, an Austrian archduke who had come
here in the seventies and described everything within a day's buggy ride
of Los Angeles, including Anaheim, and Fullerton, and Santa Monica,
and--I've forgotten what the other communities were—Long Beach, San
Pedro. But he had published this book under the title Eine Blume aus derx goldene Land; that is, "a flower from the
golden land." But Phil Hanna had been publishing this translation by
Marguerite Eyer Wilbur in Touring Topics—which
was the predecessor of Westways-- serially. He
suggested to me that this would be a good thing to publish as a book. So
I went to McCallister, and McCallister printed it, and I published it.
He got out a very attractive circular, and the thing sold out within a
very short while. It was my first and probably most successful
publication. We did better than break even, and we had a very nice book
to our credit. Following that, I did a book by Sarah Bixby Smith; it was
the third edition of her Adobe Days. And that's a
book that I'm very proud of because it had some very fine personal
recollections of growing up in Southern California as a member of the
Bixby family.
-
GARDNER:
- That remains a very important -
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it remains a very important book. The first edition of it was
published by the Torch Press in Iowa, and the second edition was also
published by the Torch Press. And then Sarah Bixby Smith, who was the
wife of Paul Jordan-Smith, suggested to me that she would like to get it
out in a better edition and add some new material, and I undertook to
publish it. That was about 1933. It was a very attractive book, and it
sold quite well. But when I merged my publishing with the Primavera
Press, the Primavera Press then became a corporate entity; and when the
Primavera Press started to falter, and there were not enough books sold
to keep paying the small salary that we were supposed to give whoever
did the secretarial and bookkeeping work and wrapped the packages and
shipped them out, then the whole stock and everything was turned over to
Ward Ritchie, to Anderson and Ritchie. And I'm sorry to say that after
Anderson and Ritchie had the Primavera Press for a while, a good many of
the books were junked. Ward says it was an accident, that they had left
them in the place they were occupying and been told they could leave
them there, and that after a while the people that had occupied the
place following them had dumped these books without notifying them. But,
in any event, a large part of Adobe Days was
destroyed, went to the dump; and a large part of a book translated by
Van Wyck, the translation of Fracastorius ' s [Girolamo Fracastoro] On Syphilis also was largely destroyed, [as well
as] several other books. So these books are now rarities, not because
they were consumed by the public but because they were destroyed before
they ever got to the public.
-
GARDNER:
- The more or less definitive work on the Primavera Press is Ward
Ritchie's Influences on California Printing that
was done for the Clark Library in 1970. Well, I'm going to turn the tape
over in a second, and when we get there I'm going to ask you a question
about some of the printers with whom you worked on Primavera.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO
(August 2, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- In the Ward Ritchie pamphlet, one of the publications he mentions is
something he did of Merle Armitage called Aristocracy
of Art, and the designer was Grant Dahlstrom.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Grant Dahlstrom was working for the Mayers Company at that time;
it was one of his first jobs in Los Angeles. I think he'd first come
here and gone to work for Bruce McCallister; then the job ran out, and
he worked for the Mayers Company. And then he went back to Bruce
McCallister, with whom he remained for quite a long time. Bruce
McCallister was the only printer around town in the middle twenties who
had any appreciation for the tradition of fine printing or knew anything
about early printed books. And he was a great idolater of the work of
John Henry Nash. In fact, his devotion to John Henry Nash was excessive
and uncritical. Nonetheless, he recognized the fact that John Henry Nash
used good types and good paper, and he strove for excellence in
presswork and things like that, and he knew enough to appreciate these
things. He also collected printed books, and the first book he ever
asked me to find for him was a Jensen's [ Life of
] Pliny . Well, I never found a Jensen's Pliny for him, and it wasn't until many years
afterwards that I finally had one on vellum, which I bought at the
Chatsworth sale and sold for $100,000. Merle Armitage, who was as
energetic as he was egocentric, had delivered a speech at the California
Art Club, which then used to meet in the Frank Lloyd Wright house, the
so-called Hollyhock House. It had been Aline Barnsdall's house. And
there, about once a month, there would be a meeting of the so-called
California Arts Club; people like S. MacDonald-Wright and Arthur
Millier, and a number of other people interested in the critical side of
the arts would get up there and debate. Merle Armitage delivered this
paper one night on the aristocracy of art and then suggested that I
should publish it. I took it to the Mayers Company, but Grace Marion
Brown actually designed that. Grant Dahlstrom had very little to do with
it, and I'm sure he would be the first to disown it now because he
disliked very much that bold black type that was used, and he also
disliked the philosophy of Merle Armitage, which was expressed in that,
as much as I did later when I came to realize what form of elitism Merle
Armitage was advocating. But in any event, I did publish it, and
curiously enough I used to have bundles of them. For years I couldn't
sell them, and I used to give them away or put them out for a dollar
apiece. The other day I went to look for one, and I couldn't find it and
the last one I saw offered for sale was priced at eighty dollars.
-
GARDNER:
- Everything's relative.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it's all a matter of changing and growing tastes.
-
GARDNER:
- What about Dahlstrom?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Dahlstrom was one of the first printers I met here. He had studied at
the Laboratory Press in Pittsburgh. He had gone back to Ogden, Utah, for
a short while, but he wanted to conquer the big city and learn more
about printing, and so he came to Los Angeles. And shortly afterward,
his girlfriend, his bride, Helen, came out, and they got married. I
think that was 1927. I met them shortly after they were married, when
Helen was pregnant with their daughter Anna Victoria. Grant was a man
with good taste in everything he did. He wore polka-dot cravats that
were just the right color and size, and his pants were always hung right
with the right colors to match his jackets and shirts, and I always
looked upon him as a man who had innate good taste. He had a good hand
with flowers, growing things. We became fast friends very early. I
introduced him to Arthur Ellis, and he and Arthur Ellis, with my
occasional help, put together the Albion handpress, which was the first
handpress established here for the purpose of producing anything like
fine printing. Grant has always followed traditional standards and
styles in his design. His idea has been not to do anything spectacular
but to utilize the materials and processes of printing for giving the
best expression to the ideas that were to be conveyed by the
materials--the contents which were contained in the vessel of the book.
He was, however, very knowledgeable in the traditions of printing, and
when Saul Marks came to town, Saul Marks looked him up. Saul Marks was
working in a typesetting plant at the time, and he and Grant came to my
shop, just as Ward Ritchie and Gregg Anderson did, and we would look at
different specimens of printing. We would look at the few good prints,
the Durer woodcuts and the Durer engravings that came in the early
printed wood-block books, and all this stimulated us all very much.
Also, Paul Landacre—we took him into the group. Paul's wife, who was my
secretary for a short time, had come around and showed me some of his
wood engravings, and I exhibited them and encouraged him and would show
him all the new prints that came in. I would take them out to his house
and show him different styles of wood engraving-- different artists'
work. We got together one night, in 1929, and formed what we called the
Thistle Club. We called it later the Rounce and Coffin Club. Gregg
Anderson was there and Ward Ritchie and Grant Dahlstrom. And later we
took in Paul Landacre, and then we took in Saul Marks. And our idea was
that that was all that was ever going to be of the Rounce and Coffin
Club. Each time somebody else would be the host--we'd eat at someone's
house-- and then we would show each other what we had found in the way
of interesting specimens of printing and talk about them. Then we had
the idea that each person would do a keepsake, and some of the early
keepsakes are very rare because there were only five of them, one for
each member. And the earliest Saul Marks keepsake was really an
exceptional thing. Saul Marks had good taste, not only in types and the
quality of printing, but he also had good taste in literature. He was
reading the Restoration poets and Elizabethan plays and so on. And he
chose, I think—I've forgotten now—one of the Restoration poets to do a
poem from for his first Rounce and Coffin Club keepsake. In any event,
the Rounce and Coffin Club grew, continued to meet, and then somewhere,
I think about 1933- '34, Grant Dahlstrom had the idea that we should
sponsor a western-books exhibition, and that became the main function of
the club and has been the thing which has kept it going.
-
GARDNER:
- When did the expansion start? Around then?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Around then. Well, we brought in various people. Roland Baughman of the
Huntington Library was our first secretary, and then Gary Bliss was
secretary for a while, and then Archer--H. Richard Archer who worked at
the Clark Library. Well, there 've been about six secretaries over the
years, and the club has continued quite surprisingly . . .
-
GARDNER:
- And grown.
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . and grown until now it has a membership of more than seventy and a
lot of corresponding members. It once had a set of bylaws, which were
never read or observed since the time they were printed, and on the
occasion when we adopted the bylaws and constitution of the club (which
had been printed for the occasion) , one of our members resigned. He
announced that he would not be a member of any group that had a set of
bylaws and a constitution.
-
GARDNER:
- Who was that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- That was Raul Rodriguez. I think that was a fine spirit, but none of the
rest of us followed his example. The Rounce and Coffin Club differed
from the Zamorano Club, number one, in that it wasn't exclusive; and, in
the second place, that it was very disorderly; and, in the third place,
it never took itself very seriously. It had no regular meeting places or
times and has continued in the same way.
-
GARDNER:
- What was your first keepsake? Do you recall?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I can't remember at all. But I think this sparked us all, and the Rounce
and Coffin Club remained a sort of a medium through which we all
communicated. We stimulated each other, we brought ideas to each other,
and I think every one of us benefited greatly, even the ones that
weren't printers. There were people like Larry Powell that never did any
printing, but it was a meeting through which they could publish some
things, write things for the keepsakes. It was a forum for debating
ideas about printing or discussing our notions of what constituted a
good example of printing and what didn't. The Rounce and Coffin Club in
general disapproved greatly of some of the more famous of the local
typographers; they looked upon them as bulls in china shops. One of them
was referred to as a "stud horse critter," and Bruce McCallister said of
him that his ideal would be a book in the shape of a perfect cube.
-
GARDNER:
- Who was this?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, this was Merle Armitage that Bruce McCallister was speaking
of—since both of them are gone and nobody really cares, I don't think it
makes any difference if I tell you.
-
GARDNER:
- I notice Saul Marks and his Plantin Press did one of your early books.
When did he first arrive?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It must have been 1933. I think he arrived sooner—he must have arrived
around 1930--but actually Marks set up a printing concern in which Grant
Dahlstrom was a silent partner. And then he took in another partner,
McKay, and the first piece of printing they got out was a sort of a
broadside inviting me to give them some printing to do. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- What was he like?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Saul Marks was a very sensitive man. He was a man of very high ideals
and very good taste. He could be very stubborn, and the more you pressed
him to get a job done, the more stubborn he could be. At times, also, if
he had an idea that a certain thing was right in the way of typographic
format, no matter how much it violated the rules of bibliographical
style, he insisted on doing it the way he felt it would look best to the
printer's eye. And over the years Saul and I fell out many times, mostly
because I would give him a job to print a catalog and by the time the
catalog was printed and he delivered it, all the books had been sold and
the money had been spent, so that I had a very hard time paying him for
a catalog that was no longer of any use to me.
-
GARDNER:
- Except as a collectors' item.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, except as an ornament. One of his other first jobs was a little
thing called A King's Treasury of Pleasant Books and
Precious Manuscripts, written by Paul Jordan-Smith and handset
and printed by Saul Marks. And it is a really exquisite little piece of
printing. I'm not sure that I have a copy of it left because my
scrapbook in which I pasted all of my early catalogs and announcements
and so on seems to have been filched; it has disappeared from my house,
and I don't know where it is, and I don't know that it would do anybody
else any good. So except for other specimens of things that I saved in
other places, there's a lot that's missing.
-
GARDNER:
- The scrapbook really is missing? Have you looked through and checked?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. I've turned the place upside down. It just isn't here. Well, the
best book that Saul Marks ever printed — that he printed in his early
years--was Gil Blas in California , and that was
very much of a labor of love. Ward Ritchie would go over, and they would
make up different page layouts, and they would set the type and print
them, then hang them up and look at them and criticize them and change
them over and so on. No commercial plant could ever have afforded that
kind of a thing, so they spent many a night and many a day bringing
about what I think was a very beautiful and very well integrated piece
of printing--the Gil Blas in California. Paul
Landacre did the engravings. He did a map of the gold fields, and he did
a series of vignettes, chapter headings, all of which I think represent
just about as good examples of that kind of thing as has ever been done
in a book. It was all around a very beautiful production. And, of
course, it bankrupted Marks and nearly put the Primavera Press out of
business, but there's no doubt that it was an artistic success. None of
us made any money out of it, including poor Paul Landacre, for whom,
however, it was a very good medium for showing what he could do; and it
later resulted in his being commissioned to do a number of books for the
Limited Editions Club. While that was published as a Primavera Press
imprint, it certainly was a collaboration of many people, including
Grant Dahlstrom, Saul Marks, Ward Ritchie, Paul Landacre, and all of us
who were part of the Primavera Press. The book was translated by
Marguerite Eyer Wilbur. It was translated from the French, and it was
supposed to have been written by Alexandre Dumas—but since Alexandre
Dumas had a literary factory, we're not sure that it wasn't written by
somebody who came back from the gold fields and was commissioned by
Dumas to write it so he could put his name on it.
-
GARDNER:
- The business aspects of Primavera, as I mentioned, are of interest, too,
I think, just for your comments. Hanna and Ritchie were 30 percent each,
you were 40 percent, and Carey McWilliams was an attorney with 0
percent.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, none of us profited by all this. We didn't get any money out of it,
and we did put a little in--I don't think very much. I had already put
in all the publications I had, and that was what brought the press
about. It was all ready; there was a Primavera Press. We were very poor
businessmen, all of us. If we had been good businessmen, we never would
have gone into it, and we wouldn't have produced anything, and that
would have been a shame. So I'm not sorry that it wasn't a business
success. It did about as well as could be hoped for, considering the
impracticality of all of us involved—the fact that we set our ideals of
fine printing above our notions of good business.
-
GARDNER:
- That's wonderful. Well, to move away from fine printing and back into
the bookstore, in 1928— I guess late in 1928--you moved to Sixth Street,
right around the corner.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the reason for that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the landlord wanted the space. And we didn't have much room. It
was a very small space. We had built this shop into the back doorway of
this real estate office, T.J. Lawrence Company, at the corner of Sixth
and Hope Street, and they were very nice to let us have the space at
all. I'm not sure how many city ordinances we violated, and it may have
very well been that T.J. Lawrence decided that he didn't want to take a
chance on being fined for violating a lot of ordinances. Whatever it
was, he said, "I need the space, so you'll have to go somewhere else."
So we went around the corner, and we published a little playlet called
Kicked around the Corner, which was written
by my friend Henry Mayers, in which I was asked, "Why are you moving,
Mr. Zipkin?" and I would say, "Well, our landlord wants the space." And
then the man would ask me another question, and he would say, "Mr.
Zeppelin, where are you going?" and so on. He never did once pronounce
or spell my name right in the course of the whole play; that was part of
the joke of it. Paul Landacre did a little portrait woodcut of me which
was used as a sort of a logo in this mailing piece, and I still have
some copies of that around. And when I moved in 1928 to, I think it was,
705 1/2 West Sixth Street, Lloyd Wright again designed that place. It
was a very beautiful place, but it was no more practical than the
previous one. He always had a great love for putting in lighting
arrangements which created a very soft, diffused light. But when the
light bulbs went out, you couldn't get at them to replace them, and so
gradually, as one after the other of the light bulbs expired, the place
got darker and darker. And finally we couldn't use the ceiling fixtures
at all, and we had to set lamps around the place in order to keep the
shop lit well enough for people to see the books they thought they might
buy. It was about that time that I started to import a lot of the books
produced by Douglas Cleverdon, who was still an undergraduate in Bristol
and had a very fine taste for printing and was a great admirer of Eric
Gill. He produced a volume of the collected woodcuts of Eric Gill, and I
bought some of the special editions in which each proof was signed by
Gill. These sold for, I think, as high as $150 a set, and today I should
think that if one had one of those special copies which I bought, it
would bring anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000. In any event, I remember
filling a whole window with the woodcuts of Eric Gill. I had a wonderful
young man working for me then. His name was William Blaine Wooten, and
William Blaine Wooten had come to me out of the blue. He had a natural
sense of the rightness of letters and the rightness in proportion of
arrangements. If he had persisted as a calligrapher and a typographer, I
think he would have been one of the very great ones. He would have been
in a class with Dwiggins; he was very much in the tradition of Edward
Johnston. And I was very fortunate to have him. He designed one catalog
which would really have bankrupted anybody but a very indulgent printer
like Bruce McCallister, who followed his directions and changed it just
to conform to his ideas of the right proportions and the right use of
ornament and color. He hung the exhibitions; he wrapped books; he did
the lettering of signs. He was a wonderful young man, but after a while
he became dissatisfied—he was temperamental—and he left me. And I've
always regretted very much that I didn't have the art of keeping him and
didn't know what it took to hold onto him and encourage him, because I
think William Wooten would have become one of the great typographic
designers and calligraphers. He went into the navy, and I don't know
what happened to him afterward. He was a very good friend of the
Landacres, and they were in touch with him for quite a while. But I do
know that from shortly after he left me, he never again did anything
with this very great talent he had. I had several very interesting young
men working for me at 705 1/2. The first one was Karl Zamboni--Karl
Philip Zamboni--and in those days he was a very handsome young man,
having all of the best attributes in physical appearances and personal
charm of a combination of Scandinavian and Italian parentage. He was
also a very good bookman, and I think that he could have become the
outstanding bookman on the Pacific Ccast if some unfortunate things
hadn't happened to him. But when he was with me, he was very charming,
he was very inventive, and he did a lot of things which advanced my
business. He was with me for five years, and then he left and came again
and was with me for another five years. His wife was one of the most
beautiful young women I have ever seen. I remember an English woman
author who wrote a satire on Somerset Maugham. Somerset Maugham had
written a book called Cakes and Ale, which was an
attack on Hugh Walpole. And this woman, who wrote under the pen name of
Elinor Mordaunt, had written a response to Cakes and
Ale, which she called Gin and Bitters,
in which she went after Somerset Maugham with a bull whip and a rapier
and really struck some very telling blows. The result was not that Hugh
Walpole applauded her, but rather he attacked her in spite of the fact
that Maugham had really been merciless in satirizing him in Cakes and
Ale. And Walpole wrote a review of Gin and Bitters saying. in effect,
"How could she do that to poor Willie Maugham?" Elinor Mordaunt was
quite an older woman when she came here, but I remember one evening her
coming to our house, and Cathy Zamboni came in the house. And she
stopped, and looked at her, and seemed to stop breathing. And she said,
"What a very exquisite young woman." And she was. She looked like a
combination of Polynesian and the all-around American girl. But later
Cathy left Karl Zamboni, and when she left him, it took all of the drive
out of him, and he never became anything like the great bookseller that
he could have become. He left me. He went up to Northern California, and
he is still living up near Palo Alto and does an occasional catalog,
sells books by mail--a great specialist in esoteric trivia. And he has
lost all of his very great youthful appearance and handsomeness.
-
GARDNER:
- Of course, another of your early employees —well, perhaps not that
early—your employees on Sixth Street, was Larry Powell.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, before Larry Powell there are two others I would like to mention.
One was a young man by the name of E. Digges Graves, Elliott Digges
Graves. His father was a sort of an advanced Episcopalian minister, and
Elliott and his father both were disciples of Eric Gill and strived very
much to follow his example in lettering and in the crafts. E. Digges
Graves was a very strange man, who never bore fools gladly and was very
impatient with people who would come in and ask ridiculous questions.
Finally it came to the point where Elliott couldn't bear the ridiculous
questions of my best customers, so he decided to leave. He joined with
Stanton Avery, who was the founder of Avery Adhesives and was his early
partner. The only thing is that Avery continued to be successful and
became an immensely rich man and great business tycoon and, of course,
poor Elliott Digges Graves remained the strange man that he was. And
another of the young men who worked for me at that time was Fillmore
Silkwood Phipps. As I think of the names of these young men, I'm
wondering whether they were invented by Trollope or by Charles Dickens.
[laughter] Fillmore Phipps was a very handsome young man who dressed in
tweedy coats and had a seal ring and was very uncommunicative about his
family. It turned out later that Fillmore Silkwood Phipps 's father ran
a popcorn stand in the park at Long Beach. Fillmore had higher
ambitions; in fact, he left me and was a partner in a book business with
a woman who also worked for me at that time. Tone Price; and later, when
they dissolved that business, he was in charge of making films for a
company that was subsidized by Forest Lawn. And he, poor fellow, started
to behave most erratically; started to be impossible and unmanageable to
his wife. Finally she put him out, and he was living in a room in
Hollywood, in a cheap hotel. And when he died, it turned out that he had
a brain tumor; and if it had been diagnosed early, they might have saved
him. Apparently that was responsible for his erratic behavior. He left a
family of beautiful and talented children and was a very respectable
person.
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE
(August 9, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- You were about to say what you recalled we closed with last time.
-
ZEITLIN:
- As I remember, I closed with an account of the sort of things that we
exhibited--the sort of books that we tried to sell—Eric Gill's book of
wood engravings as published by Douglas Cleverdon, and I think I also
talked about the design of the shops that I had by Lloyd Wright.
-
GARDNER:
- Right—his lighting systems.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. His lighting systems were only good as long as the light bulbs
lasted, and then it was no longer possible to get back of the fixtures
in order to renew the light bulbs; so that as the light bulbs blew out
or wore out, the light became dimmer and dimmer, and finally we had to
set lamps on the floors and find other ways of lighting the place. I
don't mean this to be in any way a reflection on the imaginative quality
of Lloyd Wright, because I have come to believe that a great deal of
what was best in the architecture that his father gets credit for in
Southern California was designed by the son, Lloyd. The father would
come along, and he would do a tremendous job of selling, and then he
would turn loose Lloyd and a team of several of his disciples. and they
would go ahead and do the details and creative work on a place like the
so-called Hollyhock House (the Aline Barnsdall house) and a number of
other places in Southern California. Lloyd was especially brilliant in
combining plants with architecture, and he did introduce in every place
he designed for me some kind of a plant or a box of green, growing
things. And I think in that he was far in advance of many of the
architects that have come along since. He was very ingenious, very
creative, and certainly produced the most effect for the least money. He
wasn't always practical, and the amount of shelf space we got out of the
walls, for instance, wasn't the maximum. After a while, the interest was
focused so much on the architecture and the interior design of my shops,
the customers couldn't look at the books. A great many people would come
and look at the architecture and "oh" and "ah" and walk away, and that
wasn't really what I was there for.
-
GARDNER:
- That must have stood out on Sixth Street at that time, because most of
the other shops must have been very practical.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, yes, they were very simple, practical shops. They just took some
lumber and built some shelves along the wall, hammered together a few
counters, and that was it. And bought some glass cases. There were
several interesting shops on Sixth Street. The largest one was about a
block east of Figueroa on the south side of the street. It belonged to
Holmes; it wasn't his headquarters, but it was the largest shop and the
last one that he had. He had about five secondhand-book stores in Los
Angeles, and they were really jammed full of what today would be great
treasures. The shelves ran up to a very high ceiling on all sides of
this big space. He also had a balcony room in which he would store a
great many of the things that he bought in quantity, and, among other
things, he bought up a number of copies of a little book of poetry
called Flagons and Apples by Robinson Jeffers. He
had found the entire remaining stock somewhere at a printer who had
produced them. And if I bought five copies at a time, he would let me
have them for a dollar and a half apiece. Later he raised the price to
three dollars each, and ultimately we had to pay as much as fifteen
dollars a copy, which seemed outrageous. Today, I would say that it
sells for between $650 and $750 a copy. And when poor Holmes's store was
finally closed, there was a large number of them still on hand. At one
time he used to auction off books and sets of books on Hill Street
around Christmastime, and when the selling got slow, they would give
away a few books, including copies of Robinson Jeffers 's Flagons and Apples. One of the other bookshops
was Rogers. [Warren] Rogers was married to the sister of Ernest Dawson,
and he had a substantial general secondhand-book stock. But he was never
as imaginative as Ernest Dawson, never had the stimulating style of
exhibiting things, or writing up cards about them, and so on; or meeting
people with the friendliness and enthusiasm that Dawson showed.
Gradually his stock dwindled—he didn't go out and buy aggressively--and
he ultimately closed down and went into selling books from an office,
particularly books on managing restaurants and hotels, and he seems to
have done quite well at that for a while. One of the most spectacular
bookshops on the street was that of a chap by the name of Bunster
Greeley. Bunster had been a flyweight boxer. He was about five feet tall
and very feisty, and he had a secondhand-book shop. He was married to a
niece, I think, of Norman Holmes.
-
GARDNER:
- Quite an incestuous street.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. And one of his earliest employees was H. Richard Archer, who later
became the curator of the Clark Library and then has recently retired as
the librarian of the Chapin Collection at Williams College. Further
towards Figueroa there was also Kovach's Bookshop. Nick Kovach was a
Hungarian who began, as far as I know, in this country working for a
watchmen's service. He used to ride around on a bicycle and patrol the
houses over in Fremont Place and along in the area that the Los Angeles
Country Club was located in. He happened to meet one of the men whose
house he guarded, a man by the name of Arthur Cecil, Dr. Arthur Cecil.
Cecil had been the leading urologist of the time in Los Angeles until
Elmer Belt came along, and Cecil had resisted, with every device at his
command, the growth of Elmer Belt—tried to prevent his becoming a member
of the staff of Good Samaritan Hospital. But Arthur Cecil was a rather
testy Virginia gentleman who, being a surgeon, had enjoyed all the
prerogatives of that role—ordered people around; spoke with a great
sense of command to everyone around him. Arthur Cecil had become
interested in collecting rare books, and primarily it started with an
interest in the first editions of Edgar Allan Poe . Being a Virginian,
he acquired some letters of Poe (I think he had one page of manuscript
and several first editions of Poe) , and then he branched out into a few
other things. And one of the outstanding things that Arthur Cecil had
was a manuscript of Gauguin which he'd acquired while on a voyage to
Hawaii a great many years before. He'd acquired it from a lady by the
name of Madame Reviere who lived in Hawaii. I don't know how she had
acquired this manuscript of Gauguin; it was an unpublished manuscript
covered with drawings and unique woodblocks of Gauguin's, and it was
about ninety pages. It was a violently anti-Catholic polemic, and it was
unpublished and probably unpublishable. At the beginning of it, there
was a long autograph letter from Gauguin to his friend Charles Meurice,
in Paris, who had sent him a great deal of money from time to time, and
who later edited some of his letters. Anyhow, it was a long and very
interesting letter of Gauguin's. But Mr. Kovach had persuaded Dr. Cecil
to let him get out a catalog of these things and offer them for sale. It
was probably the most remarkable first catalog that any dealer ever got
out. I don't know how many copies there were, but as far as I know, the
only thing that was sold from this was one of the Edgar Allan Poe
letters, which was sold to Mrs. Doheny. In any event, Mr. Kovach went on
to become a secondhand-book seller and opened a shop on Sixth Street.
And one of his girl clerks, also a Hungarian, attracted the attention of
Richard Archer, and he married her. Her name was Margot—an
extraordinarily beautiful young woman and a very sweet and wonderful
person. Kovach later became a dealer in periodicals and journals, and
also would buy up entire libraries and resell them. He was a great
problem, because he would make librarians very extravagant offers for
their books, and nobody could compete with him. The only thing is that
after he took the books, they could never catch him to get paid. No
matter how much he offered for them, they were great bargains; he would
turn around and sell them at below-market prices. So he spent a great
many years running from his creditors and going from one deal to another
of that sort. He was a brilliant man, had a great deal of charm, and if
he had used his energy and charm towards a little better disciplined
style of doing business, he would have made a great deal more money and
been a much happier man. There has always been a mystery about Bunster
Greeley's place. One morning when the place was opened up, one of his
employees was found dead in the place; he had apparently been stabbed,
and no one ever could figure out what happened or how that man happened
to get killed. It's always been a sealed book. Another interesting
thing: there was an old count who lived up on Bunker Hill who had, over
the years, accumulated a lot of interesting things, some of which he
inherited. And among other things, he had a painting of a man with a
beard. It was old; it needed cleaning; it was brown; it wasn't too easy
to see what it was. Bunster Greeley had it in his window, selling it on
commission for the man; I think he wanted something like $150 for it. I
took it over to my place and asked several people who were supposed to
be knowledgeable about art to look at it, because it struck me that this
thing was done by someone of real quality. Well, I remember showing it
to Arthur Millier, and he said, "Oh, it's just another beard. Don't
bother with it." Finally, some man from up in the Bay Area came along
and bought it, and paid something like $100, $150 for it. In the course
of the years, he researched it; he developed a real background on it,
and it turned out to be a very fine portrait by [Giovanni Battista]
Tiepolo, probably worth $200,000 or $300,000.
-
GARDNER:
- That's amazing.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The other shop on West Sixth Street that I remember vividly was Fred
Lofland (it probably had been spelled Loughlin originally, but I think
it had gone through the transformations that American ways with names
have, and it ended up as Lofland) . And Fred Lofland had a very closely
packed shop: I don't know how he managed to get as many books into one
small shop as he did. One of his most constant customers was a writer by
the name of Gordon Raye Young. Gordon Raye Young had become very
successful writing for Adventure magazine, and he
had a whole series of things going, and then some of them were published
as books. In one, in particular. there was a sort of a Conrad-like
story. I took it out to Ben Schulberg at Paramount Studios, my first
time inside of the office of a cinema mogul--enormous room with a desk
perched at one end of it, raised on a dais, and, like Mussolini's
office, you had to walk a long way to get to it. However, I must say
that Mr. Schulberg was very kind to me, and he did have this thing read
and synopsized. But for some reason or another, it never got accepted
for pictures. It was called Siebert of the
Islands, and it had to do with some German plantation owner on a
Pacific island. That is all that I can remember of it. However, Gordon
Raye Young had an enormous appetite for books, and when he died, he left
a large roomful of books up on the top of Echo Park Avenue--one of the
Echo Park hills just off of Cerro Gordo Street. He was a close friend of
Paul Jordan-Smith. And Paul Jordan-Smith and his wife [Sarah Bixby
Smith], Gordon Raye Young and his wife, and my wife and I used to get
together and have some very wonderful evenings; we drank lots of wine
and ate lots of spaghetti and spouted a lot of good talk. Then when we
got into the mood, we would all do our own form of solo dances, our own
inventions. Paul Jordan-Smith later wrote about my gymnastic ability
when I was inspired. I can't imagine leaping and soaring in the style
that he described as I am now, but I'm sure that his visions of what he
thought I was doing were very much colored by the redness of the wine.
-
GARDNER:
- What about some of the non-Sixth Street booksellers?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I want to mention one other bookshop that was on Sixth Street
which I think ought to be mentioned, and that is Jones Book Store. Jones
Book Store was on Pershing Square. It was largely a textbook store; it
supplied a great many of the public schools and some of the parochial
schools in the Southern California area, and they had large contracts
with the board of education. The woman that managed it was a really
striking woman. She was Mrs. Lawrence Maynard, and her husband had been
Lawrence Maynard, who was the head of the publishing firm of Small and
Maynard. They had published a number of good poets and other writers.
They had published some of the editions of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the books of Whitman's
disciples. They had published Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, and they
had also published a good many of the good English titles which they
brought over to this country. And they had employed some of the very
good book designers; I think that Will Bradley must have done some of
their books for them. A great many of the leftover stock of
Small-Maynard was distributed on the shelves of the Jones Book Store. I
can remember seeing them in piles and thinking what perfectly
beautifully charming books there were, which I could have bought for
seventy-five cents, a dollar, a dollar and a half, and two and a half
dollars--and not doing so. She [Mrs. Maynard] was a very striking woman;
she carried a sort of a pre-Raphaelite air around with her. And then
there was Parker's Bookstore. [C.C.] Parker was a gentleman of the old
Southern school. He came to Los Angeles, I suppose at the turn of the
century, and he taught elocution and had a bookstore besides. He used to
dress very formally, with these high-tipped celluloid collars. He was
looked upon as the very [pinnacle] of what one should read and the kind
of books one should have in his library. And I must say that his idea
was a good one: his idea was to have every good book that was in print
of any publisher in the United States, so that you could go through the
shelves there and find marvelous books—first editions of Edwin Arlington
Robinson and Theodore Dreiser and a great many of the writers of the
early part of the century—in mint condition at the price at which they
were originally published. And that went on until sometime in the
thirties when the business finally had to close. That shop was a marvel;
there was no bookstore in the United States (it was said by the
traveling salesmen for the various publishers) that carried so good a
stock of books as Parker's Bookstore did at its peak. Of course, he got
more and more in debt to the publishers; the expenses outran the
revenue, and the turnover was very poor relative to the size of the
stock. And when finally the stock was sold off, just marked down and
slaughtered, it was astonishing what wonderfully good books there were
there. If someone had just taken the trouble to get them out--dig them
out from under the shelves, price them, and put them out for sale, there
would have been enough money coming in to pay off all the bills which
finally dragged Parker into receivership. But there were no bookmen
there. One of the troubles, usually, with book businesses which have
lasted for a long time is that ultimately the man that had founded
them--the genius of the business—cannot hire people or will not hire
people who have the ability to appreciate and to sell the books the same
way they could, so the stock finally has no one to galvanize it, no one
to really present it and price it; keep up with the times with it.
That's what happened with this place.
-
GARDNER:
- You say "cannot" or "will not," and that's an intriguing duality.
"Cannot" because they can't find them, or "will not" because they don't
really want to train someone who will then go into competition?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it's very hard for a man to yield the powers that he has to defer
to some younger man. It's a great blow to your pride, very often, to
have one of your youngsters go out and sell rings around you, or to take
something off the shelf and say, "Look, we've had this long enough, and
out it goes. We're going to price it at half of what you've put on it."
But that's what has to be done if the business is to go on. And this has
happened a few times; in no case do I know where it's lasted for more
than two generations. All the great bookshops have sooner or later
degenerated because the kind of individuality and leadership that it
took to carry them on just wasn't there.
-
GARDNER:
- Is that true everywhere?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it's been true. It was true of McClurg's in Chicago; it was true
of Brentano's in New York. In this day of branch bookselling, Kroch, for
instance, has remained a great book business, but not in the sense that
it was when Adolph Kroch himself was managing it. It happened with
Weyhe's bookshop in New York, which certainly was the greatest art-book
shop in our time and in the history of American bookselling. And it
happened with Stechert-Hafner, who were great wholesalers and importers
of books. I could name many more. It's happening right now with Arthur
H. Clark and Company in Glendale, which started out in Cleveland and
which has, for almost 100 years, been an outstanding publisher of
western American historical books and also a dealer in American
historical literature. One of the interesting exceptions is John
Howell's bookshop in San Francisco, which has certainly grown and become
a much more important book business under the management of Warren
Howell, but there is no sign of his developing a successor. And, of
course, Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles, which has been carried on in
the tradition of Ernest Dawson—not as vigorously as he carried it on,
but with the same high standards and principles.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, again, that falls within your two-generation rule, though.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it falls within the two generations, and I can't think of anyplace.
. . . There are no Quaritches left, of course, no relatives of the
Quaritches left in Bernard Quaritch in London. The Maggses [Maggs
Brothers] are the only firm I know of where the management has continued
into the third generation, and what will happen there is hard to say.
They're all fine people, but there is no one strong head of the firm,
and they are continuing largely because of the magnificent reputation
that they have and the devoted patronage of people like myself who have
done business with them for fifty years and would like to keep it up.
The Goodspeeds--the son and son-in-law have carried it on, but I doubt
if there will be a Goodspeed's in twenty-five years. The Paul Elder
bookshops in San Francisco are no longer; they continued one generation
after the founder, and then that was the end of Paul Elder's. And so it
seems to go.
-
GARDNER:
- To return, have we completed our tour of Sixth Street?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think we have, except I think I should go on to mention that
Louis Epstein started the Acadia Book Shop on Sixth Street. He made a
mistake in his article by offering a prize to anyone who could remember
the name of his bookshop, but he excluded Max Hunley and me. And then he
said that he got the title out of Hiawatha. He
didn't get the title out of Hiawatha—he got it
out of Evangeline.
-
GARDNER:
- He got that straight in his interview, by the way.
-
ZEITLIN:
- He did. I corrected him, and I'm sure some other people did, too. But he
started the Acadia Book Shop on Sixth Street after he had had a bookshop
in Long Beach. And one day two young men by the name of Howey came in.
Richard and Ralph Howey came in, and they offered him $1,500 for his
bookstore, and he said. "I'll take it." So Acadia Book Shop became the
property of the Howey brothers. Richard Howey continued with his studies
of economics and acquired a degree, became a distinguished professor and
was head of the Department of Economics and Economic History at the
University of Kansas, until recently when he retired. Ralph Howey, the
other brother, continued the business. He was a very quiet man who
really didn't like to meet people. Ultimately he went to Philadelphia
and went to work for the Rosenbachs; he remained with the Rosenbachs for
five or six years, until the business was closed. Then he went into the
business of selling, mostly seventeenth and eighteenth-century
pamphlets, which it was possible to buy at one time in large quantities
in England. He would catalog them, list them, and sell them to places
like the Folger Library, Yale, Harvard, and so on, and has continued to
be very successful without having to meet the public generally. He lives
somewhere in Pennsylvania now. I'm sure I haven't mentioned all of the
bookshops that were on West Sixth Street.
-
GARDNER:
- The only one I can think of, offhand, is Kohn.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Dave Kohn. Mr. Belch! That was a remarkable bookstore [Curio Book Shop]
. He had a brother who had had a bookshop on Sixth Street, Soldier Joe,
and Soldier Joe's bookshop continued independently. Dave Kohn first
started up on Third Street, and he used to sleep, I think, on the
balcony of this bookshop. He had somewhere picked up the most enormous
stock of old paperbacks, all in mint condition, and none of us had sense
enough to know what a treasure he had. I think when he closed that shop,
most of them were hauled off to the pulp mill. The most marvelous
paperback classics— I just wonder how many copies of the first edition
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the first book of
Hamlin Garland, and a few other things like that, were in that library.
Dave Kohn and his sister had an enormous storehouse of books on Sixth
Street; it was a labyrinth. There was very poor light. You sort of
blundered around in this mess of old books and spiderwebs and dust; and
there was no classification whatever, except in one room of this place
[where] he had segregated and kept up to date a complete run of Everyman
Library books. It was the one place, I think, in all the United States
where you could go and get any title of Everyman's Library. He kept the
stock up to date and in perfect numerical order, so that if you wanted
an Everyman's book, you could take the catalog and go in there, and find
it. Otherwise, it was a great, dismal swamp.
-
GARDNER:
- To move, then, from Sixth Street outward, were there any other major
dealers of used books around town?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, there really weren't. Louis Epstein later opened up a shop on Eighth
Street [Epstein's Book Shop] , which he continued until the Hollywood
bookstore commenced to occupy all his energies. And he closed that and
transferred most of his stock to the Argonaut Book Shop, which was
operated for him by his brother Ben.
-
GARDNER:
- What about Alice Millard?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Alice Millard was a different kind of bookseller. She was really a
very creative woman who had had a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
in Pasadena called La Collina. It was a beautiful little establishment
in which she had exhibitions of original watercolors, of Blake, of the
proof sheets of early bindings of the Doves Press and Doves bindery, and
of the Kelmscott Press. I remember meeting May Morris at her house. She
used to go to London and Paris and buy the best books she could find.
She had a great sense of style; she would go to the bankers in Pasadena
and say, "I want to go to Europe, and I want to spend $500,000 and buy a
lot of good books and bring them back, because Pasadena needs them."
They would lend her the money, and she would come back, and she would
sell them not only in Pasadena but she would sell them to J. P. Morgan
and to the McCormicks and to people all over the United States. I
remember that she always had a big black limousine waiting for her when
she went to call on customers like Mrs. Doheny. She dressed elegantly,
and she dyed her hair blue.
-
GARDNER:
- What was her background?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Her husband had been George W. Millard, who worked at McClurg's
Bookstore in Chicago. He had been in charge of the rare-book department;
it was called the Saints and Sinners Corner. It was frequented by people
like the Reverend Gunsales, and Eugene Field, and the actor Francis
Wilson. He moved out here to Southern California in his later years. He
had nicely bound sets and gentlemen's books in his apartment. He would
invite customers to come in and see his books, and serving tea for him
was this very beautiful lady who looked like something that had been
created by Burne- Jones or Rosetti. She was always in the background
pouring the tea, helping her husband. And when he died, she said, "I'm
tired of this piddling business." So she called in the booksellers and
the bookbuyers from around the area, and said, "Here, I'm selling off
all these standard sets and these neatly bound Sangorski and Suttcliffe
books. I'm through with that sort of thing. I'm going to do some real
bookselling." And she did. She brought great manuscripts, magnificent
incunabulas, books printed by Jensen and Wynkyn de Worde and Fust and
Schoeffer, and so on to this part of the world. She sold Mrs. Doheny a
great many important books in her library, and she educated the
rare-book buyers of Southern California to a much higher level of
appreciation than they'd ever had before.
-
GARDNER:
- What were her years here?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I can't say that I know. She was already in business in the late
twenties, when I arrived, and she certainly continued to be in business
until sometime in the forties. There is a chap by the name of Eliot
Morgan who worked for her, and I hope somebody gets ahold of him and
gets the story of Mrs. Millard from him, because he knows much more of
it than anybody else, and he's getting to be a gray-haired oldster like
me, now. They'd better get over there soon.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO
(August 16, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- I think it's time to move on into the 1930s. Was there a change that came
about in the nature of your business with the oncoming of the Depression
and so on?
-
ZEITLIN:
- The change that came about was not so perceptible as it might have been
to some people who had been doing better earlier. I remember somebody
asked Lloyd Wright how the Depression had affected the artists, and he
said that the artists have always had a depression, and they're probably
better prepared to live in the midst of it than a lot of people who were
flying high. They'd always lived on basics and hadn't depended upon the
luxuries in order to maintain the certain forms of self-esteem. Now, my
business was never a big business; in fact, I'm astonished at how little
volume--we did in a month what we exceed now in a day. It seemed to keep
us going. Of course, I paid very little. Some of my employees got $100 a
month, some got as much as $35 a week, some got as much as $50 a week,
but that wasn't very much money. Still, it was more than nothing. A lot
of them hung on simply because there wasn't a better thing to go to. I
myself drew very little out of the business. I had no fixed salary
because, after all, it was a personal business, and it of course got
worse and worse into debt. But nobody closed us down, because there was
nothing to close down on; you can't liquidate a business that doesn't
have much to liquidate. I must say, also, that I knew very little and
was very slow learning how to go about buying books. I bought very few
libraries; most of the books I bought were books that came into the
shop. I didn't know that I should go around to places like the Goodwill,
the Salvation Army, and the other places that some of the booksellers
went to regularly. I had a vague sense that buying was the most
important thing in the book business, but I really wasn't a very good
buyer, and I bought altogether too many new books. For a book business
with very little money, the new books are a royal road to disaster
because very quickly you get your capital tied up in books which become
dated, and within the course of a year, you find that your stock
consists of a lot of books that didn't sell when they should have sold
and now are on the remainder lists. Publishers didn't have as good a
returns policy as they have now, and the discounts weren't very good
either. In fact, what I marvel at is how I managed to keep the business
going at all, considering how little I knew about the basic elements of
buying and selling. I knew more about selling than I did about buying. I
knew very little--almost nothing--about management, keeping control of
overhead; but when I found a good book, I could sell it. And I was
always able to work a deal, every once in a while, selling a collection
out of which I made profit enough to resuscitate the dying body.
-
GARDNER:
- Did you have any particular orientation? Were you still selling the same
sorts of things in those days?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I was primarily selling books about books, modern English and
American first editions, and fine press books. I was also selling
prints. And until 1935, when I moved out of 907 West Sixth Street and
went to 815 (I think the address was) , I kept the place afloat mostly
through buying and selling to collectors, importing books, finding a
good book once in a while on which I could make a profit, and having an
exhibition from which I sold some art.
-
GARDNER:
- What about the fine printing that you dealt in — did you make any money
from that at all, from Primavera?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Primavera Press was never a money-making enterprise. It was an
effort to make a place for myself as a publisher, and I hoped that it
would become a source of income to the business. It actually started as
a form of vanity publishing (I think I already talked about Leslie
Nelson Jennings). Between 1930 and 1935, when I was in the location at,
I think it was, 705 1/2 West Sixth Street, I went from one crisis to
another, and finally I became involved with a man by the name of Alfred
Leonard. I had a friend, a young woman by the name of Marjorie
Rosenfeld--a very fine, sweet person, about nineteen or twenty--and she
was very hospitable to me. She used to bring me home to her house very
often for dinner (there were parties quite often at her house) . Her
mother was a very smart woman, always very beautifully dressed, and
there was some inherited money in the family. There was a kind of a
sentimental attachment but never a very active one, and certainly
nothing that involved any emotionalism or sex (at least not that I was
aware of) . And Marjorie went off to Germany. She was there during the
time that Hitler was rising. She met a young German by the name of
Alfred Leonard and married him and brought him back here. Alfred Leonard
was a very aggressive, very bright, young man, who was quite at a loss
to know what to do. He'd brought his father over--or she had helped
bring his father over—and his brother, who was a brilliant musician, a
blind man but a brilliant pianist. Alfred was taken into Marjorie's
family, and she came to me, and she said, "Haven't you got a place for
Leonard in your bookshop?" So we worked out an arrangement where we were
to set up a partnership, and he was to become a shareholder with the
money that she provided. It wasn't very much; I don't think it was ever
more than $5,000. He came in, and he was full of ideas about new plans.
Pretty soon he turned out to be overly aggressive and not at all
sensitive. The whole staff started to dislike him thoroughly, which
bothered him not one bit. And he started drawing more and more out of
the business. He went abroad, and he charged it to the business. By
1936, after we had moved to 614 West Sixth Street, it became an
intolerable situation. My customers couldn't stand him, I was going into
frenzies, the employees were threatening to attack him physically, and
something had to be done in order to get him out. I told him and
Marjorie that it was no longer possible for him to go on. He set a very
high price on his getting out. I then went to Oscar Moss, who was an
accountant and whose wife, Sadye Moss, and wife's family had been
friends of mine. They were all interested in art. They were a group that
lived up in the Echo Park area, up above Edendale. There was Oscar Moss
and his wife Sadye, and there was Maurice Saeta and Sadye Moss's sister,
who were married. They were all people who had ambitions and interests
in books and in art and music. They were exceptionally bright people.
Saeta was a lawyer. Moss was a lawyer and an accountant, and Moss had
very quickly developed his firm into a very successful accounting firm.
He invested a pittance. We decided to incorporate the business and buy
Mr. Leonard out. He told me that he could arrange to do that. And so we
drew up the papers of incorporation, and he urged me to go to my friends
and get them to become stockholders in the business. I went to a number
of them, and, in all, I got $10,000. Frank Hogan subscribed $2,500; he
was the largest single subscriber. Oscar Moss subscribed $2,500. Other
people subscribed $100 apiece, and there were quite a few of those,
including Harvey Mudd and Mrs. Doheny and Homer Crotty and a number of
other individuals in the community. Mr. Moss put one of his accountants
in the place to supervise things. We managed to get Mr. Leonard out of
the business. He went into the record business and continued in his
ways. He became a broadcaster of a music program. He opened a record
store on Wilshire Boulevard. He involved a number of people in the
business with him and went through a lot of people's money. He also went
through a number of friendships and managed to alienate a great many
other people. So, as time went on, I decided that it wasn't just my
paranoia that caused me to think of him as being the kind of person that
he was. It was a great pain to me. It was distressing because his wife
was someone that I had great affection for, and she for me, and this
became an almost insuperable rift. It wasn't until years later that she
and her children came to see me and we became friendly again. And she
remained married to him; she became a bright professional psychoanalyst,
and it was a kind of an arrangement whereby she carried on her life and
brought up the children, and he lived his own life. He went to New York
and became associated with one of the big broadcasting companies,
remained with them, I think, until he was retired. In any event, it
seemed that I could always go out with a satchel full of books and sell;
I could always find a few good rare books and keep the place going. I
had customers like Hugh Walpole who bought quite a few thousands of
dollars' worth from me. I sold books to Mrs. Doheny. I sold books to
Mrs. Getz. But the sense of crisis was always there, and it increased as
time went on. The finances were always thin; the whole idea of
incorporating the business with $10,000 was a ridiculous idea. To think
that that could go on and carry on over a period of years was really not
very practical, and I have no idea why Mr. Moss, who was such a very
successful financier and accountant, ever encouraged me to believe that
it could. In any event, the accounting charges that his firm placed on
the business were quite heavy, and there was never enough to keep ahead
of the creditors. We remained there, however, until 1935, when we moved
to 614 [Sixth Street] . It was a beautiful shop. It was the third shop
to be designed by Lloyd Wright and really the most attractive of them
all. I have a number of photographs of that shop that were taken by Will
Connell, and it was a unique establishment. My employees were an
interesting group. In particular, I had a man who was in charge of the
print gallery, by the name of Howard Moorpark, who knew a great deal
about prints and who managed to get some interesting exhibitions and put
on some good shows. I had friends among the artists here—like Tom Craig,
Millard Sheets, Phil Paradise, Milfred Zornes. I did a lot to exhibit
the watercolor school that was developing at that time and got out
announcements. So there was a stream of people coming into the place
constantly, both because of the interesting design of the shop itself
and the exhibitions we put on. We had a number of interesting receptions
there; in fact, when I opened the shop at 614, I had a party, and it
seems to me, now, as I look back on it, like hundreds of people came. It
couldn't have been that many, but there was an enormous crowd, and they
kept coming, and I had a great sense of having lots of well-wishers.
A.G. Beaman, in particular, who was an insurance man and a book
collector, and a man who spent more time than he really should helping
people like me and supporting literary activities and bookish
activities, had written a number of letters. I got all kinds of
beautiful letters and telegrams from people all around the country
wishing me well; I have framed in my shop, now, a letter from Hamlin
Garland.
-
GARDNER:
- So, though you'd been living from hand to mouth, you'd really developed
an extensive following.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. What kept me alive was the fact that, no matter what I got, I could
always sell it. [tape recorder turned off] It is true that a lot of
interesting people came to the shop. A lot of people were loyal and
supported it. It attracted a great many people who bought whatever was
there to sell, and we managed, somehow or another, in a very
unbusinesslike way, to keep a business going. Its position was not
improving in terms of profit or its debts. I used bank credit the best I
could but was always having to renew loans to pay off in part and then
start borrowing again.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the financial arrangement you made with the graphics? Were they
a consignment sort of thing?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Most of them were consigned. I bought very little art. I managed to get
things consigned from people like Norman Lindsay in Australia, who sent
me a great many of his etchings, and I used to exhibit them and sell
them for $75 and $150 apiece. Now, when I see them selling for $1,000
apiece in Australia, it's very interesting. He used to send me large
groups of them, and now I'm quite astonished at how well we did. I
exhibited artists like Paul Landacre. I exhibited the photographs of
Edward Weston and used to arrange sittings for him. It was never big,
but it all added up. And then Howard Moorpark used to go out and get
prints--he had prints consigned from the East, from Weyhe, and from
other art dealers. As a matter of fact, it wasn't a great time for
graphic arts, and there were very few print dealers. Between 1930 and
about 1955 were twenty-five years in which the graphic arts had a very
lean time: you could sell the best Whistlers, the best Rembrandts, the
best Durers (and there were plenty of them available) for very little
money. And we managed to get quite a few of these. We didn't make much
off of them; our commission was something like one-third. We also
exhibited contemporary painters, but that was not a very lucrative
business. We were one of the few places in town, however, that
contemporary artists could come with their work and hope for an
exhibition. There weren't many galleries. There was the Biltmore
Gallery; there was Hatfield, who by then, I think, had moved out on
Seventh Street; there was Stendahl's on Wilshire Boulevard; and there
was a man by the name of Harry Braxton in Hollywood. Stanley Rose had a
sort of a gallery. It's curious when I think now of the sort of things
that he had for sale, which were ridiculously cheap: original blue
Picasso paintings, Braques . . .
-
GARDNER:
- Stanley Rose had those?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, Stanley Rose. There was a man who ran a gallery in Stanley Rose's
place, [and] his name was Kurt Merlander. Then there was another chap by
the name of Howard Putzel. Howard Putzel was a man with extraordinarily
good taste and a great deal of knowledge, He didn't have much money--he
had a small gallery on Hollywood Boulevard in one of the arcades--but he
did bring some fine things there. I remember a [Odilon] Redon drawing
that Ed Hanley bought from him, and a great many other things. However,
he was an epileptic. He couldn't keep his business alive here, so he
went to New York. He became involved with Peggy Guggenheim, and he
helped build Peggy Guggenheim's collection. He died quite young, I think
as a result of one of his epileptic attacks. But Frank Perls also was
getting started. There weren't many places--a handful, four or
five--where any contemporary artist could get a showing, and so my place
provided an opportunity for things to be exhibited. And that was one
more reason why the shop kept alive.
-
GARDNER:
- Were you close to Stanley Rose at all?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, we were friends. I knew him over the years, from the time that he
started as a stock-room boy at the Broadway working in the book
department. Then he went out to Hollywood, and he joined up with Mac
Gordon, who had originally managed a big secondhandbook store downtown
which belonged to a man in Chicago, Powner's. Mac Gordon moved out to
Hollywood next door to the Brown Derby. Stanley Rose joined forces with
him, and they really got the cream of Hollywood's book business; they
had a spectacular bookshop. Everybody that was coming along in Hollywood
was there, coming and going--people like John Barrymore, Red Skelton. .
. .
-
GARDNER:
- Now, this would be about the mid- thirties, right?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, the mid- thirties . And, of course, Stanley Rose also was a man who
had good friends among the bootleggers. During prohibition you could
always get a drink at Stanley Rose's. He knew his way around. He never
struck me as being a man who was very literate, and yet he had friends
among the sort of the tough-guy school of literature. Jim Tully used to
frequent his place. I'm trying to remember some of the names of the
people who were regulars at Stanley Rose's. . . . Certainly nobody who
came to Hollywood failed to go to Stanley Rose's bookshop, or didn't
know that if you wanted a drink at any hour of the night, you could
always knock on Stanley Rose's back door, and he was there at the back
of the shop with a jug.
-
GARDNER:
- What kind of books did he handle?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, he handled best sellers. Mostly he would go out to the studios
with big suitcases of books, and he would sell them to the writers and
to the directors and producers, and he sold a lot of art books to the
art directors. They, in fact, constituted a very important part of the
customers of the book business in those days. And the research
departments also were considerably active in buying books. The research
departments of the studios had great budgets because everything that
they needed for a production could be charged to the production. In its
prime. Paramount Studios had Miss Gladys Percy, who bought very
expensive sets of books; they could buy a set of Diderot's Encyclopedia or Napoleon's great set on the Egypt
expedition. They had no limits on the amount they could spend, and they
bought full sets of things like the London Illustrated
News, or Harper's Weekly.
-
GARDNER:
- And what did they do with these?
-
ZEITLIN:
- They used them for research, background material for the films. The
writers used them, the artists used them, and they built up enormous
libraries. RKO had a research library; Columbia developed one later; but
MGM must have spent, in the course of the years, I would say, close to a
million dollars building their research library. There was a Russian
woman there who was head of the research department. I can't remember
her name, but she was a very spectacular lady who walked around in a
riding habit and carried a quirt.
-
GARDNER:
- What's happened to these libraries?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, some of them were given away. They were given to some of the
universities--the universities were told to come in and take them. MGM
apparently has retained its library; I never found out. I went out once
to Twentieth Century-Fox, which had a very well conducted research
library headed by Miss [Frances] Richardson. They answered the questions
of all the writers, they answered the questions of the art directors,
and they provided the background material. A copy of the script was
always given to the research department, and the research department
immediately set to work to provide background for the writers and the
directors, producers, and the art directors. So it was a very essential
part of movie-making. Universal finally sold its library to George
Macon, one of the employees of the research library, for a nominal sum,
so that they would no longer have to pay taxes on it, and he could start
all over again at the price he'd paid for it. They leased their space to
him, and he then became a sort of a contract research department for the
studio. I don't know what ultimately happened to that department. At one
time he came to me with the proposal that we set up an independent
research library, a research service for the different studios, but it
was just one more activity that I couldn't take on. And I think, in the
long run, I was very wise not to.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, back to Stanley Rose. In that period of the mid-thirties, the
dealerships around town had changed quite a bit, I'd imagine. Who were
some of the principal bookdealers around L.A. by the mid-thirties?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there was a woman, Jean French, and she did all her business
selling art books to the research departments of the studios. And she
worked very hard, but she made a great deal of money and, in the end,
retired very well off from just selling art books to the studios. She
would go both to the studio heads--I mean the research department
heads--and to the individual artists in the art department, and she
would sell them books, and they would buy and always be in debt to her.
So half the time she was selling books, and the other half of the time
she was trying to collect her money. Before that, there was a Miss
Marian Blood who sold architectural books and books on art research to
the studios. And then along in the thirties, the Rapid Blueprint Company
had over the years built up a very large stock of art books,
architectural books. They must have had $100,000 in their book
department. They were out on Maple Street. A man by the name of Henry
Davis was the head of it, and they decided they were not going to go on
with this. So I bought their stock, and I think that was one of the
lifesavers— transfusions--which I got to help keep the business going.
Because when I think back on the beautiful folios that we took over, all
of the great classics in architecture . . .
-
GARDNER:
- How did that happen? Was it open to bid, or was it through a contact of
yours?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It was a personal contact. Henry Davis used to come into my shop--the
Rapid Blueprint Company was then the largest and most active blueprint
concern, very successful--and he was a strange man, so very brutally
direct and full of all kinds of aggressions. He hated his brother
(Pierpont Davis) , who was an architect here at the time. When his
mother died, he didn't go to her funeral. And he was always full of
violent threats. But on the other side, he was a man of considerable
sensibilities, and he had started coming into my shop to see some of the
exhibitions. I would have as a regular visitor here in Los Angeles a man
from Bristol, England, by the name of Kenneth Gallop, who represented a
firm called Frost and Reed. They had the American agency for Russell
Flint's watercolors. And when Mr. Gallop would come to town, he would
set up an exhibition at the Biltmore Hotel. He would let me take a
number of his good things and hang them in my shop, and I used to bring
various customers to him, and I would get a commission. I sold things to
the Huntington Library; I sold things to the L.A. County Museum. He
brought good English watercolors, drawings, and etchings, as well as a
great deal of material that was purely for the interior decorator trade.
But the Russell Flints that he brought at that time, which we could sell
for $250 to $750, were the kind of things that later I bought back and
sold for $10,000. And Henry Davis became a customer of mine for Russell
Flint watercolors; he really became intrigued with them, and he
collected a number of them. Some of them were the best watercolors that
Russell Flint ever did. And I used to buy a few of them in between
visits with Gallop, and I always had Russell Flint watercolors in stock,
and other English watercolors. This, I think, also accounted for the
fact that we were able to keep going. Henry Davis liked me in a peculiar
way, so that when they decided to close out their book department, they
just invited me to come up there and take over the entire stock on a
consignment basis. At first they were all consigned to me, and I think I
got a third on everything I sold. But I could move them into my shop and
price them and sell them, and finally, when the residue got down to a
certain level, I bought everything from them at an agreed price.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, it sounds as though the art-book business was flourishing in the
1930s.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The art-book business was flourishing greatly. It was a very important
part of our business, and the chief market for art books then were the
studios.
-
GARDNER:
- What about other dealers around town? What was your basic competition?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think Stanley Rose was an important competitor when it came to
the studios. Of course, Dawson's Book Shop imported a great many art
books; Ernest Dawson had a constant flow of business. I don't remember
who else. I think it was just a great time for selling any art books
that we got.
-
GARDNER:
- It sounds as though the competition has mostly drifted away, then, by
now.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the market diminished as time went on, and instead of buying
heavily, the studios got to the point where they weren't buying at all.
And ultimately, within the past few years, they were trying to sell, and
if they couldn't sell, they gave their libraries away. They gave a great
many of their books to UCLA and to USC. But in the thirties and forties
and fifties, the studios were a tremendous market.
-
GARDNER:
- Was Sixth Street still the center of the book universe in those days, or
had it split up pretty much?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Sixth Street remained the street of bookshops until, I suppose,
about 1945, and then the rents went up. The bookshops couldn't afford to
pay the rents; a lot of the buildings were torn down. The people that
lasted the longest around Sixth Street were Bennett and Marshall. They
remained in the location which I had had near 614--next door to 614--for
quite a few years, and it wasn't until, I think, sometime in the fifties
that they moved out on Melrose.
-
GARDNER:
- Hadn't they worked for you?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, neither one of them worked for me. Bob Bennett had worked for
Holmes, and Dick Marshall had worked for Dawson's. And a great deal of
their stock came from Dawson, because Dawson was very generous about
giving credit and selling them stuff at marked-down prices. He believed
in buying large masses of stuff, putting a small profit on them and
turning them over, and extending indefinite credit to anybody. He was a
man who might have been called naive if he hadn't been so intelligent.
-
GARDNER:
- And so successful.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, he was successful to a degree. He was a successful merchandiser.
He was certainly a successful person. But he didn't leave when he should
have. He should have bought the locations which he was renting then;
they were offered to him for very little money. And he didn't take the
profits he should have taken on his good books. He became impatient
whenever a good book didn't sell, and he marked it down rather than
waiting for the right buyer to come along. He loved to buy so much that
he would sell anything to get the money to buy something else. This
becomes a kind of a senseless compulsion among booksellers: they love to
buy books, and they'd rather buy books than sell them. I'm sure that
that's true of me. I find it very difficult to restrain myself anytime I
see a good library, even if I have to go head over heels in debt. But it
was because of the studios and what they bought, because of the people
who bought prints and drawings and watercolors from me, and because of
the collectors, all of whom were very good and very generous to me, that
I managed to keep the West Sixth Street shop going until 1938.
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE
(August 16, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- Now, as I mentioned, before we get to your move from Sixth Street, there
are a couple of areas to talk about, and I guess chronologically, the
first one would be Larry Powell and his time with you. And the thought
occurred to me (I'll keep interrupting before you can start) that it
seems that when he came to your shop, there was more conversation with
the local universities, and then especially after he left and was
affiliated with UCLA.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I'd like to say, first of all, that my affiliation with UCLA began
much earlier than Larry Powell. I started going out there and selling
them books in 1927.
-
GARDNER:
- Up on Vermont?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, they had already moved out to Westwood, and the librarian there then
was John Goodwin. The woman in charge of acquisitions was Virginia
Trout. I realized that they were building a big research library that
didn't have many books, and that they were in the market for substantial
reference material. So any time I saw a good set that I thought would
fit into their program, I would take it out or I would write them about
it, and so on. In those days, nobody else that I can think of was doing
much in the way of trying to sell them. They didn't go to bookshops very
much, so that I had a great deal of UCLA's business to myself. And they
would tell me what sort of thing they wanted. I remember that they told
me they wanted a set of the British Museum catalogs, and I located a
set. In those days it consisted of over 100 volumes, all great big
quartos, and I located a set through Maggs Brothers. It was unbound, it
was in the sheets, folded, ready for binding, and Mr. Goodwin said, "Go
ahead, we'll buy it." So I ordered that and had it sent. And then the
basic guide to reference tools was [Isadore G.] Mudge, and I got a copy
of Mudge [ Guide to Reference Books ] , took it
out to UCLA and got the librarian there to check off what they had and
then to indicate what they would like to have. So I was able to work
from an actual desiderata list. I didn't take the full advantage of it
[as] I should have. I realize now that if I had sent out want lists, and
if I had advertised in the various trade journals, I could have done a
great deal more business. But I was handicapped then by the fact that I
didn't have the capital to do more business than I was doing, so that it
was really a case of hand to mouth and not enough in between.
-
GARDNER:
- How about some of the other universities—USC, Oxy?
-
ZEITLIN:
- USC was buying very little; Occidental was buying very little; and
Leslie Bliss at the Huntington was buying as little as he possibly
could, partially because the attitude of the trustees of the Huntington
then was that they ought to conserve their capital, not build the
library. And it wasn't until quite a few years passed--until sometime in
the fifties --that the trustees realized that they had something like a
million dollars in reserve funds which should have been spent buying in
the years in between. They called Bill Jackson and asked him what they
should do, and he said, "Gentlemen, spend it as fast as you can on
books, because they're going to cost you more every year. Your dollar is
going to go down in value, and the books are going to go up in value."
But Leslie Bliss was intimidated by his board. I remember Robert Schad
telling me how he wanted to get a certain herbal because they had the
gardens (they were supposed to be a botanical garden as well as a museum
and a library) . And he went to Mr. [Robert A.] Millikan, and after
quite a lot of negotiating, he was told, "Mr. Schad, we will give you
the money for that book provided you promise not to ask us for any more
money to buy books with this year." Well, you were asking about Larry
Powell. Larry Powell came to me because he had returned from Dijon,
where he had gotten his degree. He had married Fay, and he had expected
to get a job teaching at Occidental College. But the then-head of the
faculty didn't approve of Larry, and in spite of the goodwill of Remsen
Bird and certain other friends that he had there, he couldn't get a job.
He really had no money, and he and Fay were living down at Laguna Beach
with M.F.K. [Mary Frances Kennedy] Fisher, who was then married to
Dilwyn Parrish, the brother of Anne Parrish. Dilwyn Parrish was a very
talented painter and he also was a good writer. And he was a fine
person. He was the one man that M.F.K. Fisher always was deeply in love
with. I got a letter from her a few days ago in which she told me the
story of how she went with him to the Mayo Clinic later—I suppose it was
sometime in the forties--and they told him that he had, I think it was,
some form of a degenerative disease. He had to undergo a series of
amputations before he died. But Larry was living down there, and he
didn't have any money. And I said to Ward Ritchie, "What do you think we
could do about Larry Powell?" I said, "Do you think he'd come to work
for me if I offered him a job?" He said, "Well, I don't know, but you
can try." So I sent him a telegram saying, "If you want to come to work
for thirty dollars a week, come in Monday and start" (something to that
effect--I've actually got a copy of the telegram somewhere). And he
really didn't like the idea, but it was better than starving; so he came
in and went to work. And he and Fay found a little house down the side
of a hill on Lakeshore Avenue in the Echo Park area, and he worked for
me for several years. He could type, he could write letters, and he had
a large group of friends. He made friends very quickly; Larry Powell has
always had a talent for friendship. Through the shop, he made a great
many of the friends who later were to be his chief supporters when he
became the librarian at UCLA, [as well as] his chief links with the
community. He had a unique opportunity to establish relationships with
the people who were interested in books and who had influence, both
political and financial, because we were located downtown in the area
where the men who wielded power in Los Angeles came and went. The
California Club was around the corner; the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance
Company was across the street, and the men who managed Pacific Mutual
Life Insurance Company were customers of ours. There were people like
Seeley Mudd and his brother Harvey Mudd of the Cypress Mines Company,
who had their offices and came into our shop frequently, and attorneys
like Homer Crotty. There were men like Glenn Schaefer, who was president
of the Security Title Insurance and Trust Company, which was separate
then from the Title Insurance Company. And they all came into the shop
at one time or another. Larry Powell met all these people, and he formed
friendships with them. He would write them letters and sell them books.
One of his jobs was to go over to the Los Angeles Public Library and
call on Albert Reed, who was then the head of the acquisitions
department of the public library. Albert Reed had first been librarian
of the El Paso Public Library; I don't know how long ago, but it must
have been about the turn of the century. Later he worked for Fowler
Brothers, which was the largest of the new-book stores in downtown Los
Angeles, managed by a very interesting character, a very colorful man by
the name of Charlie Hixon. Larry went over to call on Albert Reed to
sell him some books, and Albert said, "Larry, you're not any good as a
salesman, but you'd be awful good on this side of the desk. Why don't
you go to library school. I think I can help get you a scholarship, and,
one way or another, I think it would be a good thing if you got yourself
a library degree to go with your PhD. You would be one of the men who
would be fitted to go ahead and advance as a librarian beyond that of
most people who had come up through the ranks of library school." So he
persuaded Larry to come up to Berkeley and go to library school. Larry
had very little money, but he took the risk. I don't know how he
managed; I think Dr. Al Cass, his friend, advanced him some money, as
other people did. He went up [to Berkeley], became friends with [Sydney
B.] Mitchell, who was the head of the library school and evidently a
very inspiring man, and got his library degree, came back down here and
again couldn't get a job. I hired him again, and this time (it was about
1936) Frieda Lawrence had come into my shop. She'd been brought in by
Galka Scheyer; Galka Scheyer was a very interesting, very spectacular
Hungarian woman who represented the Blue Four [Die Blau Vier] group of
artists--Kandinsky , Klee, Feininger, and Jawlensky. She was trying very
hard to get people to buy their paintings and drawings, and she would
come to me and say, "Jake, why don't you come up and buy one of those
paintings. It will cost you $300, and you can pay $10 a month." I didn't
have ten dollars a month, and besides, I thought, I was not going to be
stuck with those things. So she never stuck me with one of those great
paintings, and the only man who really supported her in those days was
Walter Arensberg . [noise from street; tape recorder turned off]
-
GARDNER:
- Now, you were talking about Galka Scheyer and Frieda Lawrence. . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Galka Scheyer brought in Frieda Lawrence, and they invited me out to
Frieda's place that she rented —no, to Galka Scheyer's house-- to
discuss what Frieda was going to do about the manuscripts of Lawrence
which she had. I suppose Frieda needed money; I don't think she had a
great income at that time. So I told her I'd like very much to try and
sell them and [that I] thought I could get a good price for them. But
what we thought was a good price then was miserably little; she would
have taken $30,000 for all the Lawrence manuscripts at that time. She
agreed to let me come out to San Cristobal, where the manuscripts were,
on the ranch, in New Mexico. And I must say I'm very confused about
this; it was in the fall of 1937. Well, let's stop just a minute; I want
to get the exact date. [tape recorder turned off] It was agreed that I
was to come out to the ranch at San Cristobal and see the manuscripts. I
think it must have been in the summer of 1937 that I finally got out to
the ranch. Drove up--it was some terrible, dark night; I don't know yet
how I found my way up to the ranch. I had driven from Colorado, and the
next morning I met Aldous Huxley and Maria Huxley there at the ranch and
Angelino [Ravagalli] who was Frieda's Italian boyfriend. They showed me
the trunk in which the manuscripts of Lawrence were kept. They did not
show me the Lady Chatterley manuscript, which may
not have been there then; it may still have been held somewhere for
safekeeping in Europe. But it was a very pleasant visit. I remember the
squash blossom omelettes we'd have for breakfast. I remember also that
Aldous Huxley would get up and type; he was then writing Ends and Means , which was, I think, the first
book in which he seriously expressed his general philosophy both about
mysticism, pacifism, and the sources of human motivation and man's
relation to the universe. And he talked to me--he told me something
about what he was writing. I said to him that there would probably be a
place for him in Hollywood if he would like to come out and work for the
pictures. And he said, well, he would think about it ... he might be
inclined to do so. ... I said to him, "I don't want you to make any
contracts or any agreements, but would you be receptive if a proposal
came to you, if there was someone that said that they would offer you a
job?" And he said, yes, he would be, and he wrote me to that effect,
saying essentially that he would be open to proposals, that he was not
committing himself in any way, there was no exclusive agreement between
us, but if I could bring someone to him, he would be interested. And I
remember we went down to Santa Fe . We met Witter Bynner there, and all
drove to Santo Domingo for the rain dance. It was a wonderful occasion
to be sitting there on the ground watching this Santo Domingo rain dance
with Aldous Huxley, Frieda Lawrence, Witter Bynner, and Angelino, And
next to us, sitting on the ground, was a very inconspicuous little man
with dark skin, whom I didn't recognize at all when we first sat down.
But he finally came over and said, "Hello, Jake." And it turned out to
be Stanley Marcus, the head of Neiman- Marcus. So the Indians danced the
rain dance, and it rained —and it rained torrents. We got back to Santa
Fe, I must say, a little bit concerned about the flash floods that were
coming down, but we got back up and back up to the ranch. I drove back
from there to California. And sometime afterward, they sent the trunk to
me, and I suggested to Larry Powell that this would be a great job for
him--if he would like something to do, he could come and catalog the
Lawrence manuscripts. And this he did extremely well. Frieda came in and
he met her. He wrote the catalog description of all the manuscripts
which we printed in 1937. Aldous Huxley wrote a foreword, I wrote a
foreword, Elmer Belt and Susannah Dakin paid for the printing, and it
was printed by Ward Ritchie. It was exhibited at the Los Angeles Public
Library, and Aldous Huxley was invited to come and speak. This job
provided an opportunity for Larry to really use his talents in a
productive way, something that combined the use of his literary talents
for literary purposes and for commercial purposes. And he did an
excellent job. He wrote the essays on each one, short annotations--some
longer, some shorter--about the manuscripts. He described them very
well, and this catalog now has become a landmark, and it sells for quite
a bit of money when it turns up.
-
GARDNER:
- Tell me a little bit about Frieda Lawrence. What was she like in those
days?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Frieda Lawrence, in those days, seemed to be a very large person.
She had this voice that people speak of which really was a vibrant
Germanic kind of a voice, but it reached out and struck you; it was like
beating on a bronze cymbal. She had a wonderfully direct way about her.
There was no doubt that she was an exceptional person, a person who had
met the v/orld with open eyes and had lived her own life quite frankly
and in terms of what she felt was the honest way to live. On the one
hand, she seemed to be this very strong person; in other ways she was a
very weak, dependent woman, and she needed Angelino. They [the
Lawrences] had rented a house from him in Italy, and I think there's no
doubt that she must have had an affair with Angelo while Lawrence was in
his last year. He promised Lawrence that he would look after Frieda. And
afterward, Angelo left his family and came to the United States, helped
her look after the ranch, and finally did marry her, and they moved down
to the ranch. Of course, the ranch, San Cristobal, was given to Lawrence
by Mabel Dodge. Lawrence wouldn't take it as a gift, so he gave her the
manuscript of Sons and Lovers as a token purchase
price for the ranch. She also gave him a house down in Taos, a little
piece of land, and Frieda and Angelino moved down there, and they spent
the summers in Taos and the winters in Port Aransas, Texas. While I was
at the ranch, I met the Lady Brett, who had been a sort of a follower of
Lawrence. She was never a striking beauty; she painted, but she didn't
paint what then seemed to be very good paintings. Later in the years,
she developed into a very impressive artist. And she carried around this
horn which you had to talk into. It was a speaking horn that deaf people
used to use in those days. I didn't meet Mabel. I was always afraid to
meet Mabel; I always felt that she was a woman that devoured people. If
she took a fancy to you, she sort of took you in and overwhelmed you,
and then when she got tired of you, she shucked you off. I didn't want
to be one of the people that got caught in her gristmill.
-
GARDNER:
- You talked about Galka Scheyer very briefly. She was really very
important in Los Angeles art, and obviously also had contact with you.
What was she like?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Galka Scheyer was a little woman. She never asked people to do
things--she told them. And her great devotion was to this group of
artists who she felt were very important, would someday be numbered
among the great artists of their time--and they have become so. She
lived not too well, but she lived off of acting as their agent, selling
their things, making a commission off of them, but kept pushing these
things at people whether they wanted them or not. She was fortunate that
Walter Arensberg was forming his collection, that he appreciated what
these people were, and he bought quite a few of them. And some other
people did, too, but not nearly as many as should have.
-
GARDNER:
- And would have, twenty years later.
-
ZEITLIN:
- She also conducted classes in art, and one of the things that helped her
live, I think, were the classes. They were not so much classes in how to
paint as how to look at paintings and what the elements of the new art
were. She was a great apostle for the art of the twentieth century.
-
GARDNER:
- How did she happen to come to Los Angeles?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I have no idea. I never knew. She had a nephew living here, but whether
he came afterwards I don't know. But I can't say, unless it had to do
with a man by the name of Herman Sachs. Herman Sachs was a German
architect and designer who came here. He had been associated with the
Bauhaus school, and he came here and became associated with the
Parkinsons, who were one of the leading architectural firms in town, and
he did a great many interior designs for them. They worked on such
things as the tile design for the interior of the Union Station
downtown, and many other designs in connection with buildings and
furnishings in the Los Angeles area. I think they must have had a hand
in what went into Bullock's Wilshire, which was certainly a
revolutionary design, both in the way of structural architecture and the
interior and all the furnishings that went into it.
-
GARDNER:
- Let me finish up with one more subject, unless you feel like quitting
now.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Go ahead.
-
GARDNER:
- Okay, I thought to finish up this evening we'd talk about the show you
brought in 1937, which was [of] Kathe Kollwitz.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The Kathe Kollwitz exhibition came as a result of my receiving a
lithograph--I think it must have been in 1933--as a gift from Herbert
Klein, who was then a newspaper correspondent in Berlin. Mina Cooper,
who was one of the loveliest people I ever knew—beautiful young woman,
marvelous spirit, great sensitivity--had met him here in about 1928 or
'29. He came in one day and said he was going to go to work for what was
called the Community Chest in those days (the United Fund drive now).
And I said, "Well, you're going to meet a very lovely person down there,
Mina Cooper." And he went down, he did meet her, and fell in love; and
ultimately, when he went to Germany as a correspondent, she went over
and met him, and they were married. And one of the people that came
there while they were in Berlin to see them was Larry Powell. That was
during the time that he was going to school at Dijon. I was very much
struck with this lithograph that Herbert and Mina sent me; I think it
was for a wedding present. It was so full of emotion, called The Mothers. I wanted to know more about Kathe
Kollwitz, so I started reading what I could about her. I think the best
article I read was by Mary McCarthy in the magazine published by the
American Art Association. And so I wanted to know more, and finally I
heard that there was an exhibition of her work in Minneapolis at the
Walker Gallery, and that there was a gallery in New York also called the
Walker Gallery that was handling her things in the United States. I
wrote to Berlin and got in touch with Kathe. Kollwitz, and she in turn
got the Walker Gallery in touch with me, and I asked if I could have an
exhibition. In 1937, in the midst of the agitation against Nazism--there
was an antifascist movement in this country which was very radical, of
course, and was looked upon as being very dangerous and communistic,
which was developing —I decided that it would be a great idea to hold an
exhibition for the benefit of the League against Fascism, I think it was
called at that time. So I arranged to get this group of prints here. I
got the sponsorship of the anti-fascist organization (I've forgotten
what it was called, but I've got all my files on it here), and it was
agreed that Melvyn Douglas would chair the opening. One of the speakers
was George Antheil, and the other speaker was the man who wrote Masse Mensch--Ernst Toller, one of the most
important men in Germany at the time of the Spartacist revolution in the
twenties, late twenties. He later committed suicide. He delivered a very
fine talk on this evening. We had a very large attendance, got good
publicity both in the Los Angeles Times and in
the Los Angeles Record. And that was the first
show of Kathe Kollwitz on the West Coast. I didn't sell many of her
prints to people in Los Angeles, but Albert Bender, who was the patron
of everything good in San Francisco, came down about that time, and he
bought a complete set of the Peasant Rebellion
and a number of the other prints. Of course, the prices now seem
pathetically low--like eighty-five dollars for a complete set of the Peasant Rebellion series, and the prints were
selling anywhere from fifteen dollars to seventy-five dollars. I think
the highest price was something like seventy-five dollars. I must say
that the show got a great deal of attention and moved people emotionally
and was a sort of a landmark exhibition. That was the first exhibition,
as I said, of Kathe Kollwitz on the West Coast, and later, one of the
galleries in Munich published a hundredth-anniversary booklet on Kathe
Kollwitz. In it they reproduced a letter of Kathe Kollwitz in which she
said, "I've just had a letter from Jake Zeitlin in which he proposes to
have eine Ausstellung in Los Angeles, in
California." It wasn't until quite a few years later that I discovered
that I had a facsimile of this letter. Someone was researching Kathe
Kollwitz in Berlin and came across the original letter there and sent me
a Xerox of it, and then I discovered that I had a copy of this all the
time. But it was very nice to be mentioned by her, and this was, of
course, the farthest away from Berlin that anyone had ever shown her
work.
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: VI [video session]
(September 9, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- We're here to do the video segment of the oral history interview we've
been working on now for a month or two. What we're going to do today, at
first at least, is talk about Mr. Zeitlin's personal collection and some
of the many things that he himself has acquired through the years. Where
would you like to begin?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think that it would be very appropriate to talk about some of the
books which I have kept over the years, because books are for me the
symbols of my ideals, the symbols of my friendships, and the symbols of
some of my ambitions. And without books, I'm afraid my life would be
hardly anything at all. I've piled up here a few books in a rather
haphazard way, and there's going to be very little connection between
one and the other except as they pertain to some part of me, either my
past or my present. I'd like to say, first of all, that I'm not a book
collector in the sense that some people are. I have never attempted to
compete with my customers, and there have been times, a number of times,
when I've taken home some favorite book like Darwin's Origin of the Species in a very fine copy, and the first man
that came along and said, "You know what I really would like is a fine
copy of The Origin of the Species ," I could
never resist saying to him, "I've got the book for you." That says
something about me. It isn't that I'm entirely commercial about this;
it's that it gives me such tremendous satisfaction to have the right
book for the right man when he wants it. On the other hand, books have
been a very important part of my life. They have amulet value, in a way.
There are many books I've kept which I haven't read, but I have them on
the shelf there because, in some way, they have symbolized an ideal of
mine. And, of course, I've always had the feeling, just as most people
who accumulate books do, that someday I was going to get to it and read
it, and I wanted it there when I did decide to get to it. But in the
larger proportion, the books that I've kept have been books that I have
read either in whole or in part. I wonder if I could go back and
determine which books have been the most significant in my life and have
formed my character mostly. I can only remember a few. Certainly Victor
Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, which I read when I
was somewhere between ten and twelve, must have had a considerable
influence on me . I think it had a lot to do with forming my social and
political notions. Later on it was the books of John Burroughs which
appealed to me very much because of my interest of Ashley Montagu's Man's Most Dangerous Myth ; The
Fallacy of Race . It's inscribed, "To Jake Zeitlin, father of
this book, with love, from Ashley Montagu, 5th May, 1974." And in the
preface, he says, "It was my friend Mr. Jake Zeitlin, bookseller of Los
Angeles, who originally persuaded me to write this book." What happened
was that I had read an article of Ashley Montagu's in the journal called
Psychiatry, published by St. Elizabeths
Hospital in Washington, and that article was entitled, "Problems and
Methods Relating to the Study of Race." I wrote to him and said, "I
think you have a very important idea there, and I think you should go
ahead and expand it and make a book out of it." And I said, "My friend
Aldous Huxley might very well write a preface to it, because he approves
of your approach to the reasons for racial prejudice and racial
aggression." So with that stimulation, he started to write, and he sent
me chapters which I read and, in a small way, criticized and returned to
him. Finally he produced a manuscript for a book. He'd hoped, and I
hoped, that I would publish it; but very fortunately for him, I found
that I was in no shape to undertake any publishing. I did get Aldous
Huxley to write the foreword to it, and, with that, he was able to go to
Columbia University Press and get the book published in 1942. It's
interesting to see that since then it's gone from a small book of this
size to a considerably thicker book of this size in thirty-two years. It
has no doubt been the most widely circulated and, I hope, one of the
most influential books on the question of race and race prejudice. I
hope that it has played an influential part in changing people's
attitudes toward the notion of the myth of race.
-
GARDNER:
- I see a Sandburg down there.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the Sandburg American Songbag is another
book which I've kept because of my close association both with Sandburg
and my interest in folk songs. When I was a boy, I worked on ranches in
Texas and also had listened to some of the people that worked for my
father who went along when I drove a truck--or a team of horses before
then--on the long drives, and they would sing songs. I don't know where
I got the notion that these things constituted a form of literature, but
I felt that I should put them down. So I collected a good many of these
songs. Also, on the back lot of a house which we owned in the black
section of Fort Worth, there was a Holy Roller church, and I used to go
there and hear them sing, and I absorbed some of their songs. Very early
I had the audacity to write to Frank Dobie, and I got a letter back, and
I joined the Texas Folklore Society and received some of their early
publications, which have now become immensely valuable. I was surprised
to see some of these things, which were a dollar and a dollar and a half
when they were published, selling for as much as $250 now. I'm glad to
say that I stowed some of those away as they came in. But the American Songbag of Carl Sandburg was really his
first book, outside of his poetry, that brought him to national
attention. It was the first attempt, I think, to introduce the American
people to the idea that the folk songs which were sung by the working
people and the tramps and the cowboys and the poor Southerners were
something which were entitled to be sung in the concert hall and the
parlor, as well as in the back room in the bar. I met Carl Sandburg on a
very cold February night of 1922 in Dallas, Texas, and he was giving one
of his lectures and guitar recitals at Southern Methodist University. We
seemed to have the right chemistry for each other immediately, and after
the concert was over and the party that followed, he asked me to come up
to his room in the Adolphus Hotel. And we sat up till four o'clock in
the morning, with my singing a number of songs and his attempting to
record them with his own peculiar type of notation. Of course, tape
recorders like we have here were hardly thought of, and nobody had one
or a lot of people would have saved a great deal of work and a lot of
good material would have been preserved as it should have been, instead
of through the filter of the bad methods of recording that we had in
those days. He told me that he was going to write this American Songbag , and he would like to use some of these
songs. Later, in 1925, when I moved to California, he kept in touch with
me, came to see me when he came out here, and he used some of these
songs. I must say that he was one of the men who always took the trouble
to give appropriate credit to anyone he took a song from. He made a
great many friends that way and, certainly for me, it was a great
satisfaction to feel that these things which all my friends thought were
trivial and hardly polite were worth recording. He sent me this here and
inscribed it, "With thanks, and hoping health and love keep you, Carl."
Until his death at over eighty a few years ago, we remained in close
touch, although I never had the good fortune to go and visit him in
Chicago or at his goat farm in Wisconsin, or, later on, in North
Carolina. His daughter [Helga] later came to see me, and we have kept in
touch for the years that followed.
-
GARDNER:
- Maybe we should have you sing one of those.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, I think that that might crack the record. Now, everyone likes to
think that at one time or another he was early in discovering a talent,
and one of the books that I feel most proud of having spotted early in
its publication is The Time of Men, by Elizabeth
Madox Roberts. I think it's a very important novel, and I think it's
important not only for the story it tells but for the way in which it
tells the story. The language is pure, the purest kind of poetic
American English. There's a cadence to it which I think is unique, and
as soon as I saw the book and read a little of it, I took a copy home in
its dust jacket, and it has remained with me ever since. It's one of the
books which collectors value because of what's called "the point," the
point in this being that the title is printed not in black, but in dark
blue ink, and I defy anyone to tell the difference unless it's brought
to their attention. However, that makes it a first issue, which is not
so significant as the lovely language which she used. There is a
particular passage I wish I could find in which the man who sold apple
trees describes the different kinds of apples. There's nothing I've ever
read which gives me so much pleasure for the pure, poetic quality and
the simplicity of it; it's the language which these people she describes
would have used. I notice, now that I look at it, that this is not a
copy that I bought when it first came out; it's a copy that I bought as
a remainder from J.W. Robinson Company for fifty cents. I must have
given away the copy which I bought when it first came out. This is
another example of what happens very often to good books. First editions
of Faulkner's Soldiers Pay and Mosquitoes were remaindered, and we bought them for thirty
cents and sold them for fifty-nine cents at Bullock's in 1926 and '27.
Now they bring $250 to $450 each, so it may be one of the best marks of
a book for it to have been above the head of popular taste. One of the
friendships that I've always been most proud of, a friendship which I
feel very strongly about for a number of reasons, is that which I had
with Rockwell Kent. I'd first heard of Rockwell Kent through Merle
Armitage, although, of course, I had seen Rockwell Kent's illustrations
in Vanity Fair along about 1922, '23, and had
seen some of his books, like Voyaging and Wilderness , very early. But the first person I
knew that knew him directly was Merle Armitage, and Merle Armitage in
the late twenties and early thirties used to boast of his friendship
with Rockwell Kent. Later on, I'm sorry to say. Merle Armitage decided
that his superpatriotism couldn't tolerate the point of view of Rockwell
Kent, and so he not only disavowed him but he attacked him violently.
That was one of the several reasons why, in our later years, I was not
as close as I had been to Merle. If Rockwell Kent was good enough for
Merle to use as a sort of a stepping stone during the early part of his
career, he should have been good enough to maintain a loyal friend- ship
for later on. I have a great many photographs of Rockwell Kent. My first
personal contact with him was when I asked him to do some illustrations
or decorations or initials for Larry Powell's book on Robinson Jeffers.
I have a copy of that here; it was the first book that Larry Powell
published. I might say that it all began when Larry Powell came in my
shop on Hope Street about 1928, and he and Ward Ritchie were delivery
boys for Vroman's. We talked about a lot of things, and I expressed my
great enthusiasm for Robinson Jeffers, and he and Ritchie both bought
copies of Jeffers 's books. They had, of course, a good reason to be
interested otherwise, because Jeffers had been an Occidental student at
one time, and both Powell and Ritchie had gone to Occidental College.
So, later, Powell went to Dijon and there got his doctorate; and his
thesis for his doctorate was An Introduction to
Robinson Jeffers. He sent me a number of copies, which I sold
for him. I think the original selling price must have been no more than
two dollars and a half (there were only sixty copies printed in all) ,
and the last time I saw one of these sold was at a book fair in San
Francisco where someone paid $450 for it.
-
GARDNER:
- This is the original Dijon.
-
ZEITLIN:
- This is the original Dijon edition published in 1932. Later, when I
started the Primavera Press, I got the idea of getting out another
edition, a regular edition of this book. I wrote to Rockwell Kent and
asked him if he would think of doing it, and he said, well, he would be
coming out very shortly, and he would come and see me. So he did come
out, and I drove him down to San Diego, where he lectured. We spent a
wonderful night driving back and stopped early in the morning to eat
hijacked lobsters and clam broth with a couple of longshoreman friends
who lived along the coast of Palos Verdes. And he agreed to do something
for the book. He decided that he would do initials instead of
illustrations, and he did do the initials which were part of the book.
In the meantime, we got acquainted, and we developed a friendship which
we continued. I also wrote Kent, I think. It was March 22, 1932, that I
got a letter from Rockwell Kent's secretary replying to a letter that I
wrote him. [pause, outside noise]
-
GARDNER:
- Now then, before we were interrupted by the local trash pickup, you had
found a letter that you were about to read.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I had a letter from Rockwell Kent's secretary dated March 22, 1932, in
which she says, "Mr. Kent has been in Greenland since last April, and
Mrs. Kent, who is on her way to join him there now, has been away much
of the time." Then she goes ahead and says that she has written to Mr.
A.N. Kemp telling him Mr. Kent will return sometime in the fall, and
suggested he write again at that time. Now, A.N. Kemp was one of my
earliest customers. He was connected with the California Bank, which was
the forerunner of the United California Bank here in Southern
California, and he was a very important man in the financial world. He
had the idea of having Rockwell Kent do a bookplate for him, and it was
because of that that Kemp wrote Kent. This particular book that I'm
holding up here is a copy of Rockwell Kentiana,
the works and a few words and many pictures by Rockwell Kent. This was
published in a substantial edition by Harcourt Brace and Company in
1933. The interesting thing about this copy is that it is inscribed with
a special photograph which we had put into a few copies, which says,
"Yours truly, Rockwell Kent, to Jake and Jean." And this shows Rockwell
Kent at what must have been the age of four or five dressed in a Little
Lord Fauntleroy hat--not very consistent with the character we have of
Kent as a man who went out into the wilderness of Greenland and
Newfoundland and built himself houses in the wilderness. This Rockwell Kentiana is both by Rockwell Kent and
Carl Zigrosser, who did the bibliography and a list of his prints. It
was dedicated to C.Z. and shows a handclasp with "1910 plus," which
indicates that they had originally met in 1910. Carl Zigrosser was a
wonderful man. He was, I think, the patron saint of printmaking in
America for a great many years. My first contact with him was about 1928
when I wrote him from my first shop; he was in charge of the print
department at Weyhe's. Because of Zigrosser, a great many artists got
their first showings of prints and their encouragement. Carl Zigrosser
later went on to become the curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum
of Art. He wrote some of the most authoritative books on connoisseurship
and the collecting of prints, and died a couple of years ago in
Switzerland, where he'd gone to retire. It was very much to his
credit--is very much to his credit—that he discovered Paul Landacre here
in Southern California and encouraged him, came to see him, exhibited
his prints at Weyhe's in New York, and helped create a reputation for
him. Hardly anyone else in the East has recognized Paul Landacre' s
genius since then except, of course, George Macy, who used him to
illustrate a number of the Limited Edition Club books. And now the
director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art came to me a few weeks ago
and said that they were getting together material for a full-scale
exhibition of the wood engravings of Paul Landacre. One of the
photographs which I have of Rockwell Kent shows him here with Rosemary
Haskell. Rosemary was an extraordinarily beautiful young woman, and
Rockwell Kent had a great taste for beautiful young women. This was
done, I think, sometime around 1942, when he had come out originally. I
had introduced him to Dorothy Wagner, who was another very beautiful
young woman. Dorothy was a premier dancer for Misha Ito, and it seemed
that wherever Rockwell Kent went, he always attracted extraordinarily
beautiful women who attached themselves to him without hesitation or
delay. Rosemary Haskell later married Albert Maltz and finally committed
suicide after a long depression. One of the most amusing experiences I
ever had was long before I met Rockwell Kent, when I was invited to a
friend's house to meet him. And I went there, and here was a fellow,
about five foot four, with curly black hair and a mustache, who was
representing himself to be Rockwell Kent. It turned out to be Mike
Romanoff. Can I stop here a minute? [tape recorder turned off]
-
GARDNER:
- We have a few minutes left to wrap up.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Of course, Rockwell Kent was over six feet tall and had a bald head, so
there was no resemblance at all between Mike Romanoff and Rockwell Kent.
But he used this little gambit on people who had never met Kent, and he
got away with it several times.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, Romanoff was a great impostor, anyway, wasn' t he?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, he was an amusing impostor, and nobody ever got very mad at him or
prosecuted him because he never used it to take advantage of anybody or
get money out of them or anything like that. Of course, later on,
Michael Romanoff opened a very fine restaurant in Beverly Hills, and we
got to be very good friends. He had quite scholarly tastes and used to
buy some most erudite books from me, including Greek-English
dictionaries and some of the more highly esteemed editions of the
classics. Well, I think we've come very close to the end of our time, so
I hope that this has given you some idea of the sort of books of a
certain type which I've collected. Although this doesn't cover the books
of people with whom I've had no personal association and which I've
collected for other reasons.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, you did mention very briefly (before we close up here) the
collecting of the Brueghel. Is that about the only area that you collect
outside of the incidentals? I take it you wouldn't sell the Brueghel
material if someone came along and knocked on the door and asked for it.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The collection of books about Brueghel we're not going to sell. But some
day we're going to give them somewhere where we hope they'll be kept
together and used as a source of reference and study by someone who may
want to write more about Pieter Breughel, or by some of the print
collectors. It would be a shame for it to be dispersed after these books
have all been brought together, and we think that either the Los Angeles
Museum or the National Gallery of Art will want to keep them together.
In the not-too-distant future we're going to see what we can do about
that. It's been a great pleasure for Josephine to get these books
together and to read a great many of them. Of course, as always, a great
part of the fun is in the chase.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, Mr. Zeitlin, thank you very much for your time, and I'll be back
next Tuesday.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Thank you.
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE
(September 29, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- Now, as previewed, you said that there was more than one article that
you wrote for Reader's Digest . The only one that
I had read about was the one in 1936.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think the first one I did was in 1935, and this was the result of
my acquaintance with the Reverend Charles Ferguson, whom I had known
when he was a young, rather controversial Methodist minister in Fort
Worth, Texas. He didn't last long with his congregation there, but I
knew him only slightly, in the twenties, when we both lived there. He
commenced to write for [H.L.] Mencken's American
Mercury. He wrote several articles about American religions,
and then he later did a thing called "500,000 Brothers" (as I remember
the title) , which had to do with American organizations such as the
Shriners, the Odd Fellows, and all the other civic organizations. In
addition, he wrote about American religious cults and American
orthodoxy. He naturally followed the general point of view of Mencken
and [George Jean] Nathan, which was to ridicule the boobs. And then,
much to my surprise, after I got out here and had been here for some
time, I heard from him again and discovered that he was an associate
editor of Reader's Digest. He came out here to
visit me, quite without any special plan, and he and a man by the name
of Charlie Dunning and I went out to the Huntington Library. Charlie
Dunning was a newspaperman who had done public relations work for the
movies; before that he had been on the Chicago Daily
News and was a friend of Carl Sandburg. It was through Carl
Sandburg that I met Charlie Dunning. Charlie Dunning, at the time I met
him, was publicity man, general P.R. man for Estelle Taylor. She was
married to Jack Dempsey, who had abducted her. She was quite a
successful figure in the movies, and Jack Dempsey had got a great
passion for her and kidnapped her and took her down to Agua Caliente,
which was a great resort then, and married her. She was in mortal fear
of him, and I think that she was afraid to not marry him. But in any
event, Charlie, who was a pretty heavy man with the bottle, and Carl
Sandburg would go off for weekends, usually around Laguna, and stay in a
state of mild intoxication for several days and then come back to Los
Angeles and visit around with their friends. And Carl would do his usual
concertizing . So I got to know Charlie Dunning quite well, and he did
some very kind things for me when I had problems later on. But Charlie
Dunning came with Charlie Ferguson and me out to the Huntington Library,
and we met a Dr. [Lodowick] Bendicksen, a Dutchman who was then in
charge of the photographic laboratory at the Huntington Library. Dr.
Bendicksen had originated some documentation techniques, including the
first microcards and microfiche that I ever saw, and he demonstrated
those to us, and he also demonstrated microfilm. So Charlie Ferguson got
the idea that this would make a good story, and it was agreed that
Charlie Dunning and I would collaborate. So we interviewed Bendicksen,
got all the information that we could, and then, between us, we did the
articles. Now, a regular practice of Reader's
Digest was to buy articles from other magazines. But they very
often would inspire an article and then refer the editor of the
particular magazine to the writer of the article and he would buy it.
For instance, the editor of World's Work, where
our article "Lilliputian Libraries" first appeared, paid us $45 for it,
and then Reader' s Digest would buy the reprint
rights and pay us $2,000 for it. So we suddenly landed with a very
substantial sum of money for each of us- It was this kind of break once
in a while which kept the book business going.
-
GARDNER:
- This was the first writing you'd done in a while, wasn't it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, I'd always done some writing, but it never appeared in anything
except, you know, local magazines, and usually it was about books. Or I
tried to write some poetry, which also appeared in places like the San Francisco Review and some of the other little
poetry magazines. Then the year following, I had talked to Ferguson
about the fact that a great many valuable materials, the ephemera upon
which history is based, the things which historians need really to write
accurately, were the things that weren't worth very much money but that
in time would become very valuable and very useful. And I talked about
such things as the road maps that filling stations gave away and still
give away; over the course of a year, a series of road maps, showing the
highways of the United States and their growth and the changes that had
taken place, really constituted a valuable documentary source. And I
told stories about different things which had come my way which had
turned out to be valuable, such as a road map used by the immigrants —
T.H. Jefferson's Emigrant' s Guide from St.
Joseph, Missouri, to St. Francisco, published in 1848. This particular
one that a lady had brought in to me, which was folded up in a little
container no bigger than a cigarette pack, had written on the face of
it, "With the compliments of T.H. Jefferson to Benjamin Holliday of the
Holliday Stage Lines." So this was a very vitally important map of the
Overland Road, the road used by the immigrants, and later it was used by
Ben Holliday for setting up the route of the stage lines. I asked the
lady how much she wanted for it, and she said twenty-five dollars. And
it seemed to me that that was a reasonable price. I really had no idea
what that was worth, and so I bought it and then went to Robert Cowan,
the man who had done the definitive bibliography of California and who
v/as the librarian for William Andrews Clark, and asked him about it.
And he said, "Has it got the little pamphlet giving instructions to the
immigrants on where to camp, how to avoid some of the hazards of the
overland crossing?" I said yes. "Well," he said, "the only other copy
known of this doesn't have that." So finally he suggested I ask $1,000
for it, but I decided that was too much, so I offered it to Mrs. Doheny
for $750, and she bought it. The next day I got a wire from Ed
Eberstadt, who was a great dealer in Western Americana in those days,
offering me $1,500 for it. So I figured I'd lost $750 on that
transaction! Well, it was stories like this that I put into this
article, which I called "Trifles Today and Treasures Tomorrow." And
this, I think, appeared first in the Saturday Review
of Literature, also at a price of something like forty-five
dollars, and then it was purchased in Reader' s Digest . It was
pretending to be a digest of the best stories appearing in other
magazines in the country, but they had found that in order to maintain a
certain level of the type of story they wanted (which Ferguson said to
me was a story that would interest the average streetcar conductor in
the United States; now, that dates them very much—you'd have to go a
long way to find a streetcar conductor now) , they had to resort to this
policy of inspiring stories, planting them in other magazines, and then
buying them from the other magazines and reprinting them. It was a very
nice little arrangement. This article brought me an enormous flood of
letters, over 5,000 letters in all. I never was able to answer them all,
but I did answer quite a few, and I got a number of very good things. I
got an original Audubon pastel. I don't remember all of the things I
got, but one of the most interesting was a twenty-five-page letter from
Timothy Pickering. [He] had been postmaster general and quartermaster
general [among] many other things under Washington during the Revolution
and during his first administration. [The letter was] written after
Washington had died, giving Timothy Pickering's reasons why George
Washington should not have a monument erected in his honor. It was a
characteristic letter, it turned out: it seemed that Timothy Pickering
was a man of many grievances who enjoyed his grievances hugely, and he
also was a man who felt that people of less talent and less ability had
been selected for higher office and honored, when he was more deserving.
So he stated in this letter that George Washington had never made any of
the important strategic decisions during the Revolutionary War (they'd
all been made by General [Nathaneal] Greene) , that he was a man who
looked very well in the saddle and on the platform, but was a man of
very limited ability to make decisions or judgments, and that all this
was a great myth. Well, there were many other letters; I never got them
all answered. One of the more interesting letters was from a gentleman
in Kentucky who said that he liked the tone of my letter and that he
didn't have any rare books, but he wanted his daughter to go to
Hollywood--she was a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl--and could he send
her to me, because he knew from the tone of my article that I was an
honorable man and would see that she was protected from the lures of
Hollywood. I never could figure out whether this one hadn't been written
by one of my friends as a practical joke.
-
GARDNER:
- She never showed up?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, she never showed up, thank God. But a number of people did, most of
them who had things which were worthless, and it was very pathetic and
caused me a great deal of distress to see these people come in. One of
them was an old gentleman from Wisconsin who'd read this portion about
the Overland map, and borrowed money and came across the country to try
and sell me a map, and it wasn't worth fifty cents. So there was quite a
bit of that. Some people were very graceful about it and took it in good
spirit, and others were very much upset and felt that I had misled them.
But in any event, this sort of set the style for collecting ephemera. It
stimulated people into keeping not only first editions of famous books
but first appearances of significant articles and magazines or
significant pamphlets. I suggested that people should save things like
the old commercial almanacs that the baking powder people used to give
out, and the ladies' cookbooks from the church sewing circle. This
article really did stimulate, I think, the whole general movement
towards collecting the sort of thing that was looked upon as being
insignificant and of very little value. Later on, Van Allen Bradley
started a column in the Chicago Daily News called
"Gold in Your Attic," and that was a direct descendant of the thing that
this article started. It was, of course, very useful to me because a
great many people read Reader's Digest , and I
think that if I had known how to exploit this, I could have done a great
deal better than I did out of it. I think if I had systematically sent
somebody around the country to follow up these letters to the various
writers from which they came, I would have gotten a lot more stuff; and
the curious thing is that for twenty-five years afterwards, people would
pick up that article and write me about things. It continued to bring
stuff in for a long, long time.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, I knew about the poetry, but I wasn't aware that you wrote other
articles. You said they were in local publications. What were some of
those?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the other day I picked up something I had done in 1927 for Publishers Weekly on how we promoted fine-press
books and developed an interest in the collecting of press books. I did
an article (and I can't remember just where it was now) for one of the
Southern California magazines— it may have been Arts
and Architecture—on the book as a work of art. And later I
wrote an article for Arts and Architecture called
"What Is Planning?" I became interested in the whole business of housing
and planning, read a good deal about it, and then wrote this piece,
which was noticed by a number of architectural schools. And reprints had
to be made and sent out to places like the school of architecture at
Harvard, and so on. Then I did a column for Arts and
Architecture here that was entitled "Doubletalk, " and this was
an analysis of such things as the current attack that the American
Medical Association had launched against the advocates of health
insurance, social security, and the idea of a national health system.
It's ridiculous to think now how far we've come since then. They had
printed a brochure which was being distributed through the drugstores
all over the country which was a direct attack upon the advocates of
health insurance, social security, state-supported health services, and
even such simple things as group medicine. And I tried to make a
semantical analysis of this; that's what the substance of these articles
were--attempts at semantical analysis of different forms of propaganda.
And the L .A. County Medical Association Journal
got ahold of this--or some member did--and they published an editorial
attacking me quite violently, saying that the County Medical Association
Library had been a good customer of mine, and here I was biting the hand
that fed me. I had advanced my thesis as a sort of a counterattack, to
the effect that the good old family doctor had contributed very little
to the reduction of mortality from the great killers, but that it had
been state-supported researchers, some of whom weren't medical men at
all--like Pasteur who, with the help of public funds, had provided the
great discoveries which had reduced death from smallpox, diphtheria, and
all of the infectious diseases. And this they really pounced on. So the
first thing the trustees of the Los Angeles County Medical Association
wanted to do was see that I was made to resign from my job as the
secretary of the Barlow Society for the History of Medicine, an
organization which I had helped found, and for which I wrote the
constitution and bylaws. Much to my surprise, I learned a number of
years later that my chief defendant--the man who had stood up for me and
refused to let the motion go through—was a man by the name of Dr. Donald
Charnock, who was as conservative a Republican as ever existed, but who
just believed fundamentally that I had the right to speak my piece and
that it would be an admission of error if the [L.A.] County Medical
Association took this step. So I was rebuked by an editorial in the L.A. County Medical Association Journal, but I
was not asked to resign. And they did not take away their book business
from me, although for a while they stopped buying from me. In more
recent years, I have sold very little to the Los Angeles County Medical
Association.
-
GARDNER:
- For any particular reason?
-
ZEITLIN:
- For no particular reason except that the members of the library board
were not the kind of people who were interested in the history of
medicine or in expanding their historical collection. They had bought a
great many sets of journals from me in the earlier days—that is, in the
thirties and perhaps early forties--but then they had reached their
capacity so far as the number of journals they could house. They also
didn't have the funds to continue to fill in the gaps in their journals,
which I had made a strong drive to fill in. But it was a very good
working relationship while it lasted, and it was good for me, and it was
good for them, too, because it helped to build a good medical reference
library. And the Barlow Society for the History of Medicine has
continued to exist, by some peculiar miracle. It never has elections; it
never has meetings of its members or board for other purposes except to
hold the annual George Dock lecture. But it does go on and, somehow or
another, has remained as a paper entity.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, if that's all your writing. . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, as I say, I was writing this column for Arts and
Architecture. I wrote about books for places like the Publishers Weekly and in some of the other
magazines around here that weren't very important. Then I published a
poem in the San Francisco Review, I think it was
called--it was one of these short-lived literary magazines in San
Francisco—for which I was given a prize. And all these things managed to
get noticed and help build up a reputation for me. The whole point was
that I wasn't doing something so very great or special, but nobody else
in the book business was doing even as much.
-
GARDNER:
- Well put. [laughter] Well, in 1938 you made a major move away from Sixth
Street to Carondelet.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, in 1937 Jake Zeitlin Books became a corporation. It was a very
poorly managed operation. I think it must have been 1935 that a friend
of mine, Oscar Moss, who was an accountant, advised me that my business
had to have something done to it to feed some capital into it, and the
only thing to do was to incorporate; and that, therefore, I should try
and get some friends to advance some money to help me put some capital
into the business. But the whole point was that the total amount that we
capitalized for, in addition to the worth of my business, was $10,000;
and $10,000 was hardly enough to see a downtown business through a
rather difficult time. And so we struggled along. I was able to make a
few good sales and save the day from time to time. I sold some rather
large items to Hugh Walpole, who was out here working for the movies at
that time. And I had the manuscripts of D.H. Lawrence to sell, and I
sold quite a few of those (not a great many, considering how many I had
and how important they were) . One way or another, we managed to just
about keep our doors open, but it became apparent that we couldn't any
longer maintain a staff and keep going at the level which we were trying
to maintain. And then the owners of the property served notice on us in
1938 that they were going to raise the rent substantially. This place
that I was in at 705 1/2 West Sixth Street was really a very beautifully
designed place that Lloyd Wright had done for me, with a balcony, with a
very original style of shelving and decoration, and so on. It had a
nice, small gallery in which we held a number of good exhibitions. We
had one exhibition that Kennedy sent out, of first-rate Rembrandts and
Durers, which I wish I had now. We had the first show on the West Coast
of Kathe Kollwitz. We showed the work of people like Magritte and a
number of other important artists of the time. We had exhibitions of
photographers. I carried and sold continuously the work of Edward
Weston. I had a good working relationship with the Walker Gallery in New
York; had drawings and watercolors by people like Thomas Hart Benton and
John Curry; and original drawings, as well as lithographs, of George
Bellows. In addition, I would show local people like Millard Sheets and
Tom Craig, Milfred Zornes, Phil Paradise, and quite a number of others
of the Southern California watercolor school, which was coming into
being at that time. Because of these exhibitions, my shop attracted a
great many of the people interested in the arts, the younger people who
were looking for a place to show their work. I also utilized good
printers and good design in all of the printed matter that I sent
out--the catalogs--and I think the distinction of our printing, the kind
of exhibitions that we held, did an awful lot to offset the fact that
the business was very poorly managed, and that kept us alive. But
finally the time came when we had to go somewhere, and I appealed to a
friend of mine by the name of A.G. Beaman, who was also my insurance
man. A.G. Beaman was a sort of an unofficial greeter for all the
literary people, the artists, the collectors who came to town. If a man
like A. Edward Newton came to town, it was A.G. Beaman who made it his
business to take him around, see that he was entertained, and see that
he was taken from one speaking engagement to another, and to meet all
the collectors and bookshops. He knew everyone in the burgeoning world
of literary and artistic activity--all on the fringes of it, I'd rather
say. It was one way that he attracted business (he specialized in
fine-arts insurance and so on) , but he was a very goodhearted man and
very much concerned about people like myself. He was sort of a
counterpart of Albert Bender in San Francisco, who was a great patron,
and fortunately fared better so far as finances were concerned and was
able to be a patron more successfully. But he was a good man. And he in
turn enlisted the help of John Anson Ford. The Otis Art Institute, which
was owned and operated by Los Angeles County, had taken over, in
addition to the property of the original Harrison Gray Otis house, the
property next door which had belonged to Harrison Gray Otis's onetime
friend but later archenemy, E.T. Earl, the founder of the Pacific Fruit Express and the Los Angeles Express, a rival newspaper which was founded out
of spite by E.T. Earl. E.T. Earl had built a beautiful house on the
corner of Carondelet and Wilshire, and in accordance with the style of
the times, he had a fine carriage house in back, two stories—upstairs
where the servants lived, and downstairs they kept the horses and the
carriages. And this carriage house was ivy-covered and had a curved
brick driveway coming up to it. It was obvious this was a dream for a
bookshop. And so, at the suggestion of Gay Beaman, and with the help of
John Anson Ford, I decided that the way to avoid the problem of
increased rents and the way to stop trying to be a downtown bookshop was
to move away from the busy downtown area out here, to give more
exhibitions, to deal more in rare books, to send out catalogs, and sort
of set the style for an antiquarian book business which was not
dependent on the street. And the other advantage was that the rent was
only something like sixty-five dollars a month. So, with the help of
some contractor friends, I got a design by Walter Bearman, who had come
out here to head the new school for industrial design that was being
propagated in Pasadena, backed mostly by Susannah Dakin and then
enthusiastically pressed forward by Dr. Remsen Bird, the ebullient
president of Occidental College who supported a great many things,
sometimes with more enthusiasm than good foresight. But Remsen Bird was
a warm-hearted man, a man capable of enlisting support. So, with the
help of all these people, I closed the downtown shop and moved out on
Carondelet Street. In 1938 we held an opening there, sent out an
announcement with a map—Paul Julian drew the map, and Gregg Anderson
designed the brochure, and it was printed by Anderson and Ritchie--which
went out to people inviting them to the opening. It attracted an
enormous number of people. I asked Helen Brown, the wife of Phil Brown,
to cater this for me. She had come out here and she and Phil Brown had
gotten married. She knew a great deal about food and cookery, and she
said she wanted to start a catering business. So I said, "Why don't you
start by doing something to help this affair? People will come, they
will taste whatever it is that you provide, and maybe you'll get some
business out of it." She produced the most marvelous shrimp American
sauce which everybody raved about. We had wine. I remember Phil Hanna
sitting up beside the bowl of sauce and dipping shrimp into it until he
literally had to be hauled away. So it did bring her to the attention of
a lot of the gourmets in the community, and started her off with my
mailing list and with the chance to show what she could do. She did
become a very successful caterer, and her husband and she wrote some
cookbooks together. She died. Phil is now the advertising manager for
Jurgensen's [Grocery Co.], and is really a noted authority on food and
wine.
-
GARDNER:
- He remained in the book business for a long time, didn't he?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, yes. He was in the book business in Pasadena with the son of Charles
Yale. Charles Yale had been the manager of Dawson's Book Shop, and then
he left Dawson's and opened a bookshop of his own in Pasadena. His son
came in, and then later Philip Brown, who had come out here from
Owatonna, Minnesota, with Karl Zamboni. Zamboni had worked for me
altogether about ten years, the brightest and most promising of all the
young bookmen that ever worked for me--a man that really, I think, could
have become and should have become the outstanding bookman on the West
Coast. Brown came out, and I think he worked for a while on West Sixth
Street for Bunster Creeley at the Abbey Book Shop, and then he joined
the Yales, and later it became Yale and Brown. Philip Brown practically
carried on the business; unfortunately, Phil Yale, his partner, became
an alcoholic, and gradually they separated, and the business was finally
closed down. But, by that time, Philip Brown and his wife had
successfully established a catering business, and Philip had also gotten
a job writing gastronomic articles for Jurgensen's bulletin. He went
ahead and has really become quite a distinguished person.
-
GARDNER:
- Anyway, back to Carondelet. . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Carondelet Street opened with this small gastronomic triumph, and a
great many people came, I must say, to the opening, and I continued
there. But just before Pearl Harbor, one of the men who had become a
stockholder —his name was Preston Harrison--and Oscar Moss, who had been
my advisor and who originally urged me to incorporate, were so hostile
to each other that it became a battle of nerves; and I was in between,
and I got so I couldn't function. I went to bed with stomach ulcers, and
it became obvious that the business could not go on. So I went to a
lawyer friend of mine, a man who had been very supportive and generous
to me, a man who had been a tremendously successful lawyer in the
oil-lease world, L.R. Martineau. I went to him and I said, "What am I
going to do? I can't go on this way." And he said, "You're not worth a
damn this way. Nobody would invest another cent in you because you're
not your own man. If you were your own man, I'm sure that a lot of other
people would feel like I do. But my advice to you is get rid of this.
Liquidate it. If you end up broke, you'll be better off." So I think it
was 1942 that I finally called in an attorney, who in turn undertook the
settlement. Now, I turned over assets enough to him to completely pay
off all the creditors, but what I didn't know then is that lawyers who
operate in this kind of a business, in the world of liquidating
businesses, don't usually manage them for the benefit of the creditors;
they manage them for the benefit of themselves and their friends.
1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO
(September 29, 1977 and October 4, 1977)
-
ZEITLIN:
- I published a notice in the Publishers Weekly
and, at the same time, sent out a letter to all the creditors advising
them that I would personally pay off the balance of anything that wasn't
paid by the receiver. And later I did pay 100 percent of every claim
there was against the firm that I could get anyone to file. My greatest
difficulty in that was to get my biggest creditors to file, like Maggs
Brothers, who simply didn't want to add to my burden by filing any claim
at all. They finally did, at my own request, and engaged a lawyer who
filed a claim. In any event, I came out of it with the corporation wiped
clean and no money and all of my employees gone. I had a couple of
friends who lent me, I think, one of them $300 and another $250. I'd
been able at the auction to buy back with my friends' money some of the
books that had been part of the stock, but the major part of the books
were gone, so I had to go out and buy stock again. I had to restore the
confidence of my customers, and I had to produce enough working capital
to keep going.
-
GARDNER:
- How did you do that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know. I still haven't figured it out. It was really a miracle.
Josephine [Ver Brugge Zeitlin] worked hard. I ran hard from one customer
to another with a bag full of books. I had some credit with printers,
got out some lists and catalogs. I had one particular friend, and that
was John Valentine, who provided the capital with which to buy a couple
of large libraries, and it was out of those libraries that I got my
start again. One of them was a library up in the San Joaquin Valley of a
big industrial concern called the Chemurgic Corporation. The war came to
an end in 1945, and shortly afterwards the Chemurgic Corporation must
have gotten into difficulties. I had a letter from them asking me if I
would be interested in a set of chemical abstracts, and I didn't answer
the letter. One day I got a phone call from a man up there who said, "We
wrote you asking you if you were interested in a set of chemical
abstracts. We're about to hold a sale of this entire library up here."
And I said, "Have you got a library? Have you got more than chemical
abstracts?" And he said, "Oh, yes, we've got thousands of volumes of
important journals--scientific and technical journals--and a complete
library dealing largely with physics and chemistry." So I went up there.
I got in a car and drove up that night, and I got there the next day in
the morning. The man who was in charge of liquidating this firm, who was
supposed to be representing the bank, was very much irritated to see
that I had arrived. Some other member of the office staff had called me
because he saw that something funny was going on. And what was going on,
I learned, was that the liquidator of this company had made a deal with
a chemical company in the Bay Area to sell them the entire library for
something like $2,800, and their bid had already gone in. The bids were
going to be closed at one o'clock that day, and I quickly looked around
and I saw that this was a fantastically good library, and that you could
get $2,800 out of the first set you sold. So I called up John Valentine,
and I said, "John, there's a library up here, and it's fantastic. It's a
great collection, and I would like to bid $4,200 for it, and I haven't
got any money." I said, "I have to walk in with a check if I buy it." He
said, "You go ahead and write the check. The money will be in your
bank." And I waited until five minutes before one o'clock and walked
into this administrator's office and said, "Here is my offer of $4,200.
Well, the man was furious. He had set the time for the closing of bids.
He told me to get out of his office, and he tried to reach the competing
bidder whom he had already made a deal with to let him have it for
$2,800. One o'clock passed, and he came to the door, and he called me in
and he said, "You son of a bitch, you've bought it." It took about four
big trucks and semis to haul this collection out of that place. We
filled the entire garage of the carriage house, and we filled the
basement of a place I had rented over on Alvarado Street with these
journals and books. This was the time when Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and
Hanford were all buying as rapidly as they could to try and build up
technical libraries in order to develop all of the processes involved in
the making of the atomic bomb. And I had managed to establish a contact
with the people who were doing the buying for these libraries. I'd been
invited to go up and see them. They had sent me their want lists. They
had given me exclusive rights to go out and buy whole sets for them, and
I bought things from places like Finland and all over the world, and had
them flown in. It was another one of these lucky breaks which gave me
the opportunity to build up a business in the field of technical books
and journals.
-
GARDNER:
- That's amazing. So the years on Carondelet were difficult years.
-
ZEITLIN:
- They were very difficult years, but they were also the years which
pulled us out of the hole, primarily because Josephine had founded, on
her own, a periodical business called Zeitlin Periodicals.
-
GARDNER:
- Maybe before you go into that (we'll come back to that, I think) , we
ought to introduce Josephine into the narrative at this point, because I
don't think you've really talked about her.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, there's a lot to be said about Josephine and the role that she
played, because, in truth, I didn't take her into my business; she took
me into her business. She had started a separate business before we were
married which dealt in periodicals, and I had encouraged her to do this.
There's more to tell about how this came about. The important thing is
that when Jake Zeitlin, Incorporated, was liquidated, we then started a
new firm which was a merger of Ver Brugge Books and Jake Zeitlin, and
that was Zeitlin and Ver Brugge.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, why don't you tell the story of how she arrived in your life. I
know that exists in other places, but you can tell it briefly.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, this is a story I wouldn't really want to tell too briefly, but I
can say that it was the most important thing that happened in my life to
sort of turn me into a much more whole person than I was before, and to
give me the solid continuity and backing which I needed in order to make
a businessman out of me--and to give me a sense of security. While I was
still on West Sixth Street, in the summer of 1937, I received a letter
of an application for a job, and in it, the person writing the letter
described themself as a young woman, approximately five foot, eight
inches tall, blue-eyed, dark hair, and personable. And she had a
bachelor degree from Park College in Missouri and then had done graduate
work at the University of Iowa in English literature, and had been
teaching school in Missouri and Kansas. She had always wanted to work in
a bookshop. She knew something about bookkeeping, she knew something
about business because she had helped her father in his hardware
business in Reading, Kansas, and she would very much appreciate an
interview. I was very much impressed with the style of this letter and
also with the description of herself as five foot eight, blue-eyed,
black hair, and personable, and said to my secretary, "Well, I haven't
got a job, but this Miss Josephine Ver Brugge, who wrote this letter, is
entitled to an interview. So why don't you tell her to come in and see
me if she can tomorrow afternoon." And the next afternoon, in came this
very beautiful Dutch girl. I sat her down in my office and looked at
her, and I said, "I know I asked you in here because I thought of you as
a possibility for a job, but now that I've had a look at you, I'm not
going to give you a job. I like you too well. But don't you leave town
or I'll be on your pa's doorstep by the time you get back to Kansas.
Come across the street and let's have a cup of coffee." So we sat down
across the street, and then we talked some more, and then I went back
and called up my friend Remsen Bird and told him that I had a very
remarkable young woman here that I wanted to see in a job somewhere, and
could he suggest something. And he said, "I think they might need a
secretary at the Haines Foundation, but I don't know whether this job is
going to be open right away or not. However, you tell her to go and see
Miss Mumford, the lady who is the secretary of the foundation. And in
the meantime, just sit tight." So with that, Josephine decided not to go
back to Kansas to her schoolteaching job. She went and got a job at
Bullock's, where they told her they were going to train her as an
executive. I think the job must have paid something like twenty-two
dollars a week, and this was the way that Bullock's had of getting top
material for low prices, with the idea that they were going to be given
an opportunity to become executives. Most of these people never got out
of the credit office or the bookkeeping office, the little jobs that
they were locked into. Well, she remained there for a while, until
finally she was asked to come over and go to work for the Haines
Foundation. And while she was working there, I went up to San Francisco
and visited my friend Nathan Van Patten, who was the librarian of the
Lane Medical Library as well as the Stanford University Library. And
Nathan Van Patten took me up into the attic of the Lane Medical Library,
and here there were thousands of journals and duplicate books, and he
said, "We're going to have to get these out of here, and I think I'm
going to have to dump them." And I said, "Well, before you dump them,
what will you take for them?" And he said, "Well, what about $600?" And
I said, "Well, give me a little time." I went back down, and I talked to
Josephine and told her there was a great opportunity to buy this stock
of back files of medical journals. She had a little money that she had
gotten from her mother's estate, and she rented a store building on
Seventh Street for something like seventy-five dollars a month. There
was a man who had been working at UCLA Library by the name of John B.
Lee who needed a job, and John B. Lee came to work for something like no
more than $100 a month. A friend by , the name of Preston Tuttle, and
John Lee, and I went up to San Francisco, tied this library into
bundles, and we agreed to pay Mr. Van Patten $100 a month for six
months. Josephine scraped together enough money to pay for the carriage
of the books and stuff down, and they were dumped in the middle of this
store that was rented on Seventh Street—on the floor into a mountain. We
then proceeded to go out and buy apple boxes (in those days you could
buy apple boxes for five to ten cents apiece) , and we put the apple
boxes together and made bookshelves out of them. We got a copy of the
Union List of Serials, and with that, she and
John Lee (she working at night and after hours) proceeded to sort this
mountain of journals and put them into order and to catalog them all
according to the Union List of Serials. They had
printed postcards in which they offered to all the libraries listed in
the Union List of Serials such pieces which they
had as were lacking in these libraries. They got out mimeographed lists,
and the first thing you know, they were doing a little business. And
that was the beginning of Zeitlin Periodicals. With her hard work and
with John Lee's expertise and devotion and hard work, they were able to
bring that up to the point where she could quit her job at the Haines
Foundation and carry this on, on enough of a paying basis. And later,
after we were married in 1939, and after Jake Zeitlin, Incorporated, was
liquidated, we merged our two businesses. But we maintained a separate
location for the journals and the periodicals. And the journals and
periodicals were for quite a while a substantial part of the business;
they provided a very large business because we had very little
competition. Walter Johnson had not come into the scene, H.P. Kraus had
not gone into the periodical business, and it was possible then, with
hard work and with the luck of getting this stock, to start a business.
On top of that, the Chemurgic Corporation stock contained a number of
rather complete files of practically every important technical journal
that could be had, and a great many of the reprints that were done by
Edwards Brothers under the license of the alien property custodian. We
built up a technical-book business, mostly out-of-print technical books
and out-ofprint technical journals, which really provided more of the
basic capital which we developed for the rare-book business.
-
GARDNER:
- How long did you maintain the periodicals?
-
ZEITLIN:
- We maintained the periodical business until approximately, I think it
must have been, twelve years ago, and then we sold it to our nephew. We
enabled him to buy it; we sold it to him on very liberal terms so that
he could pay it off out of the earnings from the business. But it became
a management problem. We couldn't find capable, trustworthy employees,
people that we could really with confidence put to work running a
periodical business. And we had a choice either of closing it or closing
the rarebook business, and we decided to close the periodical business.
-
GARDNER:
- Was that on La Brea then?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, we were on West Adams at the time--that is the periodical business
was on West Adams at the time. We transferred it to Stanley, and he
ultimately moved it.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, since we've gotten you through Carondelet. . . . See how quickly
we're moving? We're up to 1948 already.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, not quite '48. We're up through 1939, 1942.
-
GARDNER:
- And then through past the war, when you're buying . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Through '45, when I was buying the Chemurgic Corporation library. I must
say that without the help of John Valentine, the wonderful friendship
and confidence that he had in me, I would never have been able to take
advantage of these opportunities and to build up the stocks that were
necessary in order for us to develop a real business. It was John
Valentine who provided the funds not only for the Chemurgic library but
for the [Charles] Kofoid collection, a collection of duplicates of books
that had been left to the University of California—28,000 books on the
natural sciences and some on the physical sciences--and later, the
collection of books on economics and political science. Otto Jeidel's
library, which I bought in Santa Barbara. All three of these, which were
very crucial. and a fourth one which really launched me into the
rare-science-book business, were all due to the very wonderful
friendship of John Valentine.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the fourth one?
-
ZEITLIN:
- That was the Herbert Evans library (that was Herbert Evans number two) .
The Herbert Evans library is a story in itself, and I think that's about
all I can do tonight.
OCTOBER 4, 1977
-
GARDNER:
- Now, as I mentioned, I thought we'd begin today, since we covered the
Carondelet shop last time, with your move to La Cienega Boulevard. How
did that come about? What made you choose to move?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I didn't choose to move. We remained at 624 South Carondelet from
1938 to 1948, which is a good, round ten years. I actually opened my
downtown shop in 1928 and moved to Carondelet in 1938, so that at the
end of another decade, it seemed to be the end of a cycle and the
beginning of a new one. What actually happened was that the property we
were occupying was part of the property belonging to the Otis Art
Institute and that, of course, in turn meant that it was owned and
operated by the county. The E.T. Earl residence was at the corner of
Wilshire and Carondelet, about halfway along the block on the east side
of the street. It was a brick driveway that curved gracefully up to the
front of an old ivy-covered brick carriage house with high gables. We
had maintained our business there for these ten years. I think there
must have been a number of elements which contributed to our having to
move, but it seemed that the precipitating element was that I had
erected a sign at the corner of Wilshire and Carondelet, a swinging sign
pointing towards our driveway. The chairman of the board of Otis Art
Institute (a man who managed to be chairman of a great many things) was
Edward Dickson, a man who later became chairman of the Regents of the
University of California. Edward Dickson was a rather narrow-minded man
and also had a tremendous sense of power. He was sort of a little
tyrant. He had somehow or another managed to become the spokesman, as it
were, willing to serve on boards and to participate in all kinds of
cultural community activities on behalf of the "forty thieves" --people
in downtown Los Angeles, mostly, who have always controlled the
destinies of all of the institutions like the Philharmonic Orchestra,
the Music Center, university, and, among other things, the Otis Art
Institute. He had been referred to by one of the great senators from
California, Hiram Johnson, in a public address as "Little Eddie
Dickson." Among other things, he had been the editor of the Los Angeles Express, so he must have had some
talents. At the time when I knew him he was in a stock brokerage
investment business downtown, so he must have, in one way or another,
been entrusted with a considerable financial clout as well as political
power. During the period when I was at Carondelet Street, I had been
very active in the organization of a Democratic Club. I had been
chairman of the campaign committee of Helen Gahagan Douglas. I had
become involved with the Political Action Committee of the CIO through
an organization which was affiliated with them, a group called
Architects and Engineers. (I've forgotten the rest of the group; they
were architectural draftsmen, people that worked in relation to
planning.) And I had written an article for one of the local magazines
which specialized in architectural and design matters . . .
-
GARDNER:
-
Arts and Architecture ?
-
ZEITLIN:
-
Arts and Architecture, called "What Is Planning?"
I was adopted by this group, who then made me a member in full standing
of the union, and out of that I was appointed to be the chairman of the
Political Action Committee, and as chairman of the Political Action
Committee, I sat at the downtown meetings of the Political Action
Committee of the CIO. And very soon [I] was heavily involved in local
politics. The CIO carried a substantial political sock and had a lot to
do with the selection of candidates for Congress. We had a war chest
with which we could distribute funds for the support of people running
for the assembly, for the state senate, for the United States Congress
and for the United States Senate. It was an important element in
California politics at the time, and, I suppose, indirectly, national
politics. Well, it was pretty heavily dominated by a left-wing
group--Slim [Philip] Connelly, among others--and in the course of that
time. I had helped gain the support of the CIO and helped elect a city
councilman by the name of Ed Davenport. Ed Davenport turned out to be
the worst lemon I ever picked. He was reactionary, he was crooked, and
he was a lush. What other vices he had I don't know, but he quickly
aligned himself with Forest Lawn Cemetery groups and all the other
groups through whom money was dispersed, and very quickly he started in
on a witch hunt. So that the next time he ran for city council, I picked
a candidate to run against him, and he resorted to smearing the
candidate, who was a very good man and had "Q" clearance with the armed
forces intelligence. He was a top man, a major in the United States
Army. Ed Davenport was a master of demagoguery. He was a master of the
hanky panky that went with getting elected to office and to staying in
office. So he defeated the candidate that I helped select, Douglas
Behrend, and caused Behrend a great deal of trouble and embarrassment.
In the city council, he announced one day that the Communists were
meeting regularly in my bookshop for the purpose of defeating him. He
tried to get the [Jack B.] Tenney committee on my neck, and, of course,
news of this filtered into the press, and, I'm sure, got to Eddie
Dickson. So one day, Eddie Dickson came and ordered me to remove my sign
from the corner of Wilshire and Carondelet Street, which I did very
reluctantly. And then he announced that I had to move, that the county
did not wish to extend my stay there. Well, it was really a very
favorable situation that I had been enjoying. I had the use of the
entire building for something like sixty-five dollars a month for ten
years. Mr. Dickson, I don't think, consulted anybody else; he just
notified me, and then he went to whoever was in charge of leases and
rentals and told them that I had to go.
-
GARDNER:
- Had you had any dealings with him prior to this?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, he would come in once in a while to see me, and he always behaved
most amiably, except on the occasion when he told me I would have to
remove my sign.
-
GARDNER:
- Did he ever buy any books or art?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He had bought some books from me when I was downtown, and it was during
that time that Larry Powell, when he was working for me, had met Edward
Dickson. But he never bought anything substantial either in books or
art. I had no choice; I had to find a place. I think I was notified in
something like June; I had July, August, September, and October in which
to move, and I immediately went searching for a place. We were driving
along La Cienega Boulevard one Sunday, and I saw this red barn which was
occupied by Pascal's Antiques. I had always said that that was the place
I would like to have a bookshop in. Well, the idea of moving a book
business as far out west as La Cienega Boulevard seemed just like
disappearing into the woods. But I had concluded by that time that my
business did not depend so much on the drop-in trade; it depended upon
the letters we wrote and the announcements and catalogs we got out, and
the exhibitions we held, which would bring people to our place. We had
accumulated a mailing list, and that was our chief asset, as it should
be in every good book business.
-
GARDNER:
- Were there bookstores out this way?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, there were no bookstores on La Cienega. The only things there were
at all were some antique stores. And then a fellow by the name of
Stoeffen had a framing shop. His wife, Esther, had some cabinets with
decorative prints which she sold to interior decorators and people who
wanted prints to be framed by her husband, and that was the nearest
thing to a bookshop. There wasn't anything between downtown and Beverly
Hills that I can remember. The red barn was up for sale because the man
who owned the property and who had financed the business, Ernest Pascal,
had somehow fallen out with his brother, who was managing the business.
They had originally started in to sell American antiques and had built
up a very fine business. Ernest Pascal himself had great taste and
knowledge in American antiques. And then, for some reason, they switched
over to English antiques. English antiques didn't fit in an old red
barn, and there were other complications of which I know nothing; but in
any event, the brothers fell out and never spoke again, I understand,
and the building was put up for sale by Ernest Pascal. I got in touch
with Pascal, and he wanted $33,000 for the property. I said to him, "You
know, I don't have enough money to pay a down payment." And he said,
"Well, I'd like to see you there. You've got a good reputation, and I
think you would do well there, and I think it would improve the
neighborhood. So write your own ticket. Tell me what you can do." I
actually didn't have any money, but I went to Susannah Dakin and told
her my situation. Susannah Dakin lived over in Pasadena at the time. She
was one of the loveliest people I ever knew, and she had been a friend
of mine for a long time. She was a niece of Sarah Bixby Smith, whose
book called Adobe Days I published, and who was a
very dear friend. (Sarah Bixby Smith was the wife of Paul Jordan-Smith.)
Susannah was interested in art. She was interested in California
history; she wrote a couple of good books on the subject. And she had a
great deal of money. Her mother was Susannah Bixby Bryant, which meant
that she was one of the Bixbys and had inherited a great deal of Signal
Hill and some of the other oil properties in Long Beach. She had married
a very fine man by the name of Dr. Ernest Bryant, who had been
associated with Dr. John R. Haines. John R. Haines was the father of the
Metropolitan Water District and the municipal Department of Water and
Power, he was one of the progressives of the era of Spreckels and some
of the other reformers (they were called "millionaire socialists").
-
GARDNER:
- That's the Haines Foundation.
-
ZEITLIN:
- He was the founder of the Haines Foundation. Dr. Bryant was in the
office of John R. Haines and partook of the philosophy of John R.
Haines, which was that of responsible, forward-looking capital. Bryant
partook of the general idea of social responsibility but was not a
progressive or pro-labor in politics, whereas John R. Haines had been
very pro-labor in politics and had been responsible for the enactment in
California of the initiative and referendum and had participated in a
great many progressive political movements. He had been among those who
fought the Southern Pacific, backed up the streetcar men when they
organized their strike against the streetcar company. So Dr. Bryant was
indeed a very fine man socially, and as a person as well, and Susannah
partook, to a great degree, of his philosophy and of his character.
Susannah had come in to my shop when she was quite a young woman, before
she had her first child. I remember she and Arthur Millier and Dr.
Remsen Bird and some other people used to meet and have lunch, and we
were always engaged in little conspiracies. I went to her, and I told
her I had to move; I told her that I had this opportunity to buy the
building on La Cienega Boulevard and that I didn't have any money. And
she asked me how much I thought it would take to make a down payment. I
said I thought I could make the down payment for $9,000; that they would
accept that and let me meet the other in a series of payments in
addition to the regular installments, She said, "You go down to our
bank, to the bank where we do business--the Security bank--and see Mr.
So-and-so, and I will tell him about you." I went down, and he lent me
the money on my note, which was, of course, countersigned by her. So I
was then able to go back to Mr. Pascal and make him a proposal of paying
$9,000 the first year, so much a month for a year, and then meeting
another substantial payment, and so on for three successive years.
Afterwards, I would pay so much a month. And he was satisfied to let me
come in and do that. My next job was to bring the building up to
standard, because as long as Pascal occupied it, and he didn't need to
get a permit to remodel, everything was all right; but as soon as I
wanted to move in and occupy it, I had to get a permit.
1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE
(October 4, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- We'll continue now with a description of the barn.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The floor was three-quarter-inch tongue-and-groove yellow pine (the kind
of wood you can't get now), but it had to be all taken up. The entire
foundation had to be reconstructed. I got ahold of a contractor who had
been recommended to me by Mr. Pascal, who had done work for Pascal. His
name was Paul Lamport, and he later became a city councilman. Well, Mr.
Lamport agreed to take out the floor and put in the new foundation and
do the necessary reconstruction work. He pulled out all of the flooring,
threw it down on the ground, and he and his workmen walked away and left
the thing for about two months without doing a thing. In the meantime,
the deadline was approaching when I was having to move. I went to my
attorney, and I said, "What can I do?" And he said, "What kind of a
contract did you write? Did you get a completion clause into it?" And I
said no. And he said, "Contractors have so much work these days that
they don't have to please anybody." (It was right after the end of the
war.) He said, "All you can do is speak nicely to him and see if you
can't get him to come back to work on the job and get his work
completed." Well, I went back to Mr. Pascal, told him about the
situation, got hold of Lamport, and Pascal, who had given Lamport other
work and had other jobs at his disposal; finally got Mr. Lamport to
finish the place, but only about September 1, so that I had a month in
which to move everything. I rented a big five-ton truck and hired a
couple of men from the slave market, which used to be down at the corner
of Third and La Brea, where men would stand out on the sidewalk and wait
to be picked up for odd jobs. And I also got ahold of my old faithful,
Bill Ulevick, who really should deserve some notice. Bill was a Czech
who never had any education, grew up somewhere in South Dakota, never
had a good job, never made any money, but somehow or another managed his
life in such a way that he now, as an old man, is able to live on his
social security and the odd jobs he gets. He knows how to take advantage
of every benefit that he can properly and legally enjoy. He's part of
the oldsters groups, and so he is enjoying a great life. He also knew
where things were happening, and he had curiosity enough so that he
would take his bicycle and go on a day's ride just to discover where a
new freeway was going, or to see try-outs of new automobile equipment,
things like that. I've always admired him for somehow or another, with
all the handicaps and the limitations he had, having worked out his life
as well as he has. But he was always available to me to do lifting and
carrying, packing, hauling, shipping. And on many occasions, when I got
hold of a big library, it was Bill Ulevick who saved my neck and made it
possible for me to pack and load it and bring it down. So Bill Ulevick
and one crew stayed at the shop and packed boxes. When I arrived with
the truck, they would load them, and I would drive across town to La
Cienega and unload them, and the men there would then stack them up. So
that between the two groups, I managed to move the entire shop by going
back and forth, day after day, for what I think must have been an entire
month, and finally got everything moved. We had the building repainted.
We bought apple boxes and lined the sides, put strips on the front,
stained them, made them look like shelving. We built two bedrooms
upstairs and our living room, and we enclosed the back section, and that
is where we moved in and lived for quite a few years. In I believe it
was October of 1948, we opened our shop on La Cienega Boulevard. I must
add that it was not only because of Susannah Dakin that I was able to
move and open up, but a great deal of the credit for providing me with
the day-by-day funds that I needed, for giving me the moral support as
well, goes to a man by the name of John Valentine. John Valentine was a
man who had gone to Williams College. He'd grown up in Chicago, had gone
out to Decatur, Illinois, and he had made what must have been a
substantial amount of money as an oil distributor. He was an enterpriser
in many ways, and he acquired master leases to some important property.
His heart was in books, however. He'd been in World War I, and following
the war, he had remained in Italy as consul in one of the Italian towns
for some time. He was a man with a great deal of feeling, outwardly not
very impressive--he was quite conventional in his appearance--very
frugal, very much aware of the value of money and very well able to
manage money. He had financed the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago
—his partner was Ralph Newman--and he had kept it going during the
period when Ralph Newman was in the services. When Newman returned and
was able to take over management again, John Valentine made an
arrangement which allowed Newman to buy the business. Valentine had a
great deal of knowledge of Lincoln, middle western history, and middle
western literature. He was very knowledgeable not only about the early
history of the Middle West and the Civil War and the literary men of the
early days of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and so on, but he also had
known personally and had formed an outstanding collection of the books
of people like Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee
Masters, Sherwood Anderson. He knew their works, and he loved them, and
he read them and collected them. He was also a very ardent Democrat and
a great collector of anything that had to do with Franklin Delano
Roosevelt. He started the Franklin Delano Roosevelt collectors' Newsletter, and he built up quite a large group
of collectors of FDR material. He encouraged the publication of
bibliographies by men like [Ernest J.] Halter and books about Roosevelt.
He became the outstanding dealer in the country in that material after
he moved out here. He was a very warm, outgoing, sprightly man, and to
me he was really the difference between failure and success. John, for
some reason, took a liking to me; he spent a great deal of time--and for
a short while he actually worked for me—in the bookshop. But, of course,
I had no business (and he knew it) employing a man that was so much my
superior as a businessman, and financially much above me. But I think he
did all this out of sheer devotion, and it was John Valentine who came
forward with loans from time to time when I had opportunities to buy
collections, provided the money and was patient about getting it paid
back, and was very generous about the terms on which he lent it. No one
person has ever contributed so much toward helping me recover from the
failure of 1942 and getting back on my feet as John Valentine. He was
good company, too, and we made a great many very enjoyable trips
together. Among other things, we drove all night up to Berkeley once to
bid for the duplicates from the library of Dr. Charles Kofoid, who had
given a large collection of books--hundreds of thousands of books—to the
University of California biological sciences. He'd had an arrangement
with the university: they provided him with the space and the clerical
help for forming a great library on the biological sciences. He was an
outstanding protozoologist, but in addition to his accomplishments in
this field, he was an absolute madman about books, and he accumulated
them by the thousands . He bought whole bookstores at the time of the
inflation in Germany and Holland, and he had them shipped to the
University of California; the life sciences building gave him a whole
section of one floor into which he crammed these books, and [he] had
help with the cataloging. The understanding was that he was to leave the
books to the university upon his death. So he very happily pursued the
dream of every bibliophile buying and buying and buying--and the
university enjoyed the benefits of all this by accumulating this
library. The duplicates from the library amounted to 28,000 books at a
minimum, and these 28,000 books were put up at auction. He had provided
that all duplicates were to be sold for the benefit of a fund to be used
to help the university professors who married young and who wanted to
have children: because he and his wife, when he had started in his
academic career, had been too poor to have children when they were
young, and later they couldn't have them. It was his idea that the money
coming from this fund could be used as loans to young professors and
their wives who wanted children. He had made money, among other ways, by
buying some real estate along Wilshire Boulevard way out beyond where
the pavement ended, along between La Brea and Fairfax, which later
became known as the Miracle Mile. But when he bought it, there weren't
many people who wanted it. It became very valuable later on, and this
provided a great deal of money with which to buy the books that he had
accumulated, and for other endowments which he left. John Valentine
drove up to San Francisco, a strenuous drive, all night long; he
wouldn't stop to rest. He finally died when he was only sixty years old
because he was a man who drove himself too hard. He had this middle
western Calvinistic spirit, this form of self-denial, this feeling about
frugality which was in some ways really unnecessary. If we went into a
restaurant to have lunch or dinner, his check always came out fifty
cents to a dollar less than mine, and he seemed to eat just as well as I
did. So it was John Valentine, to a great extent, along with the loan
that Susannah Dakin made me, that made it possible for us to move from
Carondelet Street to La Cienega. At the end of a year, Susannah Dakin
sent me a check for $9,000. She said, "I want you to take this down to
the bank and pay off the loan which they made you and which I
guaranteed." She said, "I have invested a great deal of money in many
cultural activities in this community. Yours seems to be the best
investment I've made, or at least one of the most promising in terms of
the value it has to the community and the promise of continuity. So it's
quite consistent with my idea of what I should do with my money in
supporting cultural activities for me to do this, and you would be
pleasing me if you would accept this." I remonstrated, but she insisted,
and I can't say that I remonstrated to the point of returning the check.
I did go down and pay off the note to the bank, and was therefore free
of a substantial encumbrance which might have hampered me later. This
was a fine and wonderful gesture, and she came with her husband and a
couple of friends the night we held our opening of our new shop on La
Cienega Boulevard.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, last time you described with a little bit of epicurean detail, what
the opening was like on Carondelet. Did you have a similar sort of
thing?
-
ZEITLIN:
- We did have an opening on La Cienega Boulevard. I can't remember the
printed notice of the opening, but hordes of people came, and it was a
very enjoyable event, and there was lots of enthusiasm. But my memory is
very vague about the precise details, except that I again asked Helen
Evans Brown to cater, and by then she was a very well established
caterer and an authority on cookery, and had published several books.
-
GARDNER:
- So she catered them both then?
-
ZEITLIN:
- She catered both.
-
GARDNER:
- That's wonderful.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know whether we repeated the shrimp American which had been the
great dish of our first opening, but we may well have. Can I stop a
minute? [tape recorder turned off] You asked me about book clubs.
-
GARDNER:
- Let me ask you formally (as long as we turned it off and on) . You had
membership in many of them, and I guess we'll touch on them all, but I
think we probably should start with Zamorano since it's the one of most
local interest.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I was not a member of Zamorano until very recently. The fact is,
Zamorano had a policy from its beginning that booksellers were not to be
admitted. That was a peculiar policy, considering the fact that the man
who was their first secretary--and really, I think, the reason for
forming the club was Irving Way. Irving Way had been a member of the
firm of Way and Williams Publishers in Chicago, which had produced some
very fine books. He was also a bookseller, and it was he that introduced
Thomas Wise to one of the customers that was most important in Thomas
Wise's career. It was a Major [Wrenn] , whose collection that he bought
from Thomas Wise, was the core of what later became the great University
of Texas collection. (I will remember his name shortly.) In any event,
Irving Way had come to Los Angeles--I don't know just when; he must have
come in the twenties, late twenties, I think—and he had made his living
by going around selling books to people who were interested in building
libraries, mostly Spring Street lawyers and businessmen who sent him
from one to the other. He was a bookish man, he was knowledgeable, and
he wrote extremely well. He wrote a pamphlet for Ernest Dawson which
John Henry Nash printed, and which is still one of the most charming
things ever written about book collecting and certainly one of the best
printed items ever done on bibliophily and bibliomania. Well, a group of
men, including Arthur Ellis, who was an outstanding attorney in those
days here; John Treanor, who was head of the Riverside Portland Cement
Company; Will Clary, who was one of the senior members of O'Melveny and
Myers; and A.G. Beaman, who was an insurance man that I mentioned
before, decided that Los Angeles should have a club that would
correspond with the Roxburghe Club of London, the Grolier Club of New
York, the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, and the Club of Odd Volumes in
Boston. So they resolved to organize this club. Part of its purpose was
to provide an occupation for Irving Way, who was growing older and in
failing health, and so they set up at the University Club a clubroom
which was to be a library. They provided a small salary for Irving Way,
who was to serve as secretary, and they started in with a group of
bookish people, then, from various professions. They also included
Robert Cowan, who was then the librarian of the Clark Library; and Henry
R. Wagner, who had moved down to Southern California, was living in San
Marino, and who was certainly one of the outstanding collectors as well
as sellers of collections. Both of them had done what are still the
outstanding bibliographies on California and the Spanish Southwest. The Overland Route, Plains and
the Rockies of Henry Wagner and the Spanish
Southwest, Henry Wagner, are certainly classics which have not
been superseded. And then they did include C.C. Parker, who had Parker's
bookstore on West Sixth Street. He was an old gentleman; he was what
they call "clubbable," and for some reason, they didn't regard him as a
bookseller, even though he was a bookseller.
-
GARDNER:
- There's obviously something else beneath the surface here--do you want to
elaborate?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, yes, they didn't want what they felt might be an element of
commercialism in there. They looked upon Ernest Dawson as not being a
"clubbable" gentleman.
-
GARDNER:
- Why?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Ernest Dawson, for one thing, had declared himself to be a
communist. He was a very idealistic man. And for another thing, Ernest
Dawson didn't drink, Ernest Dawson didn't smoke, and Ernest Dawson was
really an outdoorsman: he was a Sierra Clubber rather than a Zamorano
Clubber. And they also just looked upon him really as too much in trade.
They did include Bruce McCallister as a printer, and they included
Leslie Bliss of the Huntington Library as a member. I don't remember who
else among librarians was included. From time to time, they would allow
booksellers like me to come if some guest insisted upon their being
brought along. They didn't have any Jewish members for many years; and
the first member that I can remember who was Jewish was Saul Marks, who
was brought in because he was obviously an outstanding printer and a man
that was very much respected, and it would have been a reflection upon
the Zamorano Club if they hadn't brought him in. The only time I came
was when people like Dr. Rosenbach were invited and insisted that they
wanted to bring me, or Frank Hogan was invited and said, "I'd like to
bring Jake Zeitlin." So for a period of many years, there were no
booksellers of the tradesman variety in the Zamorano Club. In fact,
until about five years ago, when I was asked to join, the official
policy remained intact, in spite of the fact that some of the leading
bookmen from around the world that would come to Los Angeles would come
to see me, would be my guests, would spend their time with me while they
were here, and none of the Zamoraners would see them. So I think that
ultimately it got to be a sort of a shame.
-
GARDNER:
- The impression I get is that, except for a few of the members, it was
more of a club than a book club.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, it was founded directly for the purpose of being a book club. It was
to encourage the collecting of books, the exchanging of knowledge about
books, to encourage the publication of bookish works, the
bibliographical works such as the Zamorano Eighty
, and to sponsor fine printing—the same ideals as similar book clubs.
-
GARDNER:
- Have other book clubs had similar restrictions?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know. Certainly the great Roxburghe Club in London had among its
earliest members Bernard Quaritch, and the Grolier Club had had among
its members publishers like Charles Scribner and booksellers like Dr.
Rosenbach. But it was really not until fairly recently, sometime in the
thirties, that David Randall was made a member of the club, and it
became sort of an overt policy to have booksellers as members of the
Grolier Club in New York. That came about because Charles Scribner, who
was one of the leading members of the Grolier Club and had been a
president, simply put it on the line and said, "Unless you admit David
Randall into the club, I shall resign and I shall also spread the word
among others." So David Randall was admitted, and from then on, other
tradesmen were admitted. The Zamorano Club had, I suppose, the notion
that if they favored one bookseller and admitted him, other booksellers
would feel they'd been excluded and would be resentful. But then they
admitted some printers and didn't admit others. Bruce McCallister, Saul
Marks, Ward Ritchie were members, but a great many other printers in
this area were not invited or admitted to the club, and certainly some
librarians were not invited or admitted. But that was a kind of a
traditional rule in the Zamorano Club up to the time I was asked if I
would accept membership. I was called by Ray Billington, who is a very
fine man—a very warm, outgoing, warmhearted personality. He asked me if
I would accept membership in the Zamorano Club if I were put up for
membership. Well, there evidently had been some scuffling among the
members about this whole matter, and I think that what happened is that
some of them decided that the time had come to make an issue of it and
put it up to the board and make me the test case. I was invited to
attend as a guest, as I had been in the past, but this time I was
invited to attend as a guest in order that I might be scrutinized. And I
evidently passed. In fact, there was hardly anyone at any of the
meetings that weren't people that I knew personally and weren't personal
friends, so that the whole question of admission to membership was kind
of secondary. And, frankly, I told Ray Billington at the time he asked
me that it would have meant a lot to me twenty-five years ago to be made
a member of the Zamorano Club and have the opportunity to mingle with
collectors and with the visitors, to bring my guests to the club, and to
feel that I was part of the community of bookmen other than booksellers.
But that time had now passed, and I really didn't have that much urge to
go out at night to sit and listen to a variety of speakers, some of whom
might be interesting, and a great many of whom by now would be dull to
me. But on the other hand, I didn't feel that I should refuse because of
the precedent it set. And so I was elected membership, and at the same
time Glen and Muir Dawson were elected, which I was very glad for. In
fact, I've said often before that the Dawsons were more entitled to
membership than I was, and that the first members among the bookselling
community here in Los Angeles should be the Dawsons. And they were
proposed and elected to membership at the same time that I was.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, you mentioned that Saul Marks was the first Jewish member of the
Zamorano.
-
ZEITLIN:
- As far as I know, he was the first Jewish member. Bob Weinstein, I
think, had been a member before, but I can't remember any others, except
an architect by the name of Gordon Kauffman who had removed himself from
all things Jewish and identification as a Jew a long time ago.
-
GARDNER:
- Were there any notable collectors who might have been in Zamorano but
weren't?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, no, frankly I can't remember any that might have been invited and
weren't invited; of course, I don't know all of them. Certainly, men
like Elmer Belt were members. I don't think that Bob Honeyman ever would
have accepted an invitation to membership, because he is not what they
call "clubbable": he doesn't care for that sort of thing, although he is
by far the greatest collector this part of the world has ever known, if
you except Williams Andrews Clark. And I would include Mrs. Doheny among
those that he surpasses, or Mrs. Getz —not, of course, Henry
Huntington—but certainly among the men who didn't have vast fortunes to
spend, he's by far the most distinguished collector this area has ever
known.
-
GARDNER:
- It's an easy move from there to the Book Club of California. Now, you
were a member of that for a long time.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, well, the Book Club of California never had any restrictions, except
at one time they restricted the number of members; that was more or less
a come-on. In other words, when they couldn't get more than 150 they set
the limitation at 200. But the Book Club of California was started in
San Francisco by Albert Bender, Jim Blake, and one other person whom I
can't identify at this moment. But in any event, it was these three men
who were the organizing committee. (It might have been John Howell, and
it might have been Oscar Lewis, but in any event, these were the men who
started the Book Club of California.) Their first publication was Robert
E. Cowan's Bibliography of [ The History of] California , [ and the
Pacific West ] , which was printed by John Henry Nash.
-
GARDNER:
- Was it a similar organization?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, yes, the general idea, though, was not so much having regular
meetings and dinners as sponsoring publications for distribution among
the membership. Later on the Roxburghe Club was formed, which was more
of a social club, like the Zamorano Club. But the Book Club of
California was always open to women. There was no reason why it
shouldn't be; their money was as good as anybody else's. And it opened
up offices on Sutter Street where they held regular exhibitions. Later
it started publishing a quarterly newsletter. It would get out these
annual (I don't know what they call them) broadsides or leaflets, which
have continued. They get one out every year on some subject, and it's
certainly been a great supporting force for the publication of finely
printed books, and for publication of books about books. It's encouraged
a great many printers, encouraged scholars, and it's encouraged
collecting. It's been a very fine organization, and it's continued to
have a good tradition all along. It's remarkable how it's gone on now
for, I suppose, well, certainly over sixty years. The Roxburghe Club was
formed much later, something like 1937.
-
GARDNER:
- Did you ever have any connection with that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, yes. I've been a member for many years and have spoken for them on
two occasions—no, I think three occasions. I spoke once on Galileo, the
"Bibliographical Misadventures of Galileo." The other time, I can't
remember the subject. I can remember being there and speaking, but I'm
very vague about the subject. Oh, yes, it was on Aldous Huxley and
Huxley as a critic of the arts, especially of Brueghel and [Jacques]
Callot. And the third time, it was an autobiographical talk, "Rambling
Recollections of a Rambling Bookseller." All of which they were very
nice about, seemed to not sleep through.
-
GARDNER:
- It follows that they didn't have the same policy as the Zamorano.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, they apparently never did. And in San Francisco, that could hardly
have been possible because among the great leaders and patrons in all
the arts were the Jews. They've always had a patrician group up there;
people like Albert Bender, Morgan Gunst, Ted Lilienthal, Albert
Sperisen, and Jim Hart have been leaders, have been outstanding men in
the world of book collecting, and in support of all cultural activities.
In fact, I can remember that Mayor Robinson of San Francisco said that
without the philanthropy of the Jews there would be no opera, no
philharmonic orchestra, no museum, and practically no arts in San
Francisco. But, of course, I think that's true of a great many
communities; the Jews seem to support these things disproportionately to
their numbers, partly because they represent a cultural tradition and
partly because it is a means for achieving distinction while bypassing
the usual channels of social advancement.
-
GARDNER:
- There were no restrictions, then, on booksellers either?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, in San Francisco, so far as I know, there were never any
restrictions, because men like David Magee and John Newbegin and John
Howell were always leaders in the development of these clubs. Jim Blake
was a bookseller. One of the three or four founders of the Book Club of
California had worked as a clerk at Newbegin' s, to begin with, and
later became the western American representative for Harper and Brothers
and was always looked upon as the dean of the book travelers on the
Pacific Coast during his lifetime, greatly respected.
-
GARDNER:
- And what about your association with the Grolier Club?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, my association with the Grolier Club doesn't go back very far. I
can't remember now how long I've been a member, but I suppose it would
be twelve or fifteen years. I was put up for membership by Bob Honeyman
and Bern Dibner, as well as I can remember, and have enjoyed it very
much: primarily because the clubhouse provides a meeting place for
bookish people and it also provides a place where I can meet people from
out of town in New York sometimes. The dinners have always been
outstanding, and the trips have been one of the great pleasures of
Josephine and me. They have always been real red-carpet, red-letter
experiences, and the members who have had the privilege of
participating, I'm sure, remember these trips as great events in their
lives.
-
GARDNER:
- What sort of trips?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, these are trips which are undertaken once every three years or so
to various parts of the world.
1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO
(October 4, 1977 and November 30, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- We were talking about the membership trips of the Grolier Club.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the trips of the Grolier Club are usually arranged to cover one or
maybe two or three countries. They are about three years apart, usually.
Arrangements are made in advance by a tour party which makes a dry run
by visiting the countries that we proposed to go to and setting up
programs and itineraries with the local book clubs and other
organizations. Very often the visits of the Grolier Club enjoy the
benefits of being sponsored by governmental agencies. The two which we
have gone on were, number one, the trip to Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and
Belgium; that was the first one. On those trips we stayed at the best
hotels. All we did was pack our baggage and leave it at our door, and
when we arrived at the next hotel, we were given our key, and we went
direct to the hotel room. Passports were all taken care of en bloc;
transportation was by the most comfortable buses or trains or planes,
sometimes special trains. We were received at palaces and castles and
the leading libraries and museums of the country, with special showings
usually with banquets and entertainment, and fed to the point where we
were bulging. Each morning you would start off in a bus and travel a
considerable distance to your first location, where you would be met
with champagne. Then at noon, you would arrive at another museum or
library or palace or private collector's home and sit down to a
magnificent, lavish dinner. Some of the dinners were given by the Bank
of Paris; in the Low Country, in Antwerp, the bank occupied what had
once been the palace of one of the Hanseatic merchants. There was a
waiter in back of every other seated banqueteer, seven wines and
liquors, the most unbelievably lavish food, and all of the things that
went with it. But the main thing is that we were given opportunities to
go into the stacks of libraries; the cases were opened up, and we were
allowed to handle magnificent manuscripts and original documents and
great books. And also, everywhere we went, they had prepared specially
printed gift books which represented the best quality of printing of the
country and, very often, some of the best facsimiles of some of the best
examples of the rarities of the various libraries we visited. It was
more like a royal procession than an excursion, and you always came back
exhausted, surfeited with good books, wonderful experiences, and an
abundance of food and drink and good company. Nothing that I can imagine
could compare with these trips. We did not go on the Italian one, which
was evidently the greatest that was ever put on. The high spot was the
banquet in Rome at the Castel Sant'Angelo with a torch procession.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, my Lord!
-
ZEITLIN:
- But I did go on one tour to Vienna with the Bibliophiles, where we were
banqueted at the Schwarzenberg Palace, ballroom music by the best
Viennese musicians, and then finally the ballet of the opera danced for
us on the lawn, accompanied by the Viennese Philharmonic Orchestra, and
a grand finale of fireworks. It would be impossible for a lone
individual [not] to enjoy this kind of a trip, and it was only because
of the imaginativeness and knowledge of the people who arranged the
trips--people like Mary Hyde and Gordon Ray and a number of the
others—that we were able to have access to so many great collections and
be entertained as we were.
-
GARDNER:
- Are there many local members of Grolier?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, not many local members. I think Elmer Belt, Marcus Crahan . . .
Larry Powell was a member, I think. Homer Grotty has always been a
member, and Bob Vosper is a member, but he has never gone on one of
these tours. Neither has Larry Powell. Elmer and Ruth Belt have gone on
several of them; we've always enjoyed their company. Warren Howell [of]
San Francisco has gone, and I can't remember who else from California.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, that's okay. I just wanted to get an idea of what sort of people.
Generally you seem to be the only Southern California bookseller.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I have for a long time been the only Southern California
bookseller.
-
GARDNER:
- What qualified one for membership?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, you're supposed to be an outstanding bookman; you're supposed to
have made some contribution to the world of books, either in terms of
publishing or writing or somehow advancing bookish activities and
bookish interests.
-
GARDNER:
- So it's really the most difficult of the clubs.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it has been, although there's some peculiar people who've gotten
in from time to time. I've never heard of a member being dropped, but I
suspect that on some occasions, not all members receive the programs of
forthcoming events.
-
GARDNER:
- Well put. [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- I think this is enough for this evening, and I hope it's been
satisfactory.
-
GARDNER:
- It has.
NOVEMBER 30, 1977
-
GARDNER:
- Well, as we've just discussed briefly today, I guess we'll talk about
some of the many, many collectors who've availed themselves of your
services over the years. And since you mentioned him first, and he would
be one of the ones that I would think of first, Frank Hogan might be a
good person to start with. He was sort of tangential to your circle,
wasn't he?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, not really. Frank Hogan was the greatest trial lawyer of his day. He
had his offices in Washington and was a little Irishman, not much over
five feet tall, immaculately dressed always, great style about him. Like
a number of other men who had risen to great success, he started as a
male secretary. There are a number of cases I know of men who started as
male typists and secretaries and developed great careers, and I think
part of that was due to the training of keeping good notes and precision
which being a secretary required, and also the intimate association that
they had with some very capable executives and men of consequence. Frank
Hogan' s first job as a secretary was to the president of some railroad.
There have always been a few men in executive positions who have
preferred to have male secretaries; Kenneth Hill, for instance, is one
of those men, but there have been a number of others. However, Frank
Hogan was a very poor 272 Irish boy who put himself first through
secretarial school and then through law school, became a law clerk in a
good office, and ultimately rose to be the most in demand of all trial
lawyers. He used to say that the best client is a scared millionaire,
[laughter] and he loved to say that he'd earned as much as a million
dollars in handling a single case. He came into public attention as a
result of being the lawyer defending E.L. Doheny in the case connected
with Teapot Dome. This was a case in which Secretary of the Interior
[Albert B.] Fall was convicted for taking a bribe from E.L. Doheny, and
Frank Hogan was so clever a lawyer that he got E.L. Doheny off with an
acquittal.
-
GARDNER:
- How did you meet Hogan?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Mrs. Doheny had become interested in collecting first editions--I don't
know how or why—but the first thing she started collecting was the Merle
Johnson list of American high spots. I had sold her a few things along
that line, but not very much. I think it must have been in 1937 that
Frank Hogan first came in to call on me, and he was such a genial man
and he had such a genuine enthusiasm for literature that I was charmed
by him. And he must have liked me and thought well of me; he invited me
to come up and have lunch with him at the California Club, and it became
a regular custom, whenever he was here in California on business having
to do with Doheny and other matters, while he was staying at the
California Club, that we would have lunch every Saturday. He liked that
not only because I came to lunch but I also brought Karl Zamboni, who
was working for me then, and Karl Zamboni' s very pretty wife,
[laughter] which was a very important factor in itself. Cathy Zamboni
was one of the most beautiful young women that ever lived. She looked
like a Tahitian and was very charming and ingratiating. And he would
also have Lucille Miller, who was Mrs. Doheny' s librarian, and a woman
whose first name was Jean, who worked in the office of the law firm that
represented the Dohenys here in Los Angeles. By a curious coincidence,
this Jean had also been a member of the jury that had acquitted E.L.
Doheny; I just can't say what the connection was, [laughter] but she had
a job for the rest of her life. We would start off with silver fizzes
for lunch, and after having imbibed a couple of those, we would proceed
to have a very luxurious lunch, well laced with wine, in a private
dining room. At the end of the lunch, Mr. Hogan would say, "What did you
bring in your bag this week, Jake?" Well, I had done, I think, a good
job of convincing Mr. Hogan that he could become a distinguished
collector — as he did--if he insisted on two things: one, that the books
he bought be important books; and the second, that they be in the finest
possible condition--original boards, uncut if possible. I got for him
the Grolier Club list of [ One] Hundred Books Famous in English Literature, which became a
sort of a guide to him. He also had A. Edward Newton's list, and he had
already bought a few books: they were all cripples--the kind of books
that a man commencing to collect would buy, like an imperfect fourth
folio of Shakespeare. He was enchanted by the idea that you could own a
Shakespeare at all, and the first time he saw a fourth folio of
Shakespeare, he thought this was like realizing an impossible dream, so
he impetuously bought it. I got for him a number of books in fine
condition. Naturally, I didn't have a very good stock of my own, and I
depended on books coming from other people. One of my best sources was
Byrne Hackett of the Brick Row Book Shop, who, I think, thought that he
was really getting away with murder because he sold me a copy of
Boswell's Life of Johnson--the original boards,
uncut—for something like $1,500, and I turned around and sold it to Mr.
Hogan for $1,800. I wonder what a copy of that, as fine as that, would
bring today. Hogan set out to buy the hundred books famous in English
literature, and he was, as I say, a very impetuous man. He was an
enthusiastic man, and he went direct to whoever was the best in the
field he was interested in. He became a personal friend of A. Edward
Newton. They exchanged visits, and he became a regular visitor at
Newton's house; I think it was along the railroad outside of
Philadelphia. I sold him a substantial number of books, and it was a
great pleasure because he would open them up and he would read passages
that appealed to him. He had a fantastic memory; he could remember,
verbatim, almost everything he'd ever read. On one occasion I brought
him a copy of Logan Pearsall Smith's book on William Shakespeare. He
read it through and, ever afterward, was able to quote that book in full
length if necessary. He was the kind of collector that you enjoyed
because you not only got well paid and promptly, but you also had the
pleasure of sharing the enjoyment of the books with the customer. I
remember I introduced him to the poetry of Charlotte Mew, a rather
obscure English woman poet who wrote some very poignant, very touching
lyrics--not a major poet by any means but, on the other hand, a poet of
real quality. She published only two books and one pamphlet, as well as
I remember, and I got both of those for him, and then he said, "Well,
we're going to have to find some manuscripts." And through the Poetry
Bookshop in London, I was able to get some manuscripts of Charlotte Mew,
and I remember how we would sip our silver fizzes and read aloud from
Charlotte Mew's manuscripts and weep as we read these lines. [laughter]
Every Saturday that he was in town was the occasion for one of these
meetings, and considering that I was a little bookseller who could
hardly pay his rent, he was really God's gift. Sometimes I would come
away with a check for $2,000 and sometimes a check for $3,500, and on
one occasion, I think he paid me as much as $7,200 for one Saturday
afternoon's sales to him. I remember being with him on one occasion just
after I had read that Dr. Rosenbach had bought the Lord Roseberry First
Folio of Shakespeare in London at Sotheby's for $85,000. I asked if that
had been bought for him, and he said, "Yes, and I'm just about to
consult the best bankruptcy lawyers." He had gone to see Dr. Rosenbach,
and Dr. Rosenbach maintained an apartment and a chef in connection with
the house in which he kept his books in Philadelphia and the beautiful
apartment which he had in New York. So if you were a really important
customer, you were housed in his apartment. You were dined and wined by
his private chef, and by the time dinner was over, and he was ready to
show you his books, you were totally without any capacity for
resistance. The doctor was a charming man and knew how to say the right
things about the books he had; and he did have, undoubtedly, the
greatest collection of important rarities in English literature of
anybody in the world in his day.
-
GARDNER:
- I'd better break in here to say that your wife is just signaling that our
own dinner is ready.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, right. [tape recorder turned off] Frank Hogan had already started to
buy the books on the Grolier Club list of a hundred great books of
English literature. There were two volumes issued. One contained
bibliographic description; the other were issues, essays, and I think
George Edward Woodberry was the author of the essays. I had introduced
him to this idea and brought him the Grolier Club books, and I supplied
him with a few things-- I think, [Thomas] Gray's "Ode," and perhaps
[Oliver Goldsmith's] Vicar of Wakefield, and Jane
Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which he considered
her best novel. The copy of Jane Austen's Pride and
Prejudice which I supplied him with was three volumes in the
original boards, uncut, some repairs to the binding, and restoration of
the labels, and yet it seemed to be about the best copy you could
possibly hope to find of a book so fragile in its original format.
Several years afterward, Lionel or Phillip Robinson of the Robinson
Brothers in London came around and said to Mr. Hogan, "You know, that
copy of Pride and Prejudice was made up, and it
was made up in Newcastle-on-Tyne by a man named Arthur Rogers, who took
three different copies and put them together and then had them bound by
a very skillful binder in such a way as to look like the original boards
uncut. Well, Frank Hogan didn't say anything. They knew that he'd bought
them from me; and the Robinson brothers, I'm sorry to say, liked to
discover good collectors and then spoil their association with whoever
was their bookseller, and then they would move in. They liked nothing
but big collectors whom they could take over, and they were very good at
it, I must say. They once did it to the bookseller who used to come to
them and buy books to sell to Dr. [Martin] Bodmer in Switzerland. He was
an old gentleman who'd been a bookseller in Germany and had settled in
London. And when they discovered what fine books this man was buying
from them and taking to Bodmer, they wheedled out of him who was buying
these books. And they went direct to Bodmer and said, "Why do you buy
these books from this old man when we're the ones that have these books,
and he gets them all from us?" However, they later came out here and
told me, "You know, that Pride and Prejudice you
sold Hogan was a made-up copy." I was very much embarrassed and very
distressed; he'd paid me something like $2,500 for it, which was a lot
of money, even then, for a Jane Austen. So I called up Hogan and said,
"Mr. Hogan, I wouldn't want you to keep that book. I can't afford to
give you back the money--I haven't got it--but I will give you credit on
anything else you want to buy. You can turn in the book, and when there
are other books you want, you can just take the other books in
exchange." "No," he said, "I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keep
that book because I don't like tattletales. " He didn't really care for
the fact that the Robinsons had come to him with this story, because he
understood what their motive was. Frank Hogan, as I say, was invited to
visit Dr. Rosenbach. He called Rosenbach from Washington, and by that
time, Rosenbach knew more or less who Frank Hogan was, and [Rosenbach]
said, "Well, come stay at our house." So Dr. Rosenbach put him up in
grand style, wined and dined him, offered him his best cigars
afterwards. And after regaling him with stories of the great collections
he'd formed, the great rare books he'd bought, and the high prices he'd
paid, he proceeded to show Mr. Hogan very fine copies of most of the
other books in the [Grolier Club] list of one hundred great books in
literature-- the ones that were hardest to get, such as the [William]
Caxton Chaucer. Hogan was so enchanted that that night he proceeded to
indebt himself to Rosenbach for about a million dollars.
-
GARDNER:
- That's enchantment! [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. Here he saw, all in one place, all these great books in English
literature, famous copies with wonderful provenance, and he had the
feeling that he must get them all now. So the next time Mr. Hogan came
out to California and I brought him a satchel of books, we had lunch,
and then I started to unpack the satchel, and he said, "Jake, it's no
use. I owe Dr. Rosenbach more money than I'll be able to pay him in my
lifetime. I'm indebted for the next ten years, and I just can't buy
anything else." Well, I must say that I wasn't very happy that Dr.
Rosenbach had capitalized on my having educated a collector. Later on
Dr. Rosenbach came out to California; I think it was '38. He came to my
shop, was very friendly, not condescending, made me feel that he was
honored to be able to call on me, invited me to dinner. He was staying
at the Town House. Frank Hogan was also in town, and we arranged a
dinner for Rosenbach to which Frank Capra, Frank Hogan, Lucille Miller,
Frank Capra ' s wife, and Jo Swerling were invited, along with Jules
Furthman, who was in those days a considerable collector of rare books.
The Wine and Food Society had a grand banquet one night later. I took
Dr. Rosenbach as my guest; they made a great fuss over him, and I was
given the privilege of introducing him at the dinner. Mrs. Doheny gave a
tea for him to which I was invited (it was about ten or twelve years
after I'd worked for Mrs. Doheny as a gardener) . I must say he was very
gracious about asking people to invite me. Jean Hersholt gave a grand
evening lawn party for Dr. Rosenbach. (Dr. Rosenbach, I'm sorry to say,
was disgracefully inebriated before the evening was over.) At the end of
his visit here, he went back to Philadelphia, and he hadn't sold one
dollar's worth of books. With all the grand books he brought out--which
included the original manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses, the original manuscript of The Red
Badge of Courage, the original manuscript of Oscar Wilde's Salome , a choice selection of important English
books, like [Robert] Herrick's poems (first edition) , and the first,
second, third, and fourth folios of Shakespeare, and a number of other
very outstanding items—he hadn't sold anything. There just were no
buyers; even Mrs. Doheny didn't buy anything from him. And to add insult
to injury, his brother Philip—who was always sort of downgrading Abe,
his brother, because he didn't think Abe was a good businessman or knew
how to make money (Philip was a man who dealt in antiques and old
silver, and so on, the same business) --came out here. He was a rather
vulgar man; he knew how to live in style, but he certainly was not an
aesthete or a cultivated man. He always brought out some blond cutie
with him. He came out and called on Mrs. Doheny and sold her a
tapestry--the kind that most people wouldn't give house room to and
which were being sold at auction houses at knocked-down prices. He sold
her the tapestry for, I was told, $100,000. Then he went back and
gloated over poor Dr. Rosenbach and said, "You're no good as a
salesman."
-
GARDNER:
- Why was the market so difficult?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, a lot of people's stocks had sold so low; either they lost all
their investments by buying on margin, or what they had left couldn't be
sold for enough to buy a piece of cheese with. And the doctor was having
a very hard time. He told me that he had to sell something; he owed the
banks $300,000. And I said, "Don't worry, if you owe them that much
money, they'll never close you down." And that was true. Well, he lived
it out, although he himself never really hit his stride again as a great
bookseller. People would come because going to Rosenbach 's was like
going to Tiffany's.
-
GARDNER:
- What happened to Hogan?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Hogan formed a beautiful collection. He came out here once and was given
a special dinner by the Zamorano Club. He invited me to be his guest at
that dinner. He brought along some of his choicest books to display. I
know he had a copy of "Endymion"; he had a book which contained Milton's
"Lycidas"; he had Shelley's Revolt of Islam and
Keats 's poems (I've forgotten which one just now) --all special copies,
either presentation or association or annotated. He brought along a
little satchel of his choicest books to show the Zamorano Club and asked
me to be the one to show them to the members of the club—and that was
about twenty years before they decided to admit booksellers like me to
the membership. I must say that when they invited Dr. Rosenbach to the
Zamorano Club, he also was kind enough to ask me to come along as his
guest. Frank Hogan defended Andrew Mellon, who had been accused of some
kind of improper action at the time that he was secretary of the
treasury under Herbert Hoover, I suppose, or maybe under Coolidge or
Harding. In any event, he made a deal directly with Franklin Roosevelt
that if the government would not prosecute, Andrew Mellon would give the
nation the National Gallery of Art and his entire personal collection of
art. I think, a very good trade-off. [laughter] It saved Andy Mellon
from disgrace and saved the government from very expensive and difficult
legal proceedings, and got us the National Gallery of Art, of which Paul
Mellon has remained a member of the board of trustees, and to which the
Mellon family has made a great many very generous contributions. Frank
Hogan finally fell ill. I don't know exactly what it was; it was
something that was a degenerative condition having to do with the
circulation, I think — probably arteriosclerosis. He settled in Palm
Springs for the last year or so of his life, and he died out there. He
died at a rather early age--I don't think he could have been more than
sixty when he died--and he certainly left a reputation among book
collectors and booksellers like no one else in my time. He was very
enthusiastic about the books he bought. He gave dealers pleasure when he
bought books. He also was very generous: he underwrote people like Jake
Blanck. He enabled Jake Blanck to begin the Bibliography of American Literature. He liked booksellers, and
he was willing to see that they made a good profit and to make them his
friends. When selections from his library were sold at, I think it must
have been, the American Art Galleries (before Sotheby Parke Bernet took
over the American Art Galleries) , it was a very bad time and a lot of
his books didn't bring as much as they should have, but some of them
brought very good prices. Today the same sort of a collection would make
a sensation on the market. I suppose in all he didn't have a great many
books in quantity, but he had a remarkable number of choice books. There
isn't anyone I know who was more loved by the bookselling world, more
respected by the legal world. He was the president of the American Bar
Association for a term and, incidentally, was influential in the passing
of the child labor laws. In other ways, he couldn't have really been
called a friend of the laboring man and the poor, but he did exert
himself in certain areas. He was a man of great tolerance, a wonderful
storyteller, and a man everyone loved. I can't remember anybody except
Walter Barrett who, as an individual, made himself as much a part of the
bookselling world and the collecting world as Frank Hogan, considering
the few years in which he was active as a book collector. And I remember
getting a letter once from A. Edward Newton saying, "If you haven't met
Frank Hogan, you should do so. He is a delightful storyteller, a very
generous man, and he has a memory like Macaulay. " [laughter] Later
Frank Hogan wanted that letter, and I couldn't find it. I searched and
searched, and I would have given anything to find it and give it to him.
Because in the last days, when he was quite ill, he sent someone to me
and said, "Couldn't you possibly find that letter of A. Edward
Newton's?"
1.15. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE
(November 30, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- I suggested that next you talk about Elmer Belt.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think that would be a good subject. I'm not sure that I haven't
talked about him before; but even if I have, whatever I may have said is
worth repeating. Elmer Belt, like a number of the other great
collectors, is remembered first of all for being a fine human being. He
was, I think, one of the most truly endowed physicians that I ever knew.
He is the kind of man who makes people feel better just by coming into
the room. He creates an air of assurance when he talks to them and when
he listens to them. He has the faculty for making each person he talks
to feel like he is totally concentrated on what they have to say and
totally interested in what their particular problem is. And I think that
many patients feel better after their first meeting with him, simply
because they feel that here is somebody who understands, them; and that
in itself, of course, can be a tonic.
-
GARDNER:
- How did you first meet him?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He came into my shop with his nurse, Miss Katherine Theil. Wherever
Elmer Belt was in those early years (my acquaintance begins in 1928) ,
Miss Theil was there, too. She managed his office; she managed his
appointments; she managed every activity that took place in connection
with his practice and, I think, took care of most of his social
engagements as well. She knew as much about him and his life as he did
himself (and perhaps even more) , and she was the perfect
secretary-assistant. She was totally dedicated to him. Her day began
much before he arose, even though he arose very early, and ended long
after he left the office. He and Miss Theil came into my shop, and he
immediately cast that peculiar Elmer spell on me, which has lasted until
now. He asked if I had any old medical books, and it happened that I had
just one medical book. It was a very thick, small folio having to do
with pathology. The vellum binding was very wrinkled; and it was a book,
I would say, about ten inches high by about eight inches wide, figuring
from the back to the fore edge. I remember the title. The title was
Bonetus's Sepulcretum, and it consisted of an
immense number of post mortems. So in 1928, I think it must have been
September or October of that year, I sold my first medical book and the
first book that I sold Elmer Belt—Bonetus's Sepulcretum. The book wasn't mine; it had been turned over to
me to sell by a Dr. Charles Lincoln Edwards, a wonderful old gentleman
who at that time was connected with the public school system. He had
maintained a sort of a museum of natural history to which classes in the
public schools came. He gave lectures on birds and natural history of
all sorts. He and his wife were quite elderly even at that time. He'd
had a considerable career. His first position that I know of was at the
University of Texas, where he was in the zoology department. Either
while there or shortly before, he compiled what I think is the first
book on folk songs that is separately and strictly devoted to folk
songs. It was published by the American Folklore Society in 1895, and it
is called Bahama Songs and Stories. I am very
proud to possess a copy which he inscribed to me. Dr. Edwards came under
fire while he was at the University of Texas because he was an advocate
of the theory of evolution according to Darwinian terms; and of course
in those days, to be a Darwinian and an evolutionist in Texas was to be
a candidate for burning at the stake. He was dismissed from the
University of Texas just about the time David Starr Jordan was forming a
faculty for what was to be Leland Stanford, Jr. , University, and he
recruited Dr. Edwards, who went to Stanford and remained there for a
great many years, until, I think, his retirement. Then he came down to
Southern California and, after his retirement, commenced his new career
of teaching children in the public schools about natural history. He had
a number of assistants who later became outstanding: one of them, whose
name I can't remember right now, became one of America's foremost
herpetologists. He had over the years acquired a number of books; some
of them, I think, just because he knew they were good books and he saw
them going for very little. This Bonetus's Sepulcretum he must have acquired for that reason, because I don't
think he or many other people-- outside of the men who were interested
in discovering the causes of death by dissecting the cadavers of the
deceased—would have been interested in this book. He brought me a number
of other great books— [John] Gould's One Hundred Birds
of the Himalayas; a number of other of Gould's important books,
which I sold for very, very little money. Now, some of those books are
bringing $25,000; we probably sold them for $700 or $800 or $1,000. I'm
very sad because Dr. Edwards and his wife could well have used the
money. Dr. Belt told me something about his interests, and he said, "In
particular, if you get anything of Leonardo da Vinci, I would like to
have it." So I've forgotten, but something came along that was related
to Leonardo, and I called his office. Miss Theil said, "He's very busy,
but why don't you come up here and wait until he's through with his
patients, and then he can see you and see the book." So I came up, and I
brought along a satchel full of other books, and I discovered that Elmer
Belt not only was a very kind and considerate man but that he had very
little resistance to books. And he bought several books from me--which
fortunately enabled me to pay the rent that month, as well as the
payroll —and also that one book having to do with Leonardo. He said,
"There's a book I want you to get for me, and I want you to get two
copies. Send off to Italy and get me two copies of [Ettore] Verga's Bibliographia Vinciana , " which is the
bibliography of all books by or about Leonardo da Vinci, up to somewhere
like 1912, I guess. I sent off to Italy and got the two copies of the
book, and when they came, I brought them to him. And he said, "All
right, I will keep one and you keep one, and I want you to get me every
book listed in here. I can't afford very much money--I can probably
afford $200 a month--but buy them as you find them. If you see something
very important that's more money, speak to me about it, and maybe I can
find a way to buy it. Now," he said, "I'm going to leave the price up to
you, so go easy on me. Don't overcharge me. If you do, I won't buy
anything else from you." Well, that was good enough incentive, and a
caution to me. I wanted very much to keep Elmer Belt happy, so I added a
very minimal profit to most of the books I sold to him. But having a
customer who'd buy as much as $200 a month steadily was a very valuable
thing to me. And also having this opportunity to do what I think every
good bookseller would like to do--that is, build a collection from its
very foundation —was a great inspiration to me and a great satisfaction.
So from that time on, through the years, I've continued to send Elmer
Belt books, sometimes no more than one a month and sometimes two or
three a week. If it was in the Verga bibliography and he didn't have it,
he wanted it. And with that as an incentive, of course, I was able to
buy a lot of books which I wouldn't have bought otherwise and sell them
to him at a short profit, because I was sure of a sale when I bought
them. And having a sure sale made it easy for me to put on a small
profit, whereas if I had to buy them for stock and keep them at the risk
of waiting a long time before selling them, I would have had to put a
larger profit on them. So it worked out very well for me. And as time
went on, the collection grew. Then along came a little woman by the name
of Kate Steinitz. I think she arrived here about 1942. Kate was a rather
overwhelming little German woman who had a way of commanding attention.
At first when I met her, he [Dr. Belt] invited me to come over to his
office, and he said, "I want you to meet someone." Here was this little
woman who had come into his office to have an examination because she
had kidney stones. Her husband had been a doctor in Germany; they'd come
to New York as refugees. Her husband couldn't get a license to practice.
He committed suicide, and Kate was left with three daughters to support
and very little money. She managed somehow— I don't know how, but she
manged to carry on. She came out here, and somebody told her to go see
Dr. Elmer Belt about her kidney stones, and she went to see him. And
Elmer Belt said, "Well, we'd better make an appointment for you to go to
the hospital tomorrow." And she said, "Oh, no, I'm not going to go to
the hospital. My husband always told me that doctors want to cut easy
and that people die more from being cut than from anything else, and I'm
not going to go." "Well," he said, "it's your choice." But then she saw
all these books in his office, and she started to talk to him, and it
turned out that she was very knowledgeable in the history of art. She
had this quick intelligence and quick perception of people and what they
were interested in. So Elmer Belt thought, "Well, this is an interesting
person," and he invited me to meet her, and we got acquainted. And I
must say, I was put off at first. I really thought, "My God, she's just
too much." I don't know how to cope with a woman who overwhelms you with
conversation, and in sort of a compelling way. But she didn't let him
operate. She stayed around a while, and then she went back to New York.
And she wrote me a letter, and she said, "I understand you're supplying
Dr. Elmer Belt with books connected with Leonardo." She said, "I have to
stay here in order to get my citizenship papers before I come back to
the Coast—I'm going to go back out there—and I'd like to scout for you
and pick up books for you." Within a very short time, she reported some
outstanding things, including one of the best books that's in Elmer's
collection, a copy of [Luca] Pacioli's Divina
Proportione. It was published, I think, in 1508 or 1509, and it
is the only book of his time for which Leonardo actually supplied the
drawings. It is a very rare book indeed and today up in around the
$10,000 class. I think she got it for him for something like $450 from
an old sea captain. It was a curious story which I won't go into. And
then she haunted Weyhe ' s and the other art-book stores and found other
Leonardo books, quite obscure ones which I certainly would have missed
and Elmer wouldn't have had the time to hunt up. She would send them
out, and I would tell Elmer where I got them; that she had found them
for me. She would write him also [in that] peculiar scratchy hand of
hers with corrections every other word. When she came back, the story I
have is that she went to see Dr. Belt; and Belt said, "See here, Mrs.
Steinitz, I think you should have those kidney stones removed, and I'll
tell you what I'll do: if you will let me remove your kidney stones, I
will let you come to work for me as my librarian." Well, that was a
temptation beyond Kate's power to resist, and very shortly thereafter,
she was operated on, her kidney stones removed, and she started in to be
Elmer Belt's librarian. She was a most peculiar librarian: she didn't
know anything about librarianship in the ordinary sense, so she had to
learn all about the systems of classification and descriptive
bibliography. But she learned very rapidly, and she knew how to consult
the right people, how to consult the right reference books, and nothing
ever put her down. She had this belief, which I think is very important,
that if somebody else could learn it, she could too. She learned
Italian, started to translate from the Italian, took lessons in
conversational Italian. She, of course, knew German and French already.
And she had this very quick perception. She had this curiosity about
everything on earth and, I must add, the most broadly tolerant
understanding of anybody I ever knew. There were many things in art and
human behavior which I found rather hard to tolerate, but I never found
her unable to or unwilling to tolerate. She always knew there was
something justifiable, something worth learning about every form of
expression in art and every form of human behavior.
-
GARDNER:
- How did Elmer Belt get interested in Vinciana?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Elmer Belt, when he was a medical student, of course, had to learn
to do anatomical drawings, and in the course of learning to do
anatomical drawings, he was shown some models in Folio A or Folio B of
Leonardo, the edition published in Paris. And I think it was George
Corner--there were two men who both, I think, were very influential in
introducing Elmer to Leonardo. One was Dr. George Corner, who's still
alive. He came to Berkeley as a professor as a very young man, and the
students couldn't believe that this man who looked younger than most of
the students could be a professor of physiology or anatomy. His senior
there, the man under whose sponsorship he came, was Dr. Herbert Evans,
who was a very colorful man himself, about whom I shall talk later.
Herbert Evans not only was a great lecturer and a great physiologist,
but he also had great facility at teaching anatomy by drawing on the
blackboard as he lectured. He also had the trick of drawing with both
hands. I think he and George Corner together could have shown some of
the anatomical drawings of Leonardo to Elmer; and Elmer, of course,
quickly recognized the quality of these drawings, in terms of their
anatomical correctness and the extent that Leonardo was able to describe
what he knew. The thing about anatomy through the ages is that
anatomists never drew more than they were capable of seeing through
their knowledge of anatomy. And as their knowledge increased, their
capacity for drawing increased--unlike the artists, who could draw the
human figure with a great deal more accuracy and putting in more of the
details of what was there than the anatomists. The anatomists drew
diagrammatically, I think one should say, and they drew from the
standpoint of knowledge of the function of what they were drawing, the
same way that primitive man never knew what he was looking at and could
never draw the human body as he saw it, even though he'd cut it to
pieces many times. So Elmer started off, when he was able to (I think,
at that time, he was a very poor medical student, and he couldn't afford
it) by getting himself the Folio A and B of Leonardo, which had to do
with anatomical drawings. It became his ambition to form a library of
everything by and about Leonardo, so that anyone else coming after him
could go to one place and find everything that he might want to refer to
if he wanted to learn more about Leonardo. In later years, when he put
his collection at UCLA, his dream was realized, most significantly when
Ladislao Reti, who was chosen to edit the newly discovered Codex Madrid, decided to come to UCLA and stay
close to the campus and use the Elmer Belt Library [of Vinciana] ,
because he felt that no place else in the world was there everything
that he would need in order to translate and comment on the Madrid
Codices. Not only did Reti use the library in that way, but so did a
great many other scholars. Kate Steinitz played a very important role in
making the library known. She would issue catalogs of acquisitions; she
wrote essays; she communicated with scholars; she answered queries.
Elmer did his share by studying the things which came. He had a quick
eye: as the books arrived, he would look into them. Kate would point out
some things; a great many things he was quick to see, so that he did
some very good lectures on Leonardo the anatomist. And between Kate and
Elmer, they made what could have been just an accumulation of books into
a great tool for scholarship and an inspiration. It was Kate who
perceived the capabilities of Carlo Pedretti when he was a young man in
Bologna and had practically no recognition. When he wrote her and she
saw what great capacities he had, she encouraged him to go on. She
arranged for Dr. Belt and Bern Dibner to put up the bond to sponsor him
for his immigration to the United States. She attracted a great many
other scholars to the Belt Library. When she traveled in Europe, she
called on the libraries and museums--the curators and directors--and the
bookshops; she had every bookseller in Europe and the United States
writing to her whenever they got anything of a Leonardesque nature, and
she got her pick of a lot of very good books that way. She went to the
town of Vinci. It was partly through her contacts—more because of
Elmer's own visit there —that the town of Vinci, which was Leonardo's
birthplace, acquired a library of Leonardo books which Elmer gave them.
They had nothing in the way of books or any collection at all of
Leonardo material in Vinci until Elmer Belt started sending them
material and gave them the nucleus for a library. Following that, the
city of Vinci founded an annual Leonardo lectureship, and both Elmer
Belt and Kate Steinitz, as well as Ladislao Reti and Carlo Pedretti,
were in various years the Vinci lecturer. And when Kate Steinitz came
there to lecture, the Italian Air Force staged a fly-by over Vinci.
Elmer Belt is an unusual individual. He's touched a great many people.
He has encouraged a great many people; he's been part of the lives of a
great many people; and I don't know anyone, no matter how famous they
are, towards whom so many people have a great feeling of love and
devotion. When the national library at Madrid agreed to lend a group of
the drawings of the Codex Madrid to the
Smithsonian Institute for an exhibit, Elmer Belt and I were invited to
come be present at the opening and to attend a dinner on the occasion.
Silvio Bedini, who was in charge of this, had first invited me and then
sort of tried to disinvite me, for reasons that I have to reserve until
another time. When he invited Elmer Belt, Elmer said, "I'll only come on
one condition, and that is that Jake come with me. Otherwise, I won't
go." So I went with him, and we stayed overnight at the Cosmos Club,
attended the lecture and the opening festivities. The next morning, we
took the plane back to Los Angeles. On the way back, he fell asleep, and
the stewardess looked at him, came over and arranged a blanket over him,
and she said, "Who is that wonderful man?" He hadn't opened his mouth,
he was asleep, but she said, "He must be somebody special."
-
GARDNER:
- Wonderful. [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- And I said, "Yes, he is." And later on, when I told the story somewhere,
I said, "That's our Elmer. He can charm them even when he's asleep."
[laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- What about the giving of the library to UCLA? What were the
circumstances of that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- That became rather complicated. I'm not acquainted with all the details,
although I was involved. He had expressed his intention of giving it to
UCLA, and at that time, Larry Powell was the librarian. Bob Vosper was
the assistant librarian, and Franklin Murphy was the chancellor of the
university. And Elmer Belt had told them that he wanted to give the
collection. I then was engaged to make an appraisal of it, and then he
didn't hear anything from them for quite a while. He rather felt that it
was up to them to make the next move, but they somehow or another let it
drift, until one day I heard that he was being courted by the Huntington
Library. Well, it happened that the evening after I heard this, I had
been invited to a little gathering at Chancellor Murphy's house, and at
the dinner table I said, "Look, I have something important; I want
everybody here to listen to me. UCLA's going to lose a great collection
unless they do something very quickly —Elmer Belt's Leonardo collection.
He thinks you don't appreciate it." (This was another case of their not
moving in like they should have, except this turned out successfully.) I
said, "Now, don't lose any time. Get ahold of Elmer as quickly as you
can. Tell him that you will provide space for it, offer him a plan of
what you will do, and don't let this library get away from you. " So
they very quickly did get over to see Elmer, and Franklin Murphy
deserves a great deal of the credit —also Larry Powell, but Franklin
Murphy had a way of showing his interest and also making a proposal that
was definite and had something distinctive about it. He proposed to
Elmer Belt that they would set up the Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana in
separate quarters, and that they would conserve it properly and not
distribute it in the stacks in the university or let it get dispersed or
lose its identity. And this, of course, is what was needed in the case
of a collection like this, and I think it was very much to the benefit
of the university as well as to the satisfaction of Elmer Belt and very
much to the credit of Franklin Murphy, that the library did come to
UCLA. Now, at first it was housed in a separate couple of rooms, but at
least it was kept segregated, and Kate was made sort of an honorary
curator. Elmer paid her salary, but Kate was there in charge. I'm sure
that the people at the university did not appreciate Kate. They saw her
as this little, gnarled, rather demanding old woman [who was]
temperamental and hard to understand [and] a little bit absentminded:
she wouldn't always lock the room when she left it, and so on, which was
terrible for them. And I think they far underestimated what a great
person they had there and what an important asset to the university she
was, in terms of bringing a great many important scholars there to
visit, see the place, and meet the other faculty members. They failed to
accommodate her as much as they should have. Even if she was
troublesome, I don't think she was that troublesome. I know some other
people who made that mistake, too. One art dealer here in town who I
tried to get interested in selling something for Kate sneered at it and
said, "That gabby little old woman. I don't want to be bothered with
her." It turned out that this was one of the very important works of
Kurt Schwitters, who was the hottest thing in the European market. And
she had more of them, which this man might have gotten hold of if he'd
just had the perception to see what kind of a person Kate was. Well,
Elmer is thoughtful in so many ways, it's hard to conceive of how he has
time to be as considerate of everyone as he is. You never fail to get a
note of appreciation from him, usually written in his own hand, for the
slightest thing that you might remember to do for him. And it's been my
pleasure to be with him on two journeys to Europe. It has been my
pleasure to be present at a number of his birthday parties, to enjoy his
confidence, and to share lots of things with him. I can't think of a
more wonderful man. Ruth Belt and he both came to my seventy-fifth
birthday party, which was a great compliment. Elmer is now about
eighty-six or eighty-seven years old and isn't too spry, at least
certainly not in the evenings. And Ruth Belt doesn't go out at all--she
is totally housebound-- but she made the effort and came to my birthday
party and sat next to me, and I couldn't have had a greater compliment.
-
GARDNER:
- Would he be about your longest-running continuous collector?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I suppose so, now. I can't remember anyone else who is still alive that
bought books from me earlier. I have had people turn up lately whom I
knew as early as 1925, when I first went to work at Bullock's, but I
can't remember that any one of them--well, yes, there are two people
whom I remember who came first as customers. One of them was a lovely
woman who was a very young, wonderful creature. Mina Cooper she was
then; she's married to Herb [H. Arthur] Klein now, and lives in Malibu,
and she's still a very dear friend, And the other was a young woman
intern by the name of Esther Somerfeld, who was interning at County
Medical. She came in to buy a book for a wedding present for a couple of
friends, and then she came to buy a present for another young intern
there by the name of Eugene Ziskind, and later they were married. A few
weeks ago, we went to their fiftieth wedding anniversary party, and she
introduced me to the woman who bought a copy of Shelley's poems from me,
which was given to the husband on the occasion of their wedding.
-
GARDNER:
- That's marvelous. [laughter] You have a group of golden-anniversary
people all over the city.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, right now I've been attending more than one fiftieth wedding
anniversary, and so I'm glad of that.
-
GARDNER:
- To move to your list--I guess, after Frank Hogan, among the older
collectors or the longer-ago collectors, you have Albert Bender.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. I want to say one more thing about Elmer Belt. Elmer Belt's not
just a collector in one field. Some people may think that Leonardo da
Vinci has been Elmer Belt's exclusive collection. Of course, he's formed
a very great collection of rarities in medicine. He has some important
books in the history of science, such as a fine copy in the original
presentation binding of [William] Gilbert on the magnet [De Magnete], a very fine copy of Tagliacozzi on
plastic surgery, of course the first and second edition of Vesalius's
Anatomy [ De Humani
Corporis Fabrica ] , and a good many of the important classics
in medicine. But in addition to that, he had a collection of Upton
Sinclair which was quite extensive, not only in English but in
translations into many languages, and that collection he gave to
Occidental College. He formed a collection of the works of S. Weir
Mitchell; a collection of the works on nursing, including letters and
books of Florence Nightingale; a collection of D.H. Lawrence; and a very
exhaustive collection of books on whaling--he had become interested in
the anatomy of the whale because of a peculiar anomaly having to do with
the kidneys of whales. (I suppose peculiar anomaly is a redundancy—an
anomaly is a peculiarity.) He has collected a lot of fine-press books
and books on art outside of Leonardo da Vinci. He is an omnivorous
reader in a great many areas. Elmer Belt's collecting is a reflection of
the breadth of his mind and also his infinite capacity for fine detail
as it expresses itself in surgery and in his knowledge of medicine. In
some ways, you could take his library, and it would be a portrait of the
man.
-
GARDNER:
- Have you ever dealt with him on a professional basis?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. He's operated on me.
-
GARDNER:
- That seems to be the thread that runs through many of our oral
histories.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Is that so? Elmer Belt? Well, he had, at one time, the largest surgical
practice of any single man in the United States.
-
GARDNER:
- Is that so?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. It's not very much now, simply because he isn't able to keep up
with it. His staff has diminished. His son has left his office; his
nephew has left his office for various reasons, and I don't think that
it was incompatibility. They had ambitions of their own. And so, while
he has a continuing practice, it's not what it was.
-
GARDNER:
- Is he still able to. . . ?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, that's the point. I don't feel that Elmer should continue to do
anything but consult. He's certainly a very competent diagnostician and
consultant.
1.16. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO
(December 13, 1977)
-
GARDNER:
- You mentioned that you wanted to finish up with Elmer Belt.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. I think it ought to be pointed up that Elmer Belt demonstrated
something very special about himself when he saw the possibilities of
Kate Steinitz, [when] most of us (and I'll include myself) had no idea
what her possibilities were--what capacities she had and what potential
she had when we first met her. And it's because he had this confidence
in her, because he was willing to give her his support and to underwrite
her that she developed in her own knowledge and that she became such an
important person in the world of students of Leonardo da Vinci, and that
she contributed to the literature, and that she corresponded with all of
the Leonardistas in the various parts of the world. She became in her
time, among the scholars who were interested in Leonardo, something like
[Father] Mersenne was in his time among the men interested in science in
all the various parts of the world. Through corresponding with him, they
created a sort of a crossroads for the exchange of information, and this
really sparked everyone involved. And it was because of Kate Steinitz
and the central position she held through being Elmer Belt's librarian
that a great many things happened in the world of Leonardo research. It
was Kate Steinitz who picked Carlo Pedretti, a young boy in Bologna;
realized that he had the possibilities of being a great Leonardo
scholar, and arranged for him to come over here. She got Elmer Belt,
Bern Dibner, and Ladislao Reti all to put up money for a fund with which
to support Pedretti and enable him to come over, and to stay here and
get the degrees that were necessary for his progress, and do the work
that he did and is still doing. So that he has now become one of the
three or four outstanding scholars among the Leonardistas . This, again,
was a case of Elmer perceiving that Pedretti had these possibilities and
being willing to help him. I think that it was true also in my case.
Certainly, without Elmer Belt and his continued support, I might very
well have not been able to stay in business. And the fact that I had one
customer whose business might amount to, say, no more than $400 a month,
but it was a regular $400 a month, really made all the difference
between success and failure. And so I think that it has to be said above
everything else that Elmer Belt deserves very high credit for his
ability to appreciate people of talent, sometimes even people with whom
he didn't agree-- like Kurt Schwitters, whom he met in Sweden when he
went over there--but whose qualities he appreciated and whom he was
willing to recognize and give support to. This, I think, entitles him to
very high marks as a sponsor of culture and as a human being. It was out
of my association with Elmer Belt and Kate Steinitz that I met Bern
Dibner. As well as I can remember, this must have been about 1946, right
after World War II, that Kate Steinitz brought Bern Dibner over to my
shop on Carondelet Street. He was a very unimpressive looking little man
with a small moustache, very brusque, and very much alert and quick to
observe and remember everything you said and any new information that
came his way. He was a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to the United
States and got a degree in electrical engineering in Brooklyn. I think
he got most of his schooling at night. I think he had an uncle who had a
radio business, which gave him an opportunity to earn his first living
in electrical engineering. And I think later he and a brother-- I'm not
exactly sure what the relationship was, but there was one other person,
also, with Dibner who was involved in Bern Dibner 's beginning in
electrical manufacture. They started a very small business. Bern Dibner
decided quite early that the field which had the greatest possibilities
for advancement, the greatest possibility for widespread utilization in
all fields of electricity, was electrical connectors. So he proceeded to
study all the types of electrical connectors that were known, and he
specialized in them. It would seem strange that anything so
insignificant as what connected two electrical wires could become that
important, but every time you look up at an overhead power line, you see
that the wires are at some point connected to each other and that these
connectors are very important, that the connectors which are part of
switches are essential and must be able to bear the surges of the
current, must be able to maintain a constant flow between the two bodies
that they're connecting. And so he studied this and acquired patents and
developed patents and built up what became Burndy Engineering. Now,
Elmer Belt first heard that there was a man in New York who was
competing with him in buying books on Leonardo sometime about 1942 or
'43, and so he wrote to this man and said he would like to meet him. And
the man said, well, he was very busy, and it would be rather difficult,
but if he would come out to see him at his factory, he could spare some
time to him. So Elmer went out, and he found that this man that he met
had a security guard with him at all times. He was admitted to this
place with great care being taken to check him in and out, to make sure
that there were no questions asked or no discussion of what this man was
doing. When Elmer Belt asked to see the books, the man took him out to a
warehouse and showed him a pile of boxes and said, "This is my library.
And until the war's over, I'm not able to look at them, and I can't show
them to you or even see them myself." It was only afterward that Elmer
learned that Bern Dibner was involved in a very essential part of the
war, top secret development of proximity fuses and other ordnance. Bern
Dibner, at the end of the war, went over as part of an inspection team
to assess the effectiveness of various war measures, such things as
saturation bombing and things like that, to try to determine whether
they really were worth the money and effort that were put behind them,
or whether they were superfluous and overkill. After the war, Bern
Dibner did unpack his library, and when he set up his plant in Norwalk,
Connecticut, he incorporated his library as a separate entity and set it
up as sort of a nonprofit institution into which he poured a certain
amount of the money which he was earning from his busienss. But his
library was distributed throughout his research plant at Norwalk,
Connecticut, the first time I met him. Over in one section, he had all
his books about Volta; in another consultation room, he had all of the
books about Einstein; and in another room, he had all his Curie books
and materials. This, he felt, would serve as an inspiration to the
engineers working in the place. [laughter] He and his wife had decided
very early that the first time they were $1,000 ahead, they were not
going to devote every day of every year pursuing the dollar and tending
to business. As soon as they had $1,000, they decided they were going to
go to Europe and travel; learn about the cities of Europe. In the course
of traveling and very seriously studying the places they went and the
languages of the countries which they visited, they went to the
bookshops, and Bern Dibner developed a network of friendships with
booksellers in all parts of Europe. So there is no bookshop that you
could go to that might in any way have any book dealing with the history
of science, or any of the sciences, that he is not known in. He had a
capacity for making friends with booksellers, and he was not a hard
bargainer. He encouraged booksellers. He expected them to make a living,
and he paid fairly for what he bought. And as time went on, his visits
were looked forward to. The booksellers would accumulate the best things
and hold them until he came, and as a result of that, he got a great
many good books which he might not otherwise have gotten. Many people,
such as one man, A. Bader in Geneva, sold him things which he had
inherited, collections of letters from Volta and Galvani and Deluc, who
was an early forebear of Bader's. He sold Dibner electrical machines
which were heirlooms and really extraordinarily fine examples of the
early electrical generators which were used for conducting electrical
experiments and teaching the electrical sciences. And it was the same
with me: Bern Dibner came to see me, and he was warm, he was friendly,
he would never go away without buying something. And he encouraged me to
write him and offer him things. When he started to develop his list,
which he called "Heralds of Science," which was a list of the
outstanding books in all the sciences, he solicited the opinion of the
notable scientists in the various fields, he solicited the opinions of
the collectors in these fields, and he solicited the opinions of
booksellers. And when he got together his material and published his
work, he dedicated it to the booksellers of the world who'd helped him
form his collection. His list, the "Heralds of Science," has become a
standard guide to the outstanding books in the sciences, much more so
than the [Harrison D.] Horblit list, which was much more handsomely
published and which contained a great deal many more mistakes and
contradictions, but which has, for some people, become a great list
because it was called the Grolier Club List of a
Hundred Books on the History of Sciences. Bern Dibner, as an
example, heard that Herbert Evans was likely to sell one of his
collections. It was the second collection that Herbert had formed; the
first collection had gone to Mrs. Evans when they were divorced because
it very rightly belonged to her. Most of the money which had been spent
on buying it had come from Mrs. Evans, but it remained in Herbert
Evans's custody until it was sold, and I purchased that collection for
Lessing Rosenwald. That first collection, I must say, had some unique
books, some very fine copies of things which never occur again in any of
the Evans collections. This collection was purchased by me for Lessing
Rosenwald, who gave it to the Institute for Advanced Study, and it is
the collection which forms the foundation of their History of Science
Library at Princeton.
-
GARDNER:
- This brings up an interesting question for me, before you continue, and
then I'll try to get you back to your train of thought. With the number
of customers that you had who were interested in similar items and
subjects, how did you select those customers which would receive which
item? Do you see what I mean? There must have been great competition.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, that was a valuable privilege. It gave me a great advantage.
-
GARDNER:
- But there must have been great competition also among your buyers.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there was some competition. Naturally, the ones that treated me
the most kindly got the preference. If they bargained too hard or kept
the books too long before giving me a decision, or tried to force me to
take back books of which they had purchased better copies later on, I
sort of put them last on the list. It was a privilege which I had
earned. Naturally, Bern Dibner won a very high place on my list very
early, because when he heard about the second Evans collection, he
encouraged me to buy it. He said, "I'll tell you what I will do. I will
give you a list of approximately 100 books I want out of that collection
and I will advance you $10,000 towards your cost of purchasing. And when
you have bought it, take the books that are on my list, check them over,
price them, and send them to me. And whatever you say is the right
price, you can charge against the $10,000 which I've advanced. When
we've passed the $10,000, keep on sending the books that I want, and
we'll go on from there—I'll pay you for them." This enabled me to buy a
collection which I could have never bought with my own money. I was able
to buy this collection also with the help of John Valentine and Justin
Turner, who advanced the rest of the money. The total cost was $27,000.
I had only enough money to pay my fare to San Francisco and Berkeley,
where Herbert Evans lived. I'd heard that Herbert Evans was of a mind to
sell his collection, so I called him up one Saturday and said, "I would
like to come up tomorrow morning and talk to you about your collection."
So I went up. I had already discussed this list of what was in Herbert's
library with Irwin Rosenthal and his son Barney, and they were of a mind
to participate with me in buying it. We had concluded that we could
afford to pay about $27,000 for the collection. I went to Herbert Evans,
and I said, "I will give you $27,000 for the collection. I will write
you a check for $5,000 now, and I will give you the balance when the
books have all been checked out against your list and are packed and
have left your house for the library in the Life Sciences Building at
Berkeley." And Herbert said, "Well, I must think it over. I must talk to
my wife, but I will let you know tomorrow morning." The next morning he
said, "We'll take you up." The collectors and dealers in the East heard
about it. People like Dave Randall of Scribner's said, "How did you get
Herbert Evans to sell you his collection?" And I said, "Well, you know
you've mentioned a number of times to him that you would like to buy it,
and a number of other people have, but I did one thing more: I offered
him money." [laughter] This was the clincher: the fact that I had found
Dr. Evans at one of the points, which he had reached a number of times
during his life, where he had bought more books than he could pay for.
He had developed this fine collection, but he owed the banks money, and
he owed the booksellers all over the world money. Dunning letters were
coming in and threats of suits, and people were writing [Robert Gordon]
Sproul, the president of the University of California, and Evans had to
do something. The thing that he needed was someone who would come
forward and say, "I will give you so much money down, and I will pay you
the rest at such and such a time ." With the $10,000 that Bern Dibner
had advanced and the additional money which John Valentine and Justin
Turner lent me, I was able to buy the collection, and that gave me my
start as a dealer with a significant stock of books in the history of
science. I was able to get out two very fine catalogs, catalogs which
were landmarks in that they contained a great many important books in
the history of science, all of them fine copies or association copies.
And there was no one else, certainly, in the United States, and only one
or two people in Europe, who'd ever gotten out catalogs to compare with
these. This gave me an immediate reputation. Of course, all of this was
premised by the fact that Bern Dibner had advanced $10,000 with which I
could buy the collection.
-
GARDNER:
- So what you did basically was: he advanced the $10,000 for certain of
the titles, and the rest of the titles you maintained for yourself.
-
ZEITLIN:
- So I proceeded to price them, and he never questioned any price I put on
anything. I tried to be very fair and price them below the market in his
case, because I wanted him to be happy. I felt I owed it. The benefits
of having advanced the money considered that he was a partner in the
enterprise, so he gained a lot of very fine books at what now are very
low prices.
-
GARDNER:
- What year was that, about?
-
ZEITLIN:
- That was 1955.
-
GARDNER:
- In 1955, that late!
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, and I had this opportunity to sell all these books and to produce a
catalog that gave me a reputation, that gave me entree to a great many
other collectors and made my credit good with a lot of important dealers
in Europe. So that when I walked into a bookstore and presented my card,
I was immediately recognized as the man who got out those catalogs. And
I must say that they were very well annotated. I had a good man working
with me, John B. Lee, and he and I worked very hard to produce good
catalogs. I think I can honestly claim that the annotations were not
just superficial, that they were based upon a considerable amount of
study of the books themselves and the books about the books.
-
GARDNER:
- Had Evans done any cataloging of his own?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Evans was a discriminating accumulator. He loved the chase. He
appreciated what the books meant, and he also canvassed a great many of
the authoritative men. He wrote to some of the outstanding geologists
around the world and asked them what, in their opinions, were the
significant works in, say, geology. He did the same thing with the
physicists and the chemists and the botanists and so on. Out of that he
compiled a search list and went to work, after he'd compiled this list,
to find the best possible copies of the books. In 1937 he held an
exhibition of outstanding books in the history of science, for which he
published a little catalog that was printed by the University of
California Press, and that catalog is still the best guide to the
significant books in the history of sciences. It sold for something like
thirty-five cents, and Ernst Weil in later years, when he reviewed the
Horblit book which was selling for $100, implied that the Evans
publication was a better book.
-
GARDNER:
- I'm intrigued by one other thing, before we get back to Bern Dibner.
We've talked about four collectors, basically, in the last couple of
sessions--Frank Hogan and Herbert Evans, Elmer Belt and Dibner. Two of
them, Dibner and Belt, apparently maintained their wealth through the
years; yet both Evans and Hogan found themselves strapped by their book
purchases. Is that common?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Hogan was not strapped by his purchases.
-
GARDNER:
- He overbought, though.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, he overbought in terms of his capacity to pay immediately; but he
didn't overbuy in the long run, because Hogan's fees were immense. He
had very high retainers. I think that he got a million dollars for
defending Andy Mellon.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh. Well, so there was no problem.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, he did not die a poor man.
-
GARDNER:
- But is it common for book collectors? As you mentioned, it's common for
bookdealers to do that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Herbert Evans did not die a poor man either.
-
GARDNER:
- No, no, no, that's not what I mean. But is it common for book collectors
to overextend themselves in the course of buying?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it is. A book collector will temporarily overextend himself. He
will buy more than he can pay for, and booksellers have to be careful to
curb some of these men, because what is a pleasure can become a burden
and can be spoiled. A man who is an enthusiastic collector can be turned
into a disappointed, unhappy man if he finds himself being driven by too
much buying and being unable to pay. And if his creditors get on his
back and press him, he is in trouble. It has happened that some
collectors have had to sell their books at auction. Herbert Evans was
chronically in debt—he overbought--but in the long run, he did not lose
money by his collecting. His passion for collecting books outran his
practicality. He could have done a lot better with selling the books
that he bought; his collections were all sold too far below what they
could have brought him. Warren Howell and I together sold several of his
collections, and in no case did we get as much as might have been gotten
for them if he hadn't been in urgent need of money.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, shall we return to Bern Dibner, then, and hear the rest of his
story?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Bern Dibner ' s backing of me in the purchase of the Evans
collection was certainly very important in my development as a
bookseller and my becoming established as a dealer in books in the
history of science. We have maintained a constant correspondence, and
over the years, I visit him and he visits me. I remember his coming out
here once when the Red Cars were still running. He called me up--it was
on a Sunday--and he said he would like to come and see me if I wasn't
busy and had time to take him over to my shop. This must have been about
1950. So he took the Red Car from downtown—from the Biltmore Hotel, I
guess it was then —and he rode it out to Santa Monica and La Cienega
Boulevard, where I met him. We went down to my shop, and we spent a very
pleasant half-day there, looking at books and talking. I said, "Why
don't you take a taxi? You can get back to your hotel so much faster. It
took you at least an hour to get here." And he said, "You know, if I
spent that money on taxis I wouldn't have as much to buy books. Besides,
I wouldn't have as much time to read as I have when I'm riding on
streetcars." He was always a man without ostentation, and no matter how
powerful he has become, he has never lost his modesty nor his ability to
live in terms of very modest personal needs. We traveled together with
the Grolier Club on a couple of occasions and spent a great deal of time
with each other, and he and his wife were very considerate, never
complained, never grumbled. If the regular meals which were promised
couldn't be delivered to us, and we were given a box lunch with an apple
and a sandwich, he could sit down and enjoy it with just as much relish
as he could the best dinner in the finest restaurants of Europe. I don't
think anyone who's been associated with Bern Dibner ever was made to
feel that this was a man with the kind of wealth and power which enabled
him to travel by his own private jet around the country if he wanted to.
He has always driven his own car. He never has had anybody waiting on
him. He has built a library in Norwalk to house his collection, a very
attractive building; and lectures, seminars, and meetings of various
societies are held there. He has very attractive exhibits of electrical
instruments, in addition to portraits and prints having to do with the
history of electricity. In addition to the various fields of the history
of science, he has emphasized particularly, of course, the history of
electricity. And he bought a great many books of the fifteenth century;
he has formed a very substantial collection--I think approximately
400--of books printed before 1501. As a private collection in our time
it is certainly outstanding. It has been his idea to make this an
endowed library to be continued in perpetuity. I must stop here to say
something about the collection of instruments which is in his library.
It's to be seen in alcoves and on shelves and in niches all over the
library, and this is a collection of electrical instruments of all
types, dating from the beginning of the Voltaic battery and the
electrical friction generator, I had been told by a customer of mine
that an antique dealer in New Orleans had bought an electrical museum
which had gone bankrupt in Holland. For some reason the Dutch hadn't
wanted to spend the money to support this museum, and it finally went
broke, and the thing was auctioned off. The majority of the stuff was
all bought by an antique dealer in New Orleans who had it in his place
and whose idea was that people would buy it for bases for lamps (the
great vogue of sewing machines that looked like lampstands and
lampstands that looked like sewing machines was going strong). But he
decided that before he broke up the collection, he'd see if he couldn't
find a buyer for it all in one lot. He had written to a customer of mine
(whose name I've forgotten right now), a man who lived in Santa Barbara,
and the man in turn had mentioned this offer to me and said he wasn't
interested, and he gave me the name of that man in New Orleans. So I
called up the man in New Orleans and said, "I'd like to know about your
collection. How much do you want for it, and what does it contain?" And
the man said, "Well, I'll tell you, I can't offer it to you now because
I have promised to give somebody in New England (a man by the name of
Lincoln who was trying to start an electrical museum up in New England)
first refusal, and he's trying to get the money together right now. But
if he doesn't buy it, I'll let you know. The price of it is $5,000." And
I said, "Fine, I'd be interested." So about three weeks later, I got a
call from this man, and he said, "Well, the collection is yours if you
want it." And I said, "May I have a few days? Since you've taken this
long, may I have a few days? I've got to get together my nickels." And
he said, "Yes, you've got an option on this for ten days." And I said,
"All right." The next day I had a phone call from Bern Dibner, and he
said, "What are you doing, trying to buy that electrical collection?" I
said, "I don't see any reason why I can't buy it just as well as anyone
else." He said, "I understand you have an option on it." I said, "Yes."
"Well," he said, "I thought that this man Lincoln was going to buy it,
and that's why I didn't get into the act. And between the time that he
found he couldn't buy it, and the time I got back to this man, and the
time he told me so, I found that you have an option!" He said, "I know
how much you've been asked to pay. How much will you take to get out?"
And I said, "I think $7,500—I'll take a $2,500 profit." He said, "All
right, I'll mail you a check and all you have to do is tell those people
in New Orleans that you've turned over your option to me." So he bought
the collection, and I never saw it until about three or four years
later, when I went to his place in Connecticut. Here were all these
beautiful instruments, an enormous collection of them, all varieties of
early electrical generators and storage batteries, and so on. And I
said, "You know, it's a good thing I didn't see this collection before I
took your proposition, or it would have cost you a hell of a lot more.
You got a great bargain!" [laughter] He said, "Yes, I know I did. It is
a great bargain, and I'm very grateful to you for letting me have it."
That is the kind of man Dibner is. Now, you might say with the kind of
money he's got, it was easy for him to be generous, but that's not
usually true. Generally, the men who come up the hard way like he did,
and who are used to moving around the world and making deals, are not
very generous; they are the hardest bargainers of all. But he is truly
an exception. In the course of the years, we've met at meetings of the
History of Science Society. Our first meeting was 1956, in Florence,
where we traveled together on the train to Milan and had a wonderful
time. And from then on, over the years, we have met many
times--Josephine and I and he and his beautiful wife, Billie. I have
enjoyed trips together with them and Ladislao Reti and his wife,
Chiquita, and Elmer and Ruth Belt. It has been a wonderful association
and friendship.
-
GARDNER:
- He is still alive, I take it.
-
ZEITLIN:
- He is still alive, yes. He is over eighty, and he has been honored in
many different ways. The most important thing, I think, that's happened
to his collection I was also involved with, and that is the presentation
of it to the Smithsonian [Institution].
-
GARDNER:
- There's about two more minutes on the tape.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Two more minutes. Well, I think that this will have to wait till next
time. I think one of the most important gifts the Smithsonian ever
received was the Burndy Library, and it was I who went to him on behalf
of the Smithsonian and asked him to consider their proposal to take it
over, subject to certain conditions which I helped draw up.
-
GARDNER:
- Okay, you'd like to wait till next time to finish.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I think it would be best to wait until next time.
1.17. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE
(January 17, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- You have before you some items pertaining to Thomas Wise that are going
to be our topic, at least at the beginning, for today.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I think it's appropriate to discuss these publications in the context of
my own history as a bookseller. The basic volume relating to the Wise
forgeries, which is entitled An Enquiry into the
Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets, was written by
John Carter and Graham Pollard, and published in 1934. It was a joint
publication of Constable & Company in London and Charles
Scribner's Sons in New York. Among my customers who were interested was
a Mrs. LeRoy Crummer, usually known to her friends as Myrtle. Myrtle
Crummer was married to Dr. LeRoy Crummer, who was one of the outstanding
collectors of rare books in the history of medicine during the golden
period of the twenties and thirties. Crummer, along with Dr. [George]
Streeter, and [Harvey] Cushing, and Camac, Sir William Osier, and Dr.
George Dock had all contributed towards the publication of a very fine
journal—beautifully printed design by Frederick Goudy and published by
Paul Hoeber—called [Annals of] Medical History . It was a small folio printed on fine
handmade paper (or good mold-made paper, I should say) , printed in
Goudy types and with plentiful illustrations, both block cuts and
halftones. It ran for a period of approximately, I would say,
twenty-five years. Every prominent American collector and historian of
medicine of that time contributed to it, and it is still one of the fine
sources, one of the most useful sources, on a great many subjects in the
history of medicine. It was published during the great period of the
amateur in medical history. A medical man who loved to collect books and
who was interested in the history of medicine would have the courage to
write an article on his favorite topic and publish it there without
having to prove that he had a PhD in history. In our own day, the
academicians have taken over the history of medicine, and it has largely
become a field in which they write for each other rather than for the
devoted amateur and the public and the rest of the medical profession,
which might be inspired by what they have written. The enthusiasm for
the history of medicine has been overwhelmed by the discipline of the
scholars, in my opinion. It used to be you would go to meetings of the
Society for the History of Medicine and you would find a great many
devoted amateurs, who might not really have a profound knowledge of the
history of medicine, might not be adept in Greek and Latin, but still
had a great devotion to what they could learn from reading the books in
the languages with which they were familiar, and very often made some
very exciting and original contributions. Gushing himself was an
amateur, and John Fulton, who was a highly competent bibliographer and
historian of medicine, could certainly not be credited with being a
certified historian. LeRoy Crummer had traveled to a great many of the
cities of Europe, [and] with Dr. Dock, Dr. Streeter and [Dr. William]
Osier, had ransacked the shelves of the bookshops of Vienna and Munich
and Paris and London, and had brought together a most unusual collection
of rare books on the history of medicine. His wife. Myrtle, had on these
journeys devoted herself to collecting the literature of the
nineteenth-century poets. She had a remarkably comprehensive collection
of Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth and the later poets such as Matthew
Arnold and Swinburne, and was regarded as quite an authority. Well, I
called her up and said, "I have a book here I think you'll be interested
in reading," and I sent her a copy of the Carter and Pollard Enquiry. I didn't hear from her for several
weeks, and finally I called her and said, "What did you think of the
book?" She said, "I've been too upset to talk to anyone. In fact, the
book upset me so much that I had to go and see a psychiatrist and pay
him to listen to me." She said, "I can't believe it. Why, Thomas Wise
had asked us to tea a number of times when we were in London. He
couldn't possibly have done such a thing." And she said, "I shall never
buy another book in the nineteenth century, and I'm going to get rid of
my collection as soon as I can." The Enquiry made
tremendous waves throughout the world of book collecting and literary
criticism; it represented the application of critical bibliography to
literature in a way that it had never been applied before. It introduced
scientific methods. The paper was analyzed under the microscope, and its
evidence was assessed in the light of research into the history of paper
manufacturing. The peculiarities of the type had been traced to the
printer, and a careful study was made of the typefaces and their
introduction into English printing. The book amounted to a highly
specialized piece of detective work, which totally destroyed the
reputation of a man who was regarded up to that time as the greatest
living bibliographer and authority on literature of the nineteenth
century. His bibliographies of Landor, of Byron, and a great many others
of the outstanding men of letters of the nineteenth century were looked
upon as the last word. His catalog of the Ashley Library, which is the
library that he assembled, was regarded as a sort of a scriptural
edifice. Here he was at the age of eighty, a man who had been given a
doctorate at Oxford University and honored with every possible honor
within the power of the English bibliographical scholarly world,
suddenly exposed by implication, although never by direct statement, as
having through the years produced--and then produced the literature
which justified them and gave them validity—a number of so-called first
editions. Among other things, he had published an edition of the Sonnets from the Portuguese of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning with the date of 1848. Until he had produced this, there had
never been any mention in any of the bibliographical or biographical
literature of Robert Browning or Elizabeth Barrett Browning of the
existence of such an edition. Mind you, all of the forgeries which he
published were genuinely the work of the authors to whom they were
attributed. What he did was produce editions dated anywhere from two to
twenty years earlier than any previously known date of publication, thus
creating and validating, through his own bibliographical writings, a
number of works of which he had created the entire stock and which he
was marketing, some of them directly and some of them through a poor
dupe of a bookseller by the name of [Herbert Edwin] Gorfin. Mr. Wise
made a very poor attempt to defend himself, refused to justify himself
before his friends or any of his own partisans. He remained silent on
the whole matter until his death.
-
GARDNER:
- Now for the interesting part, the extraordinarily interesting part.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. Now, at the time that the Enquiry was
published, A.W. Pollard, who was keeper of printed books at the British
Museum (as it was called then) , had declared that these could not have
been produced by Thomas Wise alone. He said quite bluntly he didn't have
the brains for it (or to use his own terms, "He hadn't got the brains
for it"--that's what he was reported to have said). The only person who
came forward with the suggestion that others might be involved in the
fabrication of these publications, their systematic validation/ and then
their release upon the public, was a spinster lady by the name of Miss
Fannie Ratchford, who was in charge of the Wrenn Library and the Letcher
Stark Library at the University of Texas in Austin. I had the good
fortune to call upon Miss Ratchford somewhere about 1945, and at that
time she had published a little pamphlet called Between the Lines, in which she implied, or which she stated
with considerable certitude, that H. Buxton Forman and Sir Edmund Gosse
were also involved in the publication of these forgeries. Even Graham
Pollard and John Carter at that time pooh-poohed her and put her down.
They felt that it was impossible that a man as eminent as H. Buxton
Forman, one of the high priests of English literary criticism of the
time, could have been involved in such nefarious activities. H. Buxton
Forman had edited the definitive editions of Keats and Shelley. He was a
highly respected man. He had a great library of his own which later was
sold at auction and created quite a stir. But evidence to support the
allegations of Miss Fannie Ratchford was not available. The chief reason
it was not available is that the Buxton Forman family had kept under
cover all of the correspondence of Buxton Forman with Wise and all of
the papers which had to do with the various publishing activities of
Buxton Forman, and would not permit access to them. I must say that when
I called on Miss Ratchford in 1945, she said that she had been allowed
to look through the letters, and she knew that the evidence was there,
but she was not allowed to copy anything. The only other basis she had
(one of the other bases, I must say, not the only other basis she had)
for her charges with regard to Harry Buxton Forman was the letters of
Thomas Wise to Colonel [John Henry] Wrenn. Colonel Wrenn was a Chicago
book collector who had formed a substantial collection of
seventeenth-century English drama and other English literary works, and
who also had been a very substantial purchaser of Mr. Thomas Wise's
forgeries. Thomas Wise had systematically sold Colonel Wrenn a great
many works in English literature; sometimes he would sell him two copies
of the same work by changing the title, and Wrenn was so gullible and
had so much faith in Wise that whatever Wise offered him, he took. Wise
systematically gulled him, and the evidence of it was to be found in
these letters. It was my privilege to supply Fannie Ratchford with the
first letter having to do with the relationship of Thomas Wise to
Colonel Wrenn. It was a letter written by Thomas Wise to Irving Way. I
haven't got the letter here in front of me. It appears in the volume
which was published by Alfred Knopf called the Wise-Wrenn
correspondence, or Wise-Wrenn letters, edited by Fannie Ratchford. [ Letters of Thomas J. Wise to John Henry Wrenn; A
Further Enquiry into the Guilt of Certain Nineteenth-Century
Forgers ] Well, finally, in 1972 there appeared a catalog of
Sotheby and Company containing the printed books comprising the property
of Mrs. Madeleine Buxton Holmes, daughter of the late Maurice Buxton
Forman. This collection contained a remarkable group of letters between
Buxton Forman and Thomas Wise, and a number of other works, including
some of the fabrications, proof copies, layouts, prospectuses and so on,
and these were bought in block by Bernard Quaritch. The firm of Quaritch
bought them because they were aware of the significance of this
material, and they successfully bid on every piece of consequence, so
far as I know, relating to the Buxton Forman-Thomas Wise conspiracy.
They published a catalog devoted exclusively to the things which they
had purchased from the library of M. Buxton Forman, and the introduction
to it was written by Graham Pollard. This introduction proceeded to
review the history of the exposure of Thomas Wise and the history of the
participation of Buxton Forman in the production, validation, and
circulation of the various forgeries. Among other things. Pollard showed
that there was firm documentary evidence that Wise and Forman were
working together as early as February or March of 1890, when they forged
William Morris's The Two Sides of the River ,
giving it a date of 1876. And then in 1896, they printed Tennyson's The Last Tournament , giving it a date of 1871.
In fact. Pollard was able to conclude that there can be little doubt
that most of the more important forgeries were joint work and that they
were done during the period 1887, 1888, and 1899. Now, of course, Wise
went off on his own and continued to produce some of these without
consulting with Buxton Forman, but Forman provided the bibliographical
information and the scholarship which could enable Wise to
bibliographically validate these publications.
-
GARDNER:
- Before we were talking, you mentioned Edmund Gosse, too.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Edmund Gosse had been mentioned, but the extent of his
participation has never been proved, so far as I know. Now, there seems
to have also been another conspirator, and that was Buxton Forman's
younger brother Alfred, who was a paper manufacturer's agent. He was
secretary of the Villon Society, and he supplied the paper for H. Buxton
Forman's editions of Shelley and Keats. It seems that he also did the
layout for some of these forgeries, and it hardly seems possible that he
could have been ignorant of what was going on. About the role of Edmund
Gosse I can't produce any further information right now.
-
GARDNER:
- Was the motivation for this entirely financial?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, and that is an interesting thing. When Graham Pollard was here in
1973 at the Huntington for a short period, he said he wanted to come
over to Los Angeles, and they asked him who he wanted to see, and he
said, "I want to see Jake Zeitlin." So they delivered him to Dawson's
Book Shop, and I went over and got him and took him to my shop, where we
sat and talked for several hours. And then I delivered him back to
Dawson's Book Shop, so that he could be taken to Pasadena by one of the
Dawsons. But Graham Pollard did not tell me this story which I'm about
to relate. The story was related to me first by David Randall. The work
of producing the Enquiry into the Nature of Certain
Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets took a great many years and a
great deal of tedious work, some of which must have been extremely
boring. The question that occurs to one is. What, besides the motivation
for doing something sensational in the way of exposing a noted figure in
the world of letters, could have driven Pollard and Carter on? And the
story I heard seems to be the sort of thing that would account for it,
because there are human motivations in a great many cases which are not
apparent on the surface. Graham Pollard had been a student at Oxford. He
had a small collection of books; his interest in book collecting had
surfaced very early. He was in one of the colleges at Oxford, and he had
been given quarters there. He had a small shelf of the books he'd been
able to collect with the little money he'd been able to scrape together.
Thomas Wise had been brought to Oxford by a certain Colonel Hutchinson
to receive an honorary degree, and the colonel and some of the masters
brought Wise up to Pollard's rooms because they wanted to show that they
had a young book collector in residence. Wise looked at the books very,
well, very disdainfully. Among these was a copy of [George] Crabbe's
book called Inebriety, of which only two copies
were known to exist. One was a complete copy, and the other lacked the
title page, and the copy without the title page was the copy that
Pollard had been able to acquire. Crabbe had taken great pains to
destroy every copy that could be found. Wise looked at this copy with a
great show of disgust and said, "Young man, never collect imperfect
books." Also, I am told (but I was not told this by Graham Pollard) , he
turned to the faculty members that were present, Graham Pollard's own
tutors, and said, "It's all rubbish and should be thrown in the
dustbin." Now, you can imagine what this young man thought at that
moment. It was probably something like, "Someday I will get that
so-and-so." And while Graham Pollard never directly admitted this, he
did admit to me the facts of Wise having come there, and that he was
brought by Hutchinson, and that he did look at this book which had no
title page, and said, "Young man, never collect imperfect books." Beyond
that he wouldn't go.
-
GARDNER:
- What about Buxton Forman? Why would someone like that get involved in a
scheme like this?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it appears that they made a great deal of money out of it.
-
GARDNER:
- So it was that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- There was money involved in the production of these things--I mean a
considerable monetary return. According to the records of Gorfin, who
had a careful record of the number of copies he was given of Wise's
pamphlets to sell, and according to other records which have been
consulted. Wise, over the years, made a great deal out of these. There
was a time when a copy of the Sonnets from the
Portuguese would sell anywhere from about $750 or $1,000 or
$1,500, and Wise very shrewdly fed these into the market slowly, always
taking great care to give them bibliographical justification and
authentication. He introduced these bibliographical supports into his
own bibliographies and into the literature of the times. It was curious,
though, that when it came to [John] Ruskin, somebody smelled a rat a
long time ago. The first reference to the possibility that some of the
Ruskin pamphlets might be fakes was by [Edward Tyas] Cook and
[Alexander] Wedderburn, the editors of the standard edition of Ruskin,
and they found four pamphlets which they denounced roughly as fakes at
the time. [pauses to research date] I'm trying to look up the date of
the Cook and Wedderburn bibliography—that was the definitive edition of
Ruskin which they edited, and a real great landmark. They denounced
these things a long time ago, and then nobody did anything about them,
[tape recorder turned off] Cook and Wedderburn published their
bibliography of Ruskin in about 1912. They collated the text of all the
important editions of Ruskin books and first detected two of these
forgeries, as well as providing negative evidence against two more. But
this announcement was made in small type in a work of thirty-nine
volumes.
-
GARDNER:
- Why is that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, they were too busy. They were concerned with the works of Ruskin
in general. They incidentally mentioned that these were spurious. Thomas
Wise had himself published a bibliography in prose and verse of John
Ruskin in nineteen parts in 1889 to 1893, and then there was an edition
first in 1878, a bibliography on Ruskin—although Cook and Wedderburn, as
early as 1903, had detected these things as forgeries, and no notice was
taken of this exposure. And thus it was [that] there were other
whispers. A few other people had their suspicions, but no one had
gathered together all of the evidence until John Carter and Graham
Pollard set to work and exposed Mr. Wise.
-
GARDNER:
- How common are copies of the Wise books these days?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, they're all rather scarce, and they're commencing to bring
substantial prices on their own.
-
GARDNER:
- As curiosities?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No. Some people collect forgeries, and everybody would like to have
something of the Wise forgeries just to show. This man Wise was very
prolific; he published a tremendous amount of stuff, and, of course,
there's been a substantial amount of literature published about the
forgeries since then. There was another thing that Wise was guilty of
which I think is even more dastardly than his production of these
forgeries and validation of them in these bibliographies. He went to the
British Museum from time to time, and being the great Thomas Wise, no
one ever bothered to look in his briefcase. He would call out books,
seventeenth-century quartos, and take out of them pages of books of
which he had copies that lacked these pages. He mutilated the British
Museum copies in order to perfect his own. After the exposure of Wise in
1934, and after Wise died and the British Museum acquired the Ashley
Library, which was indeed a great collection of books, they started to
look through their own copies of certain books which were in their
library. Then they looked at the books in the Ashley Library, and they
found that in a number of cases, the pages were missing, and leaves from
their own copies could be found in the copies that were in the Ashley
Library. They fitted in such a way that there could be no doubt. It was
also discovered that the University of Texas, through the Wrenn
purchases, had a number of books which had been perfected by Mr. Thomas
Wise by mutilating British Museum copies, and no one will ever know the
amount of damage that he did to books in the British Museum by stealing
pages from them. But certainly it's known that he did a lot of it. So
it's obvious that he was a fabulous rascal. I was fortunate in knowing
John Carter over many years. He and I were known as "the other Jakes":
whenever one meant to speak of John, they would say "Jake," and then
they would say "the other Jake." And we always addressed each other as
Jake and signed the letters Jake, so we had fun. He was a very elegant
man and a man of great taste and a great ornament to the book world. He
had grown up working in bookshops; he'd gone to Eton College and then
gone to Cambridge. Among other things, he had formed a great friendship
with A.E. Housman and collected Housman 's books and did the
bibliography of Housman. He came over to the United States when he was
quite young, and first he worked for Elkin Mathews, which was a
remarkable shop, a school for great bookmen. Among others, there was
Percy Muir. But John Carter was the other man besides Percy Muir who was
really in the first rank of bookmen of his times. He went to work for
Scribner's rare-book department; he remained there for a while, then
went back to England and became Scribner's English representative. He
and Percy Muir would buy on the English market and on the Continent a
great many of the important books which were sent over to Scribner's and
sold by David Randall. And that included the Schukberg Gutenberg Bible.
John Carter came here to Southern California; he visited me here in this
house, and we became friends and over the years exchanged a considerable
amount of correspondence. I would see him when I went to London, and I'm
glad to say that I called on him at his home when he was in his last
illness, and had a very good, heartwarming conversation with him. The
people who came with me were Warren Howell and Kenneth Nebenzahl, both
really fine bookmen. It was interesting to notice that these young men
were so busy telling John Carter about their exploits that they didn't
have time to ask him about himself, or how he felt, or to give him an
opportunity to express his own thoughts. I sat there very silent most of
the time, thinking how much more worthwhile it would have been if we had
all listened to him.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, we're just about at the end of this - shall we stop?
1.18. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO
(January 17, 1978 and February 14, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- Continue with your thoughts.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I will begin all over again by saying that I was fortunate to live in
the period of a whole school of bookmen who added great luster to
bookselling; they included men like David Randall, who came up in the
New York bookselling school, having worked for G.A. Baker &
Company under a man by the name of Harzof, who seems to have been a
great legend among bookmen and who educated many of the young men of the
twenties. There was Jake Blanck, who went to work for Merle Johnson and
helped produce the Merle Johnson First Editions of American literature,
and later became the editor and chief producer of the bibliography of
American literature, which is continuing now; and Edward Lazare, later
editor of American Book-Prices Current ; and
there were John Van Kohn and Mike Papantonio, who founded the Seven
Gables Bookshop. Some of these men were products of Byrne Hackett of the
Brick Row Book Shop. There was in England the greatest of them all—Percy
Muir, who, I'm very grateful to say, is still living and flourishing.
And there was John Carter. All these were men who had the ability to
write and speak. They were concerned about bibliographical matters. They
were, I think, the first generation of American and English bookmen who
added the touch of professionalism which bookselling needed in order to
take us all out of the class of back-door tradesmen. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Well, it already had that in Europe.
-
ZEITLIN:
- It already had that in Europe; but these were the men, primarily, who, I
think, provided the talent, the brilliance, the literacy, and the innate
dignity which elevated bookselling in America and left a great
tradition. There were, of course, men like David Magee in San Francisco,
who did the same thing for the West Coast. Now we have a new generation
of young bookmen who, I think, will also make important contributions,
but none, I think, for me at least, that have the flavor of dash and
enthusiasm and adventurousness (and inventiveness in creating new fields
of collecting) that some of these men had.
-
GARDNER:
- When did you make your first contacts with some of them? I don't mean
simply in the sense of letters back and forth . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- You mean actually meeting? Well, I think it must have been in 1936 or
1937 that Dave Randall and Eddie Lazare, the man who for many years
edited and published American Book-Prices
Current, came out here and came to see me. I think it must have
been somewhere in the forties that I first met John Carter, and it must
have been somewhere in the early forties that I met John Van Kohn. It
was not until the late forties that I went to New York and met Jake
Blanck and Mike Papantonio and some of the other bookmen who were
prominent in the East. I also had the opportunity to meet some of the
librarians who really adorned the world of book collecting and
bibliography, and foremost among those were certainly Freddy Adams of
the Morgan Library and Ed Wolf of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
All of these people have been my teachers and my friends, and I owe very
much to them.
-
GARDNER:
- Shall we stop here?
FEBRUARY 14, 1978
-
GARDNER:
- You have in your hand a file from your archive of the Southern
California Antiquarian Booksellers. Were you ever a member of the
Southern California Booksellers, not the Antiquarians?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, as well as I can remember, the Southern California Booksellers
Association was formed somewhere around 1927, early in the year. And the
first activity that the Southern California Booksellers Association
entered into was a bookfair at the Los Angeles Public Library. Somewhere
in my files, I have a letterhead of that bookfair, and the board of that
bookfair really constituted the founding board of the Southern
California chapter, or affiliate association, of the American
Booksellers Association. The president was Leslie Hood, and the
vice-president was, I believe, Odo Staade. Let me go back and say that
Leslie Hood was the manager of Vroman's in Pasadena. He was a very
energetic man, and he was tremendously interested in the affairs of the
booksellers as a whole, and was a natural leader. Odo Stade was the
manager and later owner of the Hollywood Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard
near Highland, right across from the old Hollywood Hotel. I first met
him when I came here in 1925. And the secretary-treasurer was June
Cleveland, who was manager of Bullock's book department. She may have
been treasurer, and I was secretary, as well as I remember. My name
appears on the letterhead, so I think that the offices were divided up
something like that. Although I never was active in the Southern
California Booksellers Association as such, I was involved in the
founding of the original affiliate group.
-
GARDNER:
- It sort of kept reconstituting itself, didn't it? Disappearing and
coming back in?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it did. It went through various formats. but I never identified too
much with the new-book sellers, and they, in turn, I don't think were
very much interested in encouraging me as a member. I was critical of
the American Booksellers Association because I felt they did not exert
enough pressure on the publishers in several areas. The American
Booksellers Association was actually a child of the publishers
association and therefore was of course dictated to in its policy by the
publishers association. My criticisms were very vocal. They were, number
one, that the publishers hadn't done enough to protect the local
booksellers or cooperate with them. They used to send their sales
representatives out to sell direct to the local libraries, and I felt
that this was cutting off one of the chief means of support of the local
booksellers. And in the second place, they, the publishers, had a
murderous remainder policy and still continue to have. A bookseller who
stocks up on any good publisher's book may find himself, in a very short
time, even as little as six months from the time of publication, holding
a book which has been remaindered by the publishers. Smaller
booksellers, especially, suffered greatly from this policy. The larger
booksellers were always warned in advance and given an opportunity to
return books which were being remaindered. But the small booksellers, so
far as I know, were never given any opportunity to return the books, so
they found themselves holding books in the twenty-five dollar to fifty
dollar class which had been remaindered at five dollars to ten dollars.
So far as I could tell, the American Booksellers Association never took
a strong stand with regard to these two things, as well as the
cooperation of the publishers with the book clubs. Several of the
publishers, such as Doubleday, and Dodd Mead, and Macmillan, appeared to
me to have a strong financial interest in the Book-of-the-Month Club and
the Literary Guild, so that a great many of our regular local customers
were drained off from us by the book clubs. The book club editions,
which were contracted with the publishers, came out simultaneously with
the regular publication and very often cut off our sales. Well, I
realize that you cannot stand in the way of some of these economic
injustices, but these were some of my reasons for never taking an active
part as a member of the American Booksellers Association.
-
GARDNER:
- In fact, one of the times that the Booksellers Association really did
get organized and going here was the fight for a returns policy for the
new booksellers. The booksellers finally did band together, because they
acknowledged that there was an injustice being done.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it was a quick way to bankruptcy--handling new books --and the
publishers themselves, I think, had to realize sooner or later that if
they wanted retail outlets, they had to help them stay in business. They
couldn't sabotage them by supporting book clubs, by selling direct to
libraries, and by their destructive remaindering methods.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, it's interesting that, though obviously the local antiquarian
booksellers were great friends for a long time and all knew one another,
nonetheless, it wasn't until 1949, according to the records that we
have, that there was any formal organization.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, remember there was no formal national antiquarian bookseller's
association until very nearly that time. If I can look at this file
there, I think we can tell just about when the national association was
formed, and it was after that was formed. There are the by-laws. It has
the date of incorporation there.
-
GARDNER:
- February 1950 is what it says.
-
ZEITLIN:
- In that case, it seems that the Southern California Antiquarian
Booksellers Association was actually formed in 1949, which preceded the
formation of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.
-
GARDNER:
- Yes, they say the planning stages must have been virtually simultaneous.
-
ZEITLIN:
- As in all things, Ernest Dawson was a great leader, and I think we owe
it to him more than to anyone else that we formed an antiquarian
booksellers association here early in 1949.
-
GARDNER:
- What was his inspiration for it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it was just the idea that we got together, and we thought that it
would be valuable for all of us to have an organization where we could
exchange ideas, where we could sponsor various activities such as
lectures and courses in antiquarian books and book collecting, and we
could exchange credit information and deal with complaints against the
members of the trade and so on. So that we actually, as far as I can
remember, met first on May 11, 1949. The members present consisted of
both members of the firm of Bennett and Marshall, the Pickwick Book
Shop, Charles Yale, Kurt Schwarz, myself, and Josephine. There were
eight representatives of Dawson's Book Shop. Kurt Merlander was present,
Harry Levinson, John Valentine, M.J. Royer, Ben Epstein of the Argonaut
Book Shop, two people representing Arthur H. Clark Company, Mr. [Mac]
Gordon of the Satyr Book Shop, Claremont Book and Art Shop. Tecolote
Bookshop of Santa Barbara apparently was not present; the Cambridge
Bookshop, Charles Salzman was present. Our guests included Lawrence
Powell, Robert Vosper, Winifred Myers of London, Willis Kerr of
Claremont, Bob Schad of Huntington Library, Dr. Lewis [Francis] Stieg of
use.
-
GARDNER:
- The name I have down for the Claremont Book and Art Shop, by the way, is
Samuel Brier.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Samuel Brier is correct, and a very nice man. And then, also present was
Bob Campbell of Campbell's Book Store . . .
-
GARDNER:
- . . . who at the time would have just been through being president of
ABA, I would guess. Wasn't that right after the war?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I don't know. This was 1949. There was also Bob Ritter (I don't
remember what bookshop he represented) , Philip Brown of Yale and Brown,
Justin Turner, I. [Isaac] E. Chadwick (who was a very effective
organizing force), Mr. Nicholas Kovach, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Gottlieb,
and a Mr. Kenke (whom I do not recognize). In all, there were
forty-three members or prospective members of the association, and nine
guests. Assumedly the purpose was to welcome Miss Winifred Myers of
London, who was the vice-president of the Antiquarian Booksellers
Association of England. I drew up the agenda for the meeting, but it was
actually called to order by Glen Dawson. A report was delivered on a
temporary organizing committee, and a motion was made to form a
permanent organization. The officers to form the permanent organization
were nominated immediately, and, following that, the guests were
introduced by myself--no, no, excuse me, the first introduction of
Winifred Myers was made by Kurt Schwarz, followed by her speech. Then I
introduced Larry Powell, and that was followed by his speech. At that
meeting, a cable of greetings from the International Antiquarian
Booksellers Association of London, signed by Dudley Massey, was read.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, this is a strange and off-the-wall question, Do you recall any of
this without looking at the papers and the archive?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I recall these details very vaguely. We drew up a list of prospective
members, we invited a number of guests, and we just went to work. I
think the moving committee was Glen Dawson and I.E. Chadwick, John
Valentine, and myself. We then met on July 18th at the home of Robert
Bennett and Richard Marshall. The minutes have these things reversed.
[laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Who wrote the minutes?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I was the secretary, and I wrote the minutes, [laughter] And it appears
that by that time Charles Yale had become regional vice-president of the
national Antiquarian Booksellers Association, and in his absence the
meeting was opened and presided over by Glen Dawson. Muir Dawson
reported that he'd been to New York and that our chapter was regarded as
a sort of a pilot group. It was the first regional group to be formed,
and its example was used to set the pattern for other chapters.
-
GARDNER:
- It was really a pioneering group.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes it was.
-
GARDNER:
- Were there any issues—this of course is a test of your memory as much as
of the archive--were there any issues that were really being dealt with
at that time, or was it. . . ?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, we felt that we had the need for an auction house, so we attempted
to set up an auction . . .
-
GARDNER:
- I have that, by the way.
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . and set up rules for them. It was decided that we hold a series of
three auctions at the Ames Gallery.
-
GARDNER:
- I have one of them that I forgot to put in. This is the September 1949
auction.
-
ZEITLIN:
- And an auction was actually held in September, 1949; a catalog was
issued. It was held in the Ames Gallery and in conjunction with it. It
seemed to have done pretty well, considering the times, although we'd
all love to buy the books at the prices which they brought then.
[laughter] It seemed like the highest price realized was something like
$175 and $180.
-
GARDNER:
- For what sort of things?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, $175 for the Boswell papers published at Yale and $180 for the
first edition of [Alain Rene] Lesage's [ L'Histoire
de] Gil Blas [de
Santillane ] . The Boswell papers--I don't know who the buyer
of those was, but the Gil Bias was purchased by me, it seems here, for
$180. There were, in all, 295 items in the sale. I have no total of what
was realized; however, this sale was one of the outcomes of the meeting.
I think, in addition, this was the main action taken at the July 18,
1949 meeting, which was one of the earliest to be held. The association
also early in 1950 participated in a centennial exhibition. They formed
an exhibition of material illustrating 100 years of California
statehood, and this was exhibited in connection with the meeting of the
California Library Association in Los Angeles. All of the members of the
Antiquarian Booksellers Association contributed various things to be
exhibited, which were either the property of some of the members or were
published by some of the members. I notice that, among other things,
there was a copy of A Flower from the Golden Land
by Ludwig Louis Salvator.
-
GARDNER:
- Why don't you take out the catalog, because the rest of it's in order,
or should be.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it seems to me that there is a duplication of one page.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, there are going to be lots of duplications. There are many copies.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Beginning, then, in 1949, we very soon affiliated with the national
association. The Southern California group at that time consisted of
Regional Vice-President Charles Yale; a secretary (which was myself);
and a treasurer, Harry Levinson. A list of the membership of the
association at that time is among the archives. The next meeting was
August 5, 1948. We met a lot more frequently then than we do now. We
were less busy then--anyway , less busy than we are now. And in August
5, 1949, we seemed to have formulated a policy with regard to auctions;
what amount we were going to allow for the gallery. That included 15
percent for the auction gallery and two dollars per item for cataloging.
-
GARDNER:
- Do you find anywhere on there, or do you recall what the money was being
raised for?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, we had a balance of forty-three dollars on hand, which didn't make
it possible to raise the money for very much. However, we did raise the
money for participating as much as possible in the various fairs and
public activities. We, of course, had to underwrite some of the auctions
and pay for the advertising, and we also attempted to deal with the
problems of brokerage and customs. There was a certain amount of money
allocated for stationery. The dues were three dollars a year and didn't
produce very much.
-
GARDNER:
- One thing I'd like to do is take that early roster and go through some
of the people.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, here are the people present August 5th. There was Maxwell Hunley,
who still is in business in Pasadena, an outstanding dealer in American
first editions and children's books. He had worked for a stockbroker. On
Saturday afternoons in 1926 and 1927, Max Hunley and I used to go around
and scout various bookshops to see what sleepers we could pick up. Kurt
Schwarz--whose father and mother had run an outstanding bookshop in
Vienna and who had to leave after the Anschluss; moved to Shanghai. He
was interned there, and following his internment, came to California and
began his business jointly with Ernest Gottlieb. But they later
separated.
-
GARDNER:
- What sort of specialization?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, in books having to do with the Orient and Oriental art—of which
Kurt Schwarz knew a great deal—and of course, in German-language books.
Now, there was N.A. Kovach, who has remained in Southern California and
is still operating, who very soon started specializing in periodicals.
Mr. Kovach was one of our earliest members to resign. He was a member of
our first grievance committee, and when the grievance committee met for
the first time to consider grievances of collectors and librarians, all
of the complaints were against Mr. Kovach. Kovach didn't wait to hear
the complaints, and he offered his resignation. There was Charles Philip
Yale, the son of Charles Yale. Charles Philip Yale continued the
business founded by his father, and later joined with Philip Brown. They
ran a very good rare-book business in Pasadena for a number of years.
Roman Novins--I cannot remember who he was. It just doesn't come back to
me. M.J. Royer, of course, all of us know—Mel Royer, who was a man of
very fine taste, one of the most dedicated members the association had,
and who specialized in art books. He also handled prints and small
paintings and a few antiquities and artifacts. He's still alive, I'm
glad to say. Walter Neuman, who was a German refugee, specialized in
maps and prints and later went back to Europe. Richard Marshall of the
firm of Bennett and Marshall, who had started up in the Bay Area and
came down here, worked for Holmes Book Company, as well as I remember,
and for Ernest Dawson, and later joined forces with Bob Bennett to form
Bennett and Marshall. They opened on Pearl Harbor Day, [laughter] which
was not the best time to start, but they developed into a very important
business. Eugene Bechtold, who specialized in books having to do with
the history of the labor movement and radical literature--he never had a
bookshop [but] did business from his home, [and] he really built an
outstanding reputation in this field, both locally and nationally. He is
still living but has retired from the book business for some time.
Philip S. Brown, who came out to California from Minnesota in the
thirties together with Karl Zamboni; he worked for a while for Bunster
Creeley of the Abbey Book Shop on West Sixth Street and then went over
to Pasadena and joined up with Philip Yale in operating Yale and Brown.
His wife, Helen Brown, was a very fine cook and caterer, and through her
Philip Brown became very much interested in cookery, and is now editor
of Jurgensen's bulletin and teaches a number of courses in gourmet
cooking and gastronomy. And Robert Bennett, who was the partner of
Richard Marshall, had worked in Berkeley in a department store there
(I've forgotten the name; it had an outstanding book department in its
day), later came down here, worked for Dawson and joined forces with
Richard Marshall and died about two years ago. Ernest Gottlieb, who was
a German refugee and formed a book business in Beverly Hills together
with Kurt Schwarz; he specialized in music, published several reprints
of music [and] was also, at one time, a very fine portrait photographer.
He died some fifteen years ago. And Harry Levinson, who had his
beginning in the book business in New York about fifty years ago, had, I
think it was, the Caxton Bookshop there for a number of years, came out
to California in something like 1942 and has had a distinguished career
in bookselling since then. He closed his bookshop in Beverly Hills some
three or four years ago and now conducts business from his home. Muir
Dawson, the younger son of Ernest Dawson, who specializes in fine
printing and calligraphy and is a very fine inheritor of the tradition
of his father. And his partner. Glen Dawson, who is the manager of
Dawson's Book Shop and specialized in Californiana, as well as
publishing books--many reprints and many original publications having to
do with California history. And myself. In any event, we succeeded in
forming an organization, we succeeded in holding at least one successful
auction, and we continued to meet, from that time on, quite regularly.
On October 5, 1949, we met at the home of Charles Yale in Altadena, and
there was a very substantial attendance —about twenty-one members
present. At that time we received the first application for membership
outside the area, and that was from H.H. Evans of San Francisco. And we
at that time expressed the hope that a Northern California chapter would
be formed. The treasurer's report on that occasion was to the effect
that the gross sales at the auction were $7,038.50. The returns to
consignor members after deducting commissions and expenses was
$5,886.66. In all, after deduction of all expenses, the balance in our
treasury consisted of $21.91 and refunds of $6 from New York, so that
our total funds were $27.
-
GARDNER:
- This was a real shoestring organization.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it was indeed a shoestring organization, but that seemed to be
adequate for the purpose. In fact, successful organizations should not
have any money left over; they should always be in the red a little bit.
It was then decided that management of future sales of the book auctions
be turned over to Harry Levinson, and sometime thereafter Harry Levinson
did start a series of book auctions. We also set up an exhibition
committee for the purpose of sending out traveling exhibitions of rare
books and a lecture series. Glen Dawson and I were instructed to
constitute a committee to prepare a plan for the Southern California
series of lectures on book collecting, and were instructed to make
arrangements with Miss Ellen Shaffer for these to be carried out under
the auspices of University of California Extension Division. Ellen
Shaffer took over this project and carried it through very successfully,
and that was the beginning of a series of book lectures which have
continued until this day. The series of lectures v;as announced on
November 11th, and they were planned as a series of eight lectures to
continue through until May 2nd. Among the speakers who participated were
Robert Schad of the Huntington Library, Lawrence Clark Powell of UCLA,
J. Gregg Layne, a notable California collector of his day, and Ward
Ritchie. We applied to Charles Boyer, who at that time operated what he
called the French Institute on La Cienega Boulevard, for permission to
hold the lectures at his institute. It was a very attractive place that
he occupied, and he had a very fine library of French books. And we were
allowed to meet there. We paid for the services of an assistant who
opened it up, and that was the beginning of this series.
-
GARDNER:
- Ernest Dawson was very active at this beginning.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, Ernest Dawson was always very active.
-
GARDNER:
- Wasn't he very old by this time?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think we're really talking about Glen Dawson.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, really?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, Ernest Dawson I don't think . . .
-
GARDNER:
- Because he was down as one of the founders when you read about it.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, he was one of the founders, but I don't think he survived very
long after that. In any event, we met again in November at the Savoy
Hotel and conducted business. It was at that time that we undertook the
"One Hundred Years of California Statehood" exhibition, and at that
time, we were invited to participate by the California Library
Association in the centennial meeting of the California Library
Association in Sacramento.
1.19. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE
(February 14, 1978)
-
ZEITLIN:
- I was discussing the meeting of November 17, 1949, held at the Savoy
Hotel, which was on West Sixth Street in Los Angeles. At that time the
most important matters of business were the report of the exhibition
committee, at which time it was decided to prepare this exhibition
called "One Hundred Years of California Statehood," and this was to be
circulated among smaller California libraries. The centennial meeting
was announced of the California Library Association under the presidency
of Lawrence Clark Powell. That was to be held in June of 1950, and the
theme of the meeting would be "One Hundred Years of Librarianship,
Publishing, and Bookselling in California." We were invited to
participate; take exhibition space; furnish keepsakes, catalogs, and
literature; and provide a speaker for the program. I was designated to
be the speaker for that program and did participate in it. Ellen Shaffer
also reported that the University of California had agreed to the course
of lectures and that eight lectures were scheduled. The speakers were to
be Lawrence Clark Powell, Robert Schad, Harry Levinson, J. Gregg Layne,
Ward Ritchie, and Jake Zeitlin. Then Harry Levinson reported that he was
negotiating for a place of business in Beverly Hills. Shortly
thereafter, he did open up a bookshop there. It was his intention to
combine a bookshop and auction gallery, and he hoped to hold the next
auction the third week in January.
-
GARDNER:
- Where had he been before Beverly Hills?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He had done business from his home since coming out from New York. It
was also decided that a cooperative advertisement was to be placed in
the [ Los Angeles ] Daily
News Christmas issue, and Harry Levinson announced that we had
taken space for an advertisement in the United States
Cumulative Book Auction Records and in the Antiquarian Bookman permanent want list. And what is, I think,
of special note is that on this occasion we received word that an
organizing meeting for the Northern California chapter would be held at
Dave Magee ' s bookshop on December 8th, thus marking the beginning of
the Northern California chapter. On December 24, 1949, it was decided to
put out a directory of the antiquarian booksellers in this region, and
that was the beginning of the Antiquarian Booksellers Directory , which
has continued to be produced at regular intervals until this time. The
questionnaires were sent out by Ellen Shaffer, and a directory was
prepared by her and Glen Dawson. Our next meeting was as guests of Mr.
and Mrs. Larson and Nick Kovach at the Gung Ho Chinese Restaurant,
[laughter] 5530 Hollywood Boulevard. There is a photograph in existence
of the people present at that meeting.
-
GARDNER:
- Do you have one?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I have a photograph, and I think it's reproduced in the slide show
which Muir Dawson showed. There were, I'd say, something like about
thirty-five members and guests present at that meeting, and Glen Dawson
presided. At that meeting Harry Levinson reported that he was going to
hold a book auction on February 26 of 1950, and a later one in March of
the same year. Ellen Shaffer reported that the lecture series was now an
established reality and that the French Foundation at 411 North La
Cienega Boulevard had agreed to make their hall available for us at a
very reasonable charge. The funds for paying for the rental, which was
thirty-five dollars a meeting, were in part contributed by the
organization, and in part contributed by the University of California
Extension, and part contributed by myself in the form of a return of the
fee that I was to receive. [laughter] The minutes of that meeting
concluded with a very elaborate menu of Chinese food served on this
occasion—in all, about eleven items.
-
GARDNER:
- A memorable evening was had by all. [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, a memorable evening indeed. It seemed that the next meeting of the
antiquarian booksellers involved a banquet, and the cost of the banquet
was $193, of which cash received was $178.50, leaving us in the red for
$16.50. I'm sure that deficit was made up in one way or another. [tape
recorder turned off] On January 2, 1950, the booksellers met again at
Harry Levinson's bookshop with a considerable number of members present,
and the guest member of the national association, Mr. Philip Rosenbach,
brother of Dr. Rosenbach of Philadelphia. Charles Yale presided. Harry
Levinson, as treasurer, reported that there was a current balance of
$232.71 in the treasury.
-
GARDNER:
- Wonderful. He was a good treasurer.
-
ZEITLIN:
- A lot of progress was made. The cost of the rental of the hall for the
French Institute for the fine-printing and rare-books lectures was
discussed. There was a deficiency of fifty dollars; and various members,
including Dawson's Book Shop, Pickwick Book Shop, Max Hunley, Harry
Levinson, Charles Yale, Philip Rosenbach, and myself made up a total of
eighty dollars in all, being the sum necessary to take care of all the
additional expenses. On that occasion, Louis Epstein made the first
report of the grievance committee. The exhibition, under our auspices,
had now advanced to the point that an eight-page catalog had been
prepared and printed, and that the first of the exhibitions was to be
held at Pasadena Junior College. Glen Dawson, who by then was a member
of the National Board of Governors of the association, reported that
finally a constitution for the national association was confirmed and
that the association voted to become a part of the International League
of Booksellers. This, of course, made us participants in the activities
not only of the local association but in the national association and of
the international association. The meeting then was introduced to Philip
Rosenbach, and he was made an honorary member of the local group. This
sort of shows the step-bystep development of the association. The first
general bulletin of the Southern California chapter was published,
including a directory of the members and their real names and addresses.
Our farthest northern directory at that time appears to have been John
and Jane Wilgress of Monterey, California. We did have one San Diego
member-- the Book Center--and the farthest east member was the Claremont
Book and Art Shop in Claremont and Musicana Unlimited of Pomona.
-
GARDNER:
- Who was that? That doesn't sound familiar.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know who they were.
-
GARDNER:
- Could I see that roster?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
-
GARDNER:
- Can I go back and ask you about some of these people while you're
thumbing through?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, certainly.
-
GARDNER:
- Some of them I know the answers, some of them I don't. Abbey Book Shop
at that time--that was no longer Bunster Greeley, was it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know who succeeded Bunster Greeley, but, as I remember, I
thought he was still a member.
-
GARDNER:
- Was he, at that point?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
-
GARDNER:
- The Argonaut was Ben Epstein.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The Argonaut was Ben Epstein, and he was on Sixth Street. That was
really a subsidiary of the . . .
-
GARDNER:
- . . . Pickwick.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
-
GARDNER:
- Clare R. Bill—that's a name I don't remember at all.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Clare Bill began her bookselling career at Bullock's in 1926 or
'27—no, in 1925 or 1926, about the same time that I was working there in
the book department. She later became a specialist in bookplates, wrote
several books about bookplates, ran a succession of small book and
antique shops down here, cataloged the Morgan Collection in Santa
Barbara (which I think was given to Harvard) , and later moved up to
Northern California, where she still remains and is publishing books
about bookplates and dealing in books and bookplates.
-
GARDNER:
- Did we talk about John Q. Burch? I don't think so.
-
ZEITLIN:
- John Q. Burch and his wife were a very fine old couple who turned their
hobby, which was shells, into a very successful business in their later
years; and along with shells, they dealt in books about shells. They
retired from the book business, oh, some fifteen years ago, I think; and
I don't know whether they're still living or not. But they were a very
amiable pair of people who had this business dealing mainly in books
about shells (although they did include other natural history) and in
rare shells. They were a wonderful example of people who made their
hobby and their business one and the same.
-
GARDNER:
- I don't think we've talked about Arthur H. Clark.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Arthur H. Clark Company, in terms of the beginnings--the people of
Southern California with the earliest history in the book
business—certainly comes first because he began as an apprentice in
England before the turn of the century. He came to New York (I think he
worked for American Art Galleries for some time), then he moved to
Cleveland, and he started a business specializing in American historical
literature. Western Americana and other Americana, and publishing. He
built up a very substantial business; in fact, it was the outstanding
specialty-book publishing business in the field. He got out regular
catalogs, a great many of them over the years, of books on American
historical subjects. And sometime around 1940, I think, he moved his
entire stock to Glendale, California, and started a new business there.
The business continued under the management of Mr. Gallagher and his son
Arthur H, Clark, Jr. Now the son of Arthur H. Clark is involved. They've
done a lot of excellent western-book publishing.
-
GARDNER:
- Dale's Bookazine?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Harry Dale came from Indianapolis, Indiana. He was sort of a
diamond in the rough. He had a great talent for merchandising, and his
shop was filled with signs. There was always a spirit of activity in his
bookshop. However, the book business was too slow for him after a while,
and he went into the record business. What finally happened to him I
don't know, because I think his spirit of enterprise outran his
accounting, [laughter] and I'm afraid he got into some financial trouble
and closed his business and moved away from here. But I don't know. ...
I'm sure he's not alive still.
-
GARDNER:
- Lee Freeson?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Lee Freeson was interested in the ballet and was associated with the New
York theater for many years. He was married to a very fine dancer
[Carmelita Maracci] . She was outstanding in her day. And Lee became
interested in books having to do primarily with the dance. From that he
developed a substantial business in books on the ballet and the theater,
and has remained in business, without a bookshop—selling entirely from
his home.
-
GARDNER:
- International Bookfinders is Dick Mohr, isn't it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- International Bookfinders is Dick Mohr, which is an out-of-print search
business, doing business from his home in Pacific Palisades--entirely a
mail-order business.
-
GARDNER:
- You mentioned Kurt Merlander before as one of the founders, but I don't
think you've talked about him.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Kurt Merlander worked for Stanley Rose Bookshop at one time. He
also worked for me. He was a refugee from Germany. He was a specialist
in Spanish, knew a great deal about Spanish literature and ultimately
went into business for himself, dealing in books mainly about Hispanica,
and has continued to conduct a mail-order business. I don't know how
much he's doing now—he's probably retired--but he was quite successful
dealing only in Hispanica.
-
GARDNER:
- I think that about covers my list. I think you've talked about the rest.
Let me put this back in the file and go on.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Now, I find here the announcement of the University Extension of a
series of eight lectures which was conducted. Curiously enough, it
doesn't give a year; it says Tuesday evening from eight o'clock to ten
o'clock, beginning March 7th—I think that must have been 1950—at the
French Research Foundation on 499 North La Cienega Boulevard. The fee
was ten dollars for the entire course, and the speakers included
Lawrence Clark Powell on some great California book collectors, J. Gregg
Layne on Californiana, Ward Ritchie on fine printing, Margaret Lecky on
bindings, Kenneth Foster of Pomona College on Oriental books, myself on
early scientific books, Paul Jordan-Smith on collecting odd books, and
Robert Schad on Henry E. Huntington—the collector and his library. In
addition to that, in the same location in the folder is a very amusing
little folded brochure (quite obviously the work of William Cheney, the
founder and genius of the Auk Press) , which was issued by the downtown
members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America-- Abbey
Book Shop, Argonaut Book Shop, Bennett and Marshall, and Dawson's Book
Shop—inviting their guests to a dinner meeting of the ABAA on June 16,
1950. I think I have referred to the minutes of that meeting--no, we
haven't gotten to that point yet. But here is the May 17, 1950
[meeting], and that was held at Max Hunley's bookshop with a very
substantial membership present, including Mrs. Sara Kamen of the Kamen
Bookshop, New York, and Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Burch. At that meeting Lee
Freeson (who styled himself "Trader at Large in Fine Books--by
Appointment Only") was elected to membership, and a slate of officers
was nominated and so on, the usual' thing. Both the nominations and the
elections were held on the same evening, and Mr. Glen Dawson reported
that the lecture series had been a great success. And on the sixteenth
of June, the meeting to which the members had been invited on the
previous pamphlet was held at the Savoy Hotel with large attendance.
Practically every member of the association was present with a lot of
members of their staff and also Mr. and Mrs. Powell; H. Richard and
Margot Archer; Dr. Lewis Stieg; Robert Schad; Miss Lucille Miller, who
was the librarian for Mrs. E.L. Doheny. The election of members was
finally completed at that meeting, and arrangements were made for a
booth of the California Library Association at the Sacramento
convention. August of 1950: the bylaws were finally discussed and
approved. Group insurance, which was a matter of continuous discussion
for the members over a period of a number of years, was discussed; and
nobody has, even to this date, been able to work out a satisfactory
plan.
-
GARDNER:
- Is that so? I notice later on you were very active in trying to set
something up.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, we attempted a number of times, but nothing was actually effected.
The bylaws were at that time presented for discussion, and a draft of
them accompanied the minutes. Later in that month, on August 29, 1950, a
dinner was held honoring Carl Kup-- curator of the Spencer Collection of
the New York Public Library—a very distinguished, elegant gentleman, who
is indeed one of the great men in the world of rare books. He was then
just on the way up in what was to be one of the outstanding careers
among bookmen. The notice of the meeting was signed by M.J. Royer as
secretary and Louis Epstein as president.
-
GARDNER:
- Maybe this would be a good moment to recapitulate something about Louis,
because it's been a long time since the early days in the 1920s when the
two of you were down on Sixth Street.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Louis and I were friends from the very beginning, when I walked
into his shop--I think it was in 1926—and he had opened the . . .
-
GARDNER:
- The Acadia, wasn't it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . Acadia Book Shop on West Sixth Street. Later on Louis himself said
that he had taken the name from Longfellow's Hiawatha, [laughter] which, of course, was not the poem.
-
GARDNER:
- Right author, wrong poem.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, right author, wrong poem. It's strange that the man who chose the
name of his bookshop didn't remember the source of the name. I was much
amused, but I didn't correct him in print; I merely took a jab at him in
private. It seemed that he had bought a bookshop in Long Beach first,
and as is the case with lots of people who've later been successful in
the book business, he didn't know anything about bookselling. He
discovered that the shelves were full of junk, and that there was no
hope for what he had. He succeeded in selling it out for enough to get
out from under. He came down to Los Angeles and rented a space on West
Sixth Street and started over again. Louis has a very high degree of
intelligence, and so it didn't take him long to learn what was desirable
in the way of books and what was not desirable and salable, so that he
filled his shop with a rather choice selection of books. He didn't know
much about the value of these books; Max Hunley and I took a lot of good
sleepers off his shelves before we finally tried to educate him a little
bit. [laughter] Louis has a great talent for winning friends, and before
long, a lot of people were coming in and out of his shop. He's also a
very good businessman, so that even if his books were cheap, he was
making a good profit out of them, because he knew how and where to buy
them. And one day two brothers . . .
-
GARDNER:
- Howey ...
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . Howey brothers . . . came in and looked it over and asked him how
much he wanted for his business. He took a look around and, quite off
the top of his head, said, "$1,600." They came back and looked around
and said, "We'll take it." Ralph Howey was the one who chose to stay in
the shop and run the business. The [other] brother Richard Howey, was
interested in economics and teaching economics, and later went to the
University of Kansas; became head of the department and pursued his
interest in books to the point where he formed one of the outstanding
collections in the history of economics at the University of Kansas. But
Ralph Howey was a very quiet man--no salesmanship at all about him, but
a great deal of quiet persistence and intelligence. He very soon got rid
of the general run-of-the-mill secondhand books and was filling the
shelves with better books, mainly in the field of English literature. He
was buying out of English catalogs and buying libraries, and before
long, he had really fine books there. I bought a good many important
first editions of English literature from him, including a copy of the
first edition of Jane Austen's Pride and
Prejudice in the original boards. It was very much to my sorrow and
his regret that we later discovered that this copy had been doctored and
that it was not all that it was represented to be. It was the copy which
I sold Frank Hogan that turned out to be a made-up copy. Well, I think
it was agreed at the time of the sale that Louis would not enter into
the book business again for something like one year. So he found himself
without anything to do but still obsessed by books, and he started
traveling around to places like the Goodwill and the various thriftshop
organizations. He became very well acquainted with the people who
managed these shops and with the days when it was best to be there, and
he was soon accumulating a stock of books in his house. In 1928, when I
opened my shop, he still didn't have a shop of his own, and he lent me
some books to put on my shelves and fill out my empty spaces. He says
that I refused to return to him when he wanted them any of the books
that were unsold, [laughter] but his memory and mine do not exactly
jibe. In any event, it was very helpful to me, and it was very kind of
him to lend me part of the beginnings of my stock. He and I made a trip
in 1927 to Santa Barbara, and we had told ourselves that we were going
to go back at least every ten years. We have not yet made another trip
together to Santa Barbara, and I've warned him that this year may be our
last chance. I hope that he will be inclined to go. Well, Louis is a
very enterprising man, and he's a man of excellent judgment in business,
very energetic, and as soon as possible, he opened up another bookshop
on West Eighth Street. He knew the one great secret about bookselling,
and that is that if you buy right, you cannot go wrong. If you buy
right, you can price your books low enough so that people will come in
and buy them, and you will still make a very substantial profit. In
addition to that, he had the assistance of a man who'd been a collector
around town for a number of years. Mr. Shelton was a curious, eccentric,
solitary kind of a man, and the bookshop became his whole life. I think
that he had the hope that in the days to come he and Louis would be
equal partners in the ownership of the business. But it didn't work out
that way, and he became very disillusioned and angry and broke off with
Louis and left his employment. Louis, in the meantime, had met [Ed]
Stackhouse, who was a very brilliant merchandiser and equally [as]
energetic as Louis. Stackhouse worked shoulder to shoulder with Louis,
and, in time, Louis had an opportunity to open a store in Hollywood. The
remains of the Depression were still with us, and there was a great deal
of property to be had at relatively low prices. This corner building--or
building next to the corner--on Hollywood Boulevard was one of the
properties in the hands of a bank which they did not wish to carry, and
so they offered Louis very attractive terms—but terms which were still
difficult for him. Nonetheless, he bought that building, and it became
the center of his book business. He hadn't really intended to go into
the new-book business; but as time went on, and the demand for new books
increased, and as there was no other bookseller in Hollywood that
carried as big a stock as Louis Epstein did, his shop quickly expanded.
He bought the corner, and it became the leading bookshop in Hollywood,
as well as in Southern California. Later he was induced to occupy a
space in one of the shopping centers . . .
-
GARDNER:
- . . . Topanga . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . that was being promoted by May Company. He found, very much to his
surprise, that this branch store was doing almost as well as his
Hollywood bookshop. Ultimately, of course, he built up a very large
business, which was purchased from him by B. Dalton. Louis is a very
earnest, responsible individual. He's a good citizen with a great sense
of what's right. We have not always agreed on all matters, but I admire
him very much, and I have a very great affection for him. We have
remained very close friends through all the years, which is a matter of
great satisfaction and pride to me.
-
GARDNER:
- After all these years, that's true.
-
ZEITLIN:
- At times when I've faced critical conditions, when I was short of funds,
Louis was very generous in helping me with loans. I always repaid him
and tried to compensate for them in other ways, and I've certainly tried
to give evidence of my gratitude in every other way. I must say that
because of the help he extended to me over the years I've felt obliged
to extend help to others, and he too has done a great deal of the same
sort of thing for others.
-
GARDNER:
- That's very interesting. That brings up an interesting point to discuss,
I think, and especially from talking about the organization, and that's
the sort of brotherhood that seems to exist among bookdealers.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, book dealers have, up to now, in Southern California been on very
friendly terms. There are a few individuals who some of us don't feel as
close to and don't have the same confidence in, and there have been a
few rivalries which, I think, have created a little acrimony. But on the
whole, there's been a very high level of cooperation, and we've remained
friends and in many ways supported each other through difficult times.
My closest relationship, of course, has been with the Dawsons, for whom
I have a very high respect. We've always cooperated in everything where
it was possible. There has to be a certain amount of competition in a
business like this, but it should never go to the point where you have
to cut each other's throat in order to survive.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, Louis made an interesting point when, in [our] conversations, he
talked about one way in which the book business differs from others, and
that is that competition in the book business actually increases
business for everybody, and that the more stores you have on a street,
the more business you'll do.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. When I moved out on La Cienega, there was not another shop near me.
I encouraged Peggy Christian to move in so that I could have someone
there to send my customers to and who would in turn send customers to
me. Since then, of course, a whole group of bookshops have grown up
along Melrose. For instance, there are now about six bookshops—there's
George Houle, there's Bennett and Marshall, there is Lenny's Bookshop,
there is Salzman's Canterbury Book Shop, and there is Michael Thompson,
and there is one other of which I don't remember the name right now. But
generally if one man doesn't have it, he'll send people to the other
bookseller. If we want something from the other bookseller, he will give
us a discount so we can make a profit off it; and we feel obliged to do
the same thing. There's no dog in the manger in this business so far as
I know.
-
GARDNER:
- You mentioned great rivalries, though.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there are rivalries . . .
-
GARDNER:
- Can you tell me a couple of them?
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . mostly in terms of prestige. No, they're things I don't think it
would be easy to discuss, and I think that these things are best left
for other people to talk about.
-
GARDNER:
- Okay, instead I'll ask you this, Another one of the good book areas now
is Westwood Boulevard--now, Bob Campbell told me, and I don't think
we've talked about this, that you were out in Westwood very early on in
'29 or '30.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I had a bookshop in Westwood in 1929. I had a young woman working for
me. Tone Price. She had come out from my hometown in Texas, Fort Worth.
Tone had a great deal of personal charm. She was a peculiar kind of a
woman, I think, given to attract members of her own sex, and she dressed
rather peculiarly with mannish dresses. She didn't wear slacks, of
course, because, that wasn't heard of at that time. But she wore
tailored coats and skirts and mannish shirts with neckties and so on.
She had a great deal of personal magnetism and charm, and while she
wasn't a highly literate person, she learned quick. She learned by ear,
and she had good taste. She worked in my bookshop for, oh, four or five
years; and, of course, at that time she had the idea that it would be a
good thing if we tried to start a bookshop in Westwood. We started at a
little place facing the university, on the street where Campbell's is
now [Le Conte] , but nearer to Westwood Boulevard. The shop was designed
by Leroy Davidson, and it was a very attractive little shop. But
unfortunately we didn't have the capital, and we didn't have the stock
with which to carry on. I think it lasted about six months in all. Bob
Campbell was very encouraging. I know he would have liked to have us
stay, but it didn't work out.
-
GARDNER:
- It's interesting that no used-book stores —really, no rare, out-of-print
anything has really made it in Westwood Village.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Not in the Village. There was a remainder bookshop that did extremely
well for a while, and then they had a fire and that all went kaput. But
Jimmy Hakes has run the best general bookshop in Westwood other than
Campbell's.
1.20. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO
(February 21, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- We're back dealing with the files again of the early days of the local
chapter of ABAA. You just noticed that you were president in 1951.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I see by the minutes here before me that in 1951 I was president
and that we met on August 29th of that year for the purpose of honoring
the return of UCLA Librarian Lawrence Clark Powell and his wife from
their European tour. Powell invited any of the dealers who wanted more
information about the English book trade to visit him by appointment. At
the same time, Justin Turner, president of the National Society of
Autograph Collectors, spoke of plans for the society. This was in the
very earliest days of what later became the Manuscript Society, a name
which I suggested when the impression was that autograph collecting was
not necessarily manuscript collecting.
-
GARDNER:
- Do you recall anything about what your duties were as president? What
did the president do other than call meetings to order and so on?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the president presided. He was also ex officio member of all
committees. He appointed committees to various functions, and he,
depending upon the initiative which he took, could arrange the program
and plan other activities of the organization during the term of his
office. The organization had a series of meetings at one time. They were
visited by Samuel Hume of Berkeley, a very colorful character who had
been a part of the early theater movement. Most of the activities of the
association, other than that of meeting, consisted of arranging book
exhibitions.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, we talked somewhat about the first auction last time, and you
mentioned before we turned this on that you wanted to say something
about the first bookfair, and that's not anywhere in here.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, well, I'm afraid that I can't talk about that without referring to
the record, which I don't have with me. I do have in front of me what
appears to be the floor plan . . . [leafs through files] oh, no, this is
the California Library Association exhibition room floor plan, in which
we participated. We also met in the course of the year 1951 at Claremont
and held a meeting honoring Charles Yale, who had died at that time and
who had worked first for the state library in Sacramento and later was
manager for Ernest Dawson.
-
GARDNER:
- Why don't we move ahead and talk about the national organizations,
because I think we really have covered the origins here and gotten an
idea of the sort of meetings that were held. And since the archive does
contain all this material. ... I can see you're spellbound.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, by my own prose. [laughter] This is the introduction to the meeting
honoring Charles Yale and the dedication of the Charles Yale Collection
at Scripps College, Claremont, on Sunday, June 3, 1951.
-
GARDNER:
- I just ran across in my notes . . . I 'm going to try to stop you from
reading your notes there. [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, go ahead.
-
GARDNER:
- I just ran across some quote that I pulled out of Louis Epstein's oral
history, and there are two or three quotes having to do with the local
chapter that I'd be interested to hear you comment about. First one: he
said, "At most of our meetings we discussed a minimum of business and a
maximum of gossip."
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I didn't recall that the gossip took place in the course of the
meeting. It may have taken place before the meeting or afterward, but it
seemed to me that we spent an awful lot of time discussing trifling
things, which is the fate of a great many organizations, especially when
they get started and have to adopt bylaws and constitutions.
-
GARDNER:
- Another thing he mentioned is about as great a controversy as there
was—the nature of the membership, whether or not all booksellers should
be allowed or the membership should be limited.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there was never any doubt that in order to qualify for membership
you had to be in business for a fixed period of time (it was two years
at one time, and I think it's been extended to three years now), and
that you had to have a place of business, other than your home, where
you sold books. You also had to be proposed and seconded by two other
members of the association, and you had to be voted upon, both by the
local association and if you were accepted by them, by the national
association. There was a controversy at one time where some members of
the national association did not want to have to pay dues to the local
association; they wanted the benefits of membership in the national
association without contributing anything towards the support of it.
That was thrashed out with the national association. Now members have to
belong to a local chapter, where there is one in their part of the
country, in order to be eligible for membership in the national
association.
-
GARDNER:
- Why don't we go on and talk about the national now. Would that be okay?
I don't think there's anything really compelling in this file.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, well, I think we. . . . Let me see here a minute.
-
GARDNER:
- No, you won't find a book there.
-
ZEITLIN:
- You've gone through here?
-
GARDNER:
- Yes.
-
ZEITLIN:
- There is one thing that I think is worth mentioning, and that is that on
January 23, 1951, the association set up an intellectual freedom
committee consisting of John Valentine and myself, and we prepared a
resolution on intellectual freedom for submission to the local board;
and, following that, submission to the national board for adoption. I'm
sorry to say that the national board did not accept any resolution
pertaining to intellectual freedom. They were a bunch of small-business
men who didn't want to become involved in such things as questions of
intellectual freedom, freedom of speech, and didn't want to even become
involved in the question of freedom against censorship until they got
caught in the squeeze.
-
GARDNER:
- What sparked your forming that committee? Was there any particular
situation?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, John Valentine and I were both Democrats, active in the Democratic
party, interested in questions of intellectual freedom, and we felt that
the booksellers association should follow the lead of the American
Library Association and set up a working committee for the protection of
their members in the matter of censorship of literary material and
booksellers. The idea was that we would support any member who was being
prosecuted, we'd provide him with as much financial and legal aid as we
could, as well as any other support. The other thing that the
association became involved in about that time was the running of the
association advertisements in the yellow pages of the telephone
directory. And we occasionally did buy space in the book section of the
Los Angeles Times. I'm amused to find here a
letter from Richard Wormser, the secretary, concerning the resolution
which John Valentine and I prepared, in which he says that "it was
presented to the quarterly meeting of the board of governors, and though
everyone at the meeting agreed with the sentiments in the proposal, the
consensus was that the subject is not within the province of our
association. Should there be any attempt to impose restrictions on the
material in which we deal, we shall take steps to combat them." That's
signed by Richard Wormser, the secretary--and I must say that it was not
very long after that that I met Richard Wormser—and he'd discovered that
there was really a need for taking a position on the matter of
intellectual freedom. Well, it looks to me like I'm going backwards
here. The association seemed to have just about the same number of
people in attendance in its early years as it does now.
-
GARDNER:
- Is that so? Membership is still limited, isn't it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Membership is still limited, but I'd say the present membership--where
it started with about twenty, present membership has a total of
forty-eight firms.
-
GARDNER:
- Can I look through that and ask you about some of the people, maybe
bring it up to date? Well, I hate to go through everyone here because
there are so many.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, of course. This is the most up-to-date list, and there are of
course a great many new names, a great many dealers in specialties such
as we did not have when we began.
-
GARDNER:
- Right. Well, I think that it'd be lengthy to go through the entire list.
-
ZEITLIN:
- The association enjoyed the membership of most of the prominent
antiquarian booksellers in the area, but not all of them. The Arthur H.
Clark Company was a member for a short while and then decided that they
did not wish to participate for various reasons. They were located in
Glendale and, I think, to some degree, partook of the general political
complexion of that part of the world.
-
GARDNER:
- Do you want to take this file, then? It starts in back, in the earliest
days. This is the national antiquarian group—start on the other side, I
think. Is that the earliest? Yes. Now, as we talked about it last time,
the organizations were pretty well simultaneous.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, yes. The national association was incorporated in 1949, early in
1949, and as well as I can remember, the local association was formed .
. .
-
GARDNER:
- ... it was about the same time--fall of 1949, spring of 1950 . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . Yes, fall of 1949, so that we were the first regional chapter to
be formed. The association was formed by a group of incorporators,
including Robert Barry of New Haven; the firm of Charles Stonehill; Mary
Benjamin, the autograph dealer; Herman Cohen, a dealer in books on fine
printing; Glen Dawson of Los Angeles; Marston Drake of the very great
firm of James E. Drake in New York; Emily Driscoll, a lady autograph
dealer; Lawrence Gomme, who became later the first president of the
association; George Goodspeed of Boston; Nathan Ladden of the firm of
Inman of New York; Aaron Mendoza (the Mendoza book firm was an
outstanding firm in its day but seems not to exist anymore); Ralph G.
Newman-- 18 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, Illinois—who, while he was an
incorporator, did not remain a member for very long afterward; Bernard
Otto, who I think was associated with G.A. Baker and Company; David
Randall, in charge of the rare-book department at Scribner's; Walter
Schatzki, who later was one of the presidents in the association, one of
the very good ones; Richard Wormser, who was certainly one of the most
diplomatic and witty of the members and also had international contacts
in the world of books; and Mabel Zahn of Sessler's in Philadelphia. It's
worth noting that nobody representing the Rosenbach firm was involved in
the forming of the association, and I don't think it was until quite a
long time after the association was formed that the Rosenbachs decided
to involve themselves.
-
GARDNER:
- Why is that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I don't think they thought the organization would last. And they
didn't really want to do anything to strengthen what might become
competition.
-
GARDNER:
- Do you want to take a few minutes and go through that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. I think you'd better turn it off. [tape recorder turned off]
-
GARDNER:
- You've now perused the files of the national organization.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the national organization seems to have come into being in 1949,
and by 1950 it was well launched and was conducting a great many
activities. They started the same way that we did, by preparing a
traveling exhibition. and their first exhibition was to be of "rare and
interesting books which can be bought for twenty-five dollars or less."
(Interesting comment--I don't think that any rare-book dealer could
afford to put on an exhibition of books for twenty-five dollars or
less.) The most important event in the year following the incorporation
of the association was an invitation from the International League of
Antiquarian Booksellers to attend their annual conference in Paris. The
French national organization was the host, and they requested the
American organization to send them the names of any members who would be
present in Paris at the time. This was the first year of participation
of the American association, and they were then affiliated with the
international league. Those who attended as delegates were Captain Louis
Henry Cohn of the House of Books; Muir Dawson of Dawson's Book Shop; Mr.
Jeffrey Steele of Chappaqua, New York; and Lawrence Verry of Verry
Fischer and Company, New York. One of the most notable events at that
international meeting was an address on the part of Percy Muir, one of
the most learned and most respected of booksellers, who fortunately is
still active as a country bookseller in England. I note that there was a
slightly acrimonious exchange of correspondence between myself and Mr.
Wormser concerning the action of the association on the resolution
concerning setting up of an intellectual freedom committee. Nothing came
of it; no intellectual freedom committee was ever established. The
Antiquarian Booksellers Association quickly developed problems such as
I've mentioned before of the desire of some booksellers to join the
national association without joining their regional organization, and as
a result of that, an amendment to the bylaws was passed in 1951 which
required all members of the national association to be members of some
regional association.
-
GARDNER:
- How many regional associations do you think there were about that time?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there were very few. They set up very shortly a North Atlantic
chapter and the Middle Western chapter and the Western chapter.
-
GARDNER:
- And there would be no southern members?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Southern members could belong to the association which was nearest to
them. Another thing that the association developed was the exchange of
credit information and the effort to assist various members in dealing
with reluctant debtors. The other thing that developed in the early
years was the establishment of a fund to help booksellers or their
dependents who might be in need, and that fund has grown and now has
quite a substanial amount of money which it has on occasions lent to
bookseller members or their families. In nearly every case the help
extended and the funds have been returned. At one time the organization
set up a collection agent for all the members of the association; it
didn't work very well and finally was dropped. There are some things
which can only be done in an informal manner if you are to avoid legal
difficulties. The other activity which the national and the local
association undertook was to set up hospitality rooms and offer other
entertainment to librarians when they had their meetings in one of the
cities where a particular chapter was based, so that in 1953 the
California chapter acted as host to the members of the American Library
Association, who met for their annual conference in Los Angeles.
-
GARDNER:
- Is this still true?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. The association, either formally or informally, usually sets up a
hospitality room where they offer drinks and refreshments of other kinds
to librarians. It provides an easy way for the membership to meet and
mingle with the librarians and for the librarians to get acquainted with
the booksellers. And the librarians seem to like it very much. The
international meetings which take place every other year have become
very important affairs and very popular and attract a great many
members. The West Coast has served as host on one occasion; meetings
generally have taken place in London, Paris, Geneva, Vienna, and in
Italy at Milano-Maritima, a seacoast resort. There has always been the
most splendid hospitality. In 1955 the international organization met in
New York, and the meetings took place in the meeting hall of the
Carnegie Foundation for Peace on the United Nations Plaza. I remember
that on that occasion Mr. Luther Evans, the retired director of the
Library of Congress, was invited to address the membership, and he made
some remarks about the high prices and what he called the hold-up
manners of Mr. Kraus. In spite of the fact that Kraus was not
universally beloved, it was very much resented. That meeting was really
a high-water mark for the association. They gave us a very fine
reception at Yale, one of the most lavish and, I must also say, riotous
evenings that I ever took part in; in fact, it was so riotous and
exhausting that I spent the night at one of the houses there as the
guest of Bob Metzdorf . Mike Papantonio and I stayed overnight there and
the next morning started to drive back to New York. It took a very long
time to get back because Mr. Papantonio had a hard time getting over the
effects of the celebration the night before. This congress of 1955
included delegates from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France,
Germany (I think it was the first meeting to which the German delegates
were admitted), the United States, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland. I met
some of my most important friends in the book world on the occasion of
that meeting, and I'm sure that a great many of the other booksellers
also formed friendships there which have lasted through the years. (I
forgot to mention Amsterdam also as one of the places where the
Antiquarian Booksellers international meetings have taken place.) One
meeting, as I said before, took place in San Francisco and later
adjourned to continue informally down here, because that was our first
international bookfair in California. The association also issued a form
to be given to people who desired to sell or have books appraised, so as
to set up a uniform procedure for those things. The last minutes which I
have in the files (which now are part of the archives at UCLA) cover the
ninth annual meeting of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of
America on February 4, 1958. By then the organization had become well
formalized and had proceeded to make motions and conduct business
according to the best Robert's Rules of Order
standards.
-
GARDNER:
- How many of your fellow local booksellers would have traveled to the
national conventions? Was it a sort of common thing to do, or was it
rare?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the national meetings are held once a year still, when the
presidency either changes hands or the old officers are re-elected, and
not a great many members from around the country attend. I was the
speaker before last at the annual meeting in New York, and I would say
there were probably 100 people there, but most of them were New Yorkers,
and a great many of them were friends of booksellers rather than
booksellers. The national meetings usually don't attract a great many
members. There is a lot of competition, and the Bibliographical Society
of America meets about the same time in January, the Grolier Club holds
its annual meeting at that time, and the auction houses usually put on
auctions especially aimed at the booksellers and collectors who will be
attending the Bibliographical Society meeting, so that there's really
very little time to attend. Now, the international meetings are
remarkably well attended, when you consider that most booksellers are
not affluent in the sense that they can travel to Europe and back just
for the sake of participating in a meeting. But they have become such
wonderfully well-conducted affairs that every bookseller that can do so,
goes. You have to be designated a delegate; but if an organization like
the United States has five delegates, and ten additional people indicate
that they'd like to attend, [then] they are made alternate delegates so
they can attend anyway. The meetings are very interesting and exciting;
we are usually taken on tours of the most interesting libraries and
galleries. Special arrangements are made: bus tours to outlying areas,
monasteries, and private libraries, and palaces, and villas. The dinners
are very grand. I remember one that we had at the Savoy Hotel in London
in 1956 (the first I attended) which was followed by a ballet at Covent
Garden, and that was followed by a champagne supper afterwards. We also
were taken out to Greenwich; they erected a pavilion, and lunch was
served in the pavilion on the lawn. We were really made to feel very
much like honored guests at all the affairs that I have attended.
-
GARDNER:
- You've mentioned the word delegate ; that implies to me some sort of
transaction of business.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, there are business meetings. They are taken very seriously, and they
often become quite heated. On one occasion—well, the one in San
Francisco—the president of the international association was an English
bookseller, a very quiet, reticent man who really didn't know how to
preside; and there was a rebellion led by the Germans, who were very
punctilious and precise and who wanted to vote the president out of
office immediately, right from the floor. It took a great deal of
lobbying and closet persuasion to keep this from happening, because we
Americans and the British were not going to see the president, who was
an Englishman, dislodged by a bunch of those "Prussians," [laughter] as
we felt about them at that time. The majority of the points of
contention have to do with questions of the allowing of discounts to
fellow members with the terms of credit—that is, the length of time for
which credit is extended--and with customs problems. And also there is a
biennial bibliographical prize given by the association, a prize for
what is considered the most noteworthy contribution to the field of
bibliography. An international committee is appointed to select the
candidates for this award, and I think it's something like $500 that's
awarded to the winner of the prize.
-
GARDNER:
- There's nothing like that on the national level, though, is there? Or is
there?
-
ZEITLIN:
- The national organization has not been able to effect any sponsorship of
any activities outside of those having directly to do with the business
of the organziation and being the host nation for international meetings
and such things. The national organization has also had a problem in
recent years with the question of whether or not they could legally
refuse membership because of the bookfairs which were sponsored by the
national organization. The national organization had almost concluded
that they would no longer sponsor bookfairs. In the past, only members
of the association could participate in the bookfairs, and we were
threatened with lawsuits by various bookdealers who felt that this was
discrimination and restraint of trade. But we've now been advised by our
new legal advisors that there are ways of continuing to sponsor
bookfairs without being forced to admit members whom we do not feel are
up to the requirements for membership in the association. This has been
a serious matter, because from time to time it looked as if we weren't
going to be able to maintain an organization limited to people that we
felt were admissible, and there were threats of suits from several
booksellers, mainly California ones. This year there will be an
international bookfair conducted in New York, not directly under the
sponsorship of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association but conducted by
a private organization which will do it for profit. There will also be
one conducted by the Antiquarian Booksellers. But the international
association is committed to bookfairs because it's an old institution in
Europe. One of the first international bookfairs that was held in recent
years was held during the fifties in Amsterdam. They have been held
annually in London; there is one in Dusseldorf now. And these, in
addition to the ones in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San
Francisco, have become a sort of circuit for some booksellers who seem
never to stay home but spend all their time going from one fair to
another.
-
GARDNER:
- Do you go to more than just the California ones?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, yes. We participated in the Boston bookfair last year with some
success, and we are participating in the New York bookfair this year. We
have not decided yet whether we'll participate in the Toronto bookfair,
but we have in the past two occasions, including the first time they
held a bookfair in Canada. We were encouraged by the Canadian
association and the librarians of Canada to come up and participate;
they felt that it would add to the distinction of the occasion if we
went there.
-
GARDNER:
- Did it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I'm not sure that I contributed anything but confusion. But, anyhow, it
v/as a lot of fun.
-
GARDNER:
- Have any of the local booksellers become officers in either the national
or international organizations?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, yes. There are a great many members of the local associations who
have been officers: Glen Dawson was the treasurer for a number of years;
Warren Howell is the current president of the association for the second
term; a great many of us have been members of the board. I was a board
member for one year, but I did not attend but for one meeting. I never
could get involved in the business of the association enough to
contribute very much. I did propose that the association undertake to
sponsor, with financial help and otherwise, a history of bookselling in
America. I felt that if we were to give it the primary sponsorship, we
could get funding from some of the foundations--from the Guggenheim
Foundation, for instance, because of the strong sympathy that Gordon Ray
has for booksellers.
1.21. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE
(February 21, 1978 and March 14, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- You were talking about the history of the booksellers.
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . the history of antiquarian bookselling in America. I wrote a
letter to the president, who brought it up before the board of the
national association, but it got nowhere. I regret this very much,
because I think that the history of the antiquarian book trade in
America is very interesting. A great many colorful individuals have
participated in bookselling. They have been cultural outposts in many of
the growing cities of America, and their story is worth telling and
worth preserving. I'm sorry that it wasn't undertaken, and I'm afraid
that there isn't anybody among the younger generation willing to push it
forward at this time.
-
GARDNER:
- Have you tried contacting the foundations themselves?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I haven't tried contacting the foundations because, without the support
of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association themselves, I don't think any
foundation would take much interest in such a project. I think, on the
other hand, that if we could set up a board of, say, two booksellers and
three historians to explore the possibilities, the history could become
a reality.
-
GARDNER:
- That's an interesting idea--somebody ' s doing it on a very small level.
To come back to, say, Warren Howell being president of the national
organization and so on (and you served on the board but apparently not
in a dedicated manner) , how much time does it take up for someone like
Warren Howell?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It takes a great deal of time.
-
GARDNER:
- Does it interfere with his running his business?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it would if he didn't have a good functioning organization. Nobody
can afford to take the job without a backup staff in his own place of
business which can relieve him of a lot of his responsibilities. He has
to be able and willing to travel back and forth. There are about four
meetings a year, most of them held in New York, although the national
meeting was held here in Los Angeles at the same time as the Antiquarian
bookfair early this month. And very often the national meetings will be
held in the city where a bookfair is going on because a great many of
the booksellers will be going there anyway to participate in the
bookfair, and it makes it easier for them to attend. The Antiquarian
Booksellers Association has now reached the point where it has to
increase its membership dues substantially. It has not had a full-time
functioning secretary or administrator. It is a trade organization.
(Trade organizations provide services for their members, depending on
how much money they have and how interested their officers are.) And
this is one of the things that Warren Howell has contributed to the
association: he has tightened up a lot of the activities, and he has
brought about the establishment of a higher dues schedule and the
creation of a post of what can be called director, or administrator, of
the office of the association.
-
GARDNER:
- I see. Who serves as that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I don't think they've selected anybody yet, but that's just been
enacted. The necessary steps have taken place to make that possible.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, since we've talked about international bookselling, this may
perhaps be an interesting place for me to bring up something I've been
wanting to ask you about for a while, and that's the brief but somewhat
touching dispute that you had with Menno Hertzberger. Apparently you and
he had become close friends; I'm interested in knowing the whole
background of that as well.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, he had come out here a number of times, and we'd become very close
friends. Menno Hertzberger is a very charming man. He's the man who's
responsible for the formation of the International League of Antiquarian
Booksellers. He is a very knowledgeable bookman. [phone rings; tape
recorder turned off] Menno Hertzberger is a man of great charm. He is a
cosmopolite. He is fluent in English, French, German, and I don't know
what other languages. He's a man who quickly ingratiates himself with
people. He has had a long life in the rare-book business, and I think we
met sometime in the fifties. We also have exchanged letters over many
years. I really don't think one should make much of our difference,
because it looked bigger at the time than it really was.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, that's one reason I wanted to hear about it, because it does loom
large in the archives.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I suppose there was a lot of exchange of correspondence, but it all had
to do with a Ratdolt book which I had bought from Menno. I sold it to a
man by the name of Speck, Dr. Richard Speck, in San Francisco. Dr.
Speck, after some time, returned it to me and pointed out that it was a
made-up copy, and that part of the book was from an edition of one date
and part of it was from an edition of another date. So I wrote to Menno
asking him if he would accept the return of the book, and Menno was
convinced that there was nothing wrong with the book, and he wouldn't
accept its return. This became quite a concern, and I was very much
angered and simply refused to do any more business or continue to
associate with him. Well, it seems that Menno had a reputation for being
a little bit careless, and there were other booksellers who from time to
time had reported to me that they had complaints about similar things. I
think that what happened in my case (which wasn't known to me at the
time) was that Menno had gone into business with someone else; that he'd
actually sold his own business and therefore couldn't expect the firm
which now owned him to take the responsibility for books which he had
sold during the time when he was operating independently. He had no
other way of dealing with this thing, so he was caught between his
associates and me. That's something I did not know at the time. Now,
later Menno and I met in Italy at a congress there, and Menno agreed to
take back the book and give me the equivalent amount in exchange of
other books that I might select. However, that became difficult, because
every good book I picked didn't seem to be available. [laughter] You
can't stay angry with Menno, and there's really no sense in it. I think
that in some ways he is as naive as a child, and so we have met since in
London and dined together. I've visited him twice in the Dutch town of
Baarn, where he lives. On one occasion, on Liberation Day in Baarn, we
marched together down the streets. It was a solemn occasion when the
whole town walked through the main streets of the town and converged on
a park there to conduct a memorial service for all those that had been
murdered by the Nazis; nothing, not a word said, just the sound of
people's feet walking through the streets. We have exchanged letters of
congratulation on each other's birthday. He let me know not long ago
that he was eighty years old, and I sent off a letter of congratulation.
I think that his eyesight is very poor now, although he still continues
to operate a book business from a fine old house in Baarn. He manages to
get ahold of very good books—I mean from old customers who want to sell
off their books, or librarians that he's known who have duplicates to
dispose of, and other booksellers, so that he gets off some very
respectable catalogs, as always, with a great deal of scholarship. He's
probably one of the most knowledgeable men, especially in
bibliographical sources, of any man in the book business, and has a
great deal of knowledge in the history of printing and of incunabula.
Now he is living out his declining years in Baarn in peace, and, I
think, considerable comfort, and with the respect of his fellows in the
book trade.
-
GARDNER:
- Is that sort of dispute relatively common?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, various kinds of disputes develop, and very often they cannot be
brought up. The association discourages making big affairs out of little
ones, so that they prefer to have these things settled by the dealers
themselves. But they do, under extreme circumstances— where both dealers
insist on it and they can't get together--set up an arbitration
committee and try to arbitrate these differences. I had a dispute with a
group of English booksellers several years ago, and they threatened to
bring it up before the English association. I urged them to do so,
whereupon they immediately withdrew their suggestion. They decided they
didn't really want this business exposed to the knowledge of not only
the rest of the book trade but the book world in general. There are all
varieties of people engaged in bookselling. The majority of them are, I
think, people of reasonable honesty and good principle, but there are
others--especially the groups which make up the "ring" in England, and
the groups which form and disperse occasionally at the continental
auctions--which I think are less than beneficial to the good name of
bookselling.
-
GARDNER:
- What is the "ring"?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it seems that there have been rings of booksellers, just as there
are in the antique trade and in other businesses, for many years, and it
consists of a small group of booksellers who dominate the auctions and
agree between themselves the limits that they will pay. They agree not
to bid against each other and they also pay off the small dealers who
come; they give them five or ten pounds just to not bid. Then when the
auction is closed and the books have been brought in at the lowest
possible figures by the booksellers who are in the ring, they then hold
a separate auction between themselves. It's a very complicated business.
It takes the brain of a mathematical genius to follow the complications,
[laughter] and if they're also conducted with French currency or with
German, why, then you're even more mystified. There is a strong ring in
England. It has existed for many years. There were efforts made to break
it, and a law was passed in Parliament outlawing rings. Percy Muir, one
of the most upright and scholarly of antiquarian booksellers, got into a
great deal of trouble trying to fight the ring in the auction rooms. But
it still exists, and it seems to be one of these evils that there is no
way of breaking. Everyone is loath to bring these things to the
attention of the Queen's Counsel in England, but once in a while, when
it just gets too blatant, the word gets out, and the ring quiets down a
bit. At present there is a group known as DETH in England--Dawsons,
Edwards, Traylen, Hammond--which are known to constitute the ring, and
they usually dominate the country auctions because there isn't very much
competition from the outside world. If an important auction takes place
in London, they may have to come up against people like Kraus. Sometimes
Warren Howell and myself will go in together with another dealer, like
Kenneth Nebenzahl, and buck the English ring, but sometimes the English
ring will simply agree to not get in our way if we don't get in theirs.
-
GARDNER:
- So, in other words, you're setting up a ring of your own.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I don't go along with it, but there are dealers who do. Ours is
not a ring because we do not agree to refrain from bidding against each
other, and we do not hold a "knockout" afterward.
-
GARDNER:
- I see.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I will go into partnership, where it's an openly announced partnership.
In other words, two or three of us will agree to buy a book together,
and we'll share equally in the purchase price. But then when it's
knocked down, the law requires that all participants in the bid should
be named.
-
GARDNER:
- I see. In other words, what you would do is name the participants, where
what they would do is not.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, they wouldn't. And you see, we don't hold any auction afterwards,
and we're standing up against a great many other dealers who have just
as much interest in buying the books as we do. Sometimes it just takes
more capital than any one of us has got freely available.
-
GARDNER:
- That's an interesting kind of scam. Are there any similar things that go
on in America?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, there never has been quite the same thing as an organized ring. In
the days of Mitchell Kennerly and the early days of the American Art
Association, there were people, dealers, who worked with the house. In
other words, they were shills who boosted the prices against other
dealers. On one occasion Dr. Rosenbach found that he was being pushed up
by a dealer who obviously couldn't absorb these purchases himself and
must have been there buying for the house. He [Rosenbach] got up and
announced that he was not bidding any further and would never attend
another auction. The gentleman who was the house shill is still doing
business in New York and enjoys the patronage of some of the best
collectors in that part of the world, and it's always been a mystery to
me.
-
GARDNER:
- And his name was?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I'm not going to mention his name. I don't think there's a point to it.
-
GARDNER:
- Okay, I just thought I'd ask you.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it's well known in the trade and among collectors, too, but I
don't see any point in making it a matter of record right now.
-
GARDNER:
- The other interesting dispute that I ran across in your archives was
with Gelber and Lilienthal of San Francisco, way, way back in your early
days.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, yes, that was a very interesting one. It had to do with a copy of
David Copperfield in parts, and I had bought
this without knowing anything about the special points of David Copperfield or any other Dickens in parts.
It was in a case, it looked good, and apparently it was all right. I had
it in my shop, and I had a visit from Mr. Thomas Hatton, the coauthor of
the Hatton and [Arthur H.] Cleaver bibliography of Dickens in parts. Mr.
Hatton had come over here to sell books to Mrs. Doheny and other
collectors, and he had made his headquarters in my shop and sold a great
many things through me. So, naturally, I brought out my set of David Copperfield and asked him what he thought
of it. He looked it over, and he said, "See here, your 'Part I' is not a
'Part I.' The X has been scratched out of an XI." It was really "Part
XI." The rest of the cover looked identical with the covers of all the
other issues, so it was only in the numbering at the top of the cover
that you could determine which issue [it was] of the twenty parts in
eighteen, v/hich usually constituted a full round of one of Dickens's
novels published in serial parts. This was a most serious defect,
because a fine first edition of David Copperfield
in parts requires that all of the covers be the original covers and that
it not be made up of bits and pieces or tampered with. There was a man
in England, Walter Spencer, who specialized in making up Dickens in
parts. There was a great vogue for Dickens at one time, much greater
than there is now, so that every collector had to have his favorite
Dickens novel in the original parts; and Mr. Spencer obliged by
doctoring copies, putting them together skillfully, putting covers on
the spine and inserting advertisements and other things called for. He
made up numerous sets. There were other things that were missing from
this set of Dickens, so I wrote to Mr. Lilienthal (who is a very
honorable man) and said, "Look here, I find that this Dickens parts
which I bought from you is not really a first edition. It's imperfect.
It's lacking in these respects—it has been made up, doctored--and I'd
like to return it." And Mr. Lilienthal said, "No, caveat emptor. You
bought it and you keep it. We're not going to take it back. When one
dealer buys from another, he's supposed to know what he's doing." Well,
Mr. Will Clary of the firm of O'Melveny and Meyers came into my place
just after I'd received Mr. Lilienthal's letter, so I said to him, "What
do you think about this"? And he said, "I'm very much interested,
because I'd really like to know what the rights of a buyer are in a case
like this, and whether he has recourse. If you don't mind, I'll put
somebody in my office to work, and we'll look up the law." Well, without
any expense to me, a great deal of valuable, high-priced legal time and
talent was expended upon preparing a brief citing the law, which was to
the effect that items of rarity-- things like rare books or antiques or
works of art or valuable jewelry--carry an implied warranty with them;
that the seller was responsible for anything that was wrong which he had
not pointed out to the buyer at the time of the sale; that, in this
case, these defects had not been pointed out to me. I had discovered
them afterwards and therefore was entitled to return the books. Well, I
informed Mr. Lilienthal of this, told him that this brief had been
prepared, whereupon he engaged a firm of prominent San Francisco
lawyers. [laughter] They prepared a brief which was based upon law just
as sound as the one that Mr. Clary's firm prepared, which reached the
conclusion that there was no implied warranty and that the buyer,
especially if he was a dealer, had equal standing as an expert with the
seller and had no rights of recourse. The matter was there in kind of a
deadlock, and I decided not to do anything else, because I do not
believe in suing: there's nothing to be gained except for the lawyers. I
simply told Mr. Lilienthal that I was disappointed, that I'd had a very
great respect for him and his partner, Leon Gelber, and I had expected a
different attitude. First of all, they could afford to lose the money
very easily because Lilienthal was a very wealthy man. But I think they
felt that they had a principle to defend, and they weren't going to take
this back. Finally, Mr. Hatton came back on a second trip with more
Dickens in parts, and he said to me, "I'd like to look at your Copperfield. " And he looked at it, and he said,
"You know, your Copperfield has a number of
important advertisements --some printed on cork --and other inserts
which would perfect a copy that I have. So if you would accept what you
paid for your set, I'll take it off your hands." I was thus relieved of
the book and recovered my money. Thomas Hatton was an interesting man.
He had been a motorcycle-race promoter and a greyhound-race promoter in
Leicester. Quite by accident, he wandered into Sotheby's one day when a
copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was knocked
down for a very substantial price. And he said, "My God, do books bring
that much money?" He commenced to take an interest. Well, he talked like
a Cockney, he looked like a racetrack tout, [laughter] but he had a very
keen intelligence, and he had the patience and the ability to go through
thousands of copies of Dickens and to prepare this very detailed
bibliography which superseded [John C.] Eckel's and has, I think,
remained the chief bibliographical authority on Dickens in parts. Lord
knows, nobody else is ever going to undertake such a job. Mr. Hatton
used to come over here and make his headquarters in my shop, as I said.
I would take him out to see Mrs. Doheny, and she was quite charmed by
what she thought were English manners. I remember on one occasion he
sold her one of Dickens in parts for something like $10,000; I don't
remember just which one. It may have been an extraordinarily fine and
complete set, untouched, with the signature of the subscriber on the
cover of each of the parts. On another occasion, I took him out to see
Hugh Walpole, and we spent a couple of days showing Sir Hugh a
collection of English novels, three-deckers—in boards and in parts and
in original cloth. Mr. Walpole ended up by buying about $6,000 worth of
these novels. He had a particular fondness for English
nineteenth-century novelists, so this was a great coup for him. It's a
curious thing about Hugh Walpole, who was a very gentle man and a kind
man, that neither his books nor the books he collected have ever
received the respect I think they were entitled to. But Mr. Hatton,
after about his third trip over-- and I must say they enlivened my shop
very much; there were great parties every evening after work (the girls
and the young men and the collectors would swarm in and get nice and
liquored up, and everybody would have fun and tell stories) —went back
to England and didn't come back anymore, and I didn't hear from him
again. Mr. Hatton, like some other tradesmen, had his small faults, and
on one occasion he made a very large sale through my shop and concealed
it from me and didn't allow me my commission. Since I was spending a
great deal of time in letting him use my premises rent-free, I really
resented that. But then he was a cheerful rogue, so you couldn't really
resent him for very long. I'm not sure exactly what became of Hatton. He
seemed to have dropped out of sight. I did hear rumors that he had
overplayed the ponies and had dropped out of business altogether, but I
don't know what happened to him.
-
GARDNER:
- And you and Lilienthal established relations with Gelber and Lilienthal
again?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Not immediately; our relationships were very cool for a long time, and I
don't think either one of us really sought each other out until after
Leon Gelber died (that was Lilienthal 's partner) . I remember going up
and visiting Gelber 's wife, and I bought some things from her that were
part of Gelber 's private collection. I think the firm had been
dissolved by then. Ted Lilienthal retired to the country and bought
himself a printing press--one of the Caslon presses of the sort that
William Morris used—and printed a number of small broadsides and
pamphlets on it, and lived out his years a very respectable amateur of
books. We got on very well in later years and met on a number of
occasions, but we never discussed Dickens in parts.
-
GARDNER:
- What about the principle of it? Do you still agree with the. . . ?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Let me say this: I recently had a man approach me with a print which was
bought from our gallery eleven years ago. There isn't anything wrong
with the print, and he doesn't claim that there's anything wrong with
it. He claims that he paid too much for it, and he feels that we should
take it back. So I had a talk with him the other day. Before that,
someone upstairs had dealt with him, one of the young women, and she
brought the matter to me. So when he came in, I sat him down, and I
said, "Look, I've been in business for fifty years. It doesn't matter to
me; I won't go broke if I give you back the money you paid for this.
I've still got customers that I had when I started in the business, and
I pride myself on trying to be fair. I'd rather give ground on a matter
like this than leave the doubt in anyone's mind. So what do you want me
to do?" And he said, "I don't know." (I think the best thing you can do
in a case like that is put the other fellow on the spot, let him declare
what he wants.) He said, "I have to go into the hospital for a cataract
operation, and I don't want to get into this any further now. So if
you'll let me have my print, we'll talk about it after I come back from
the hospital." Now, I think what I will do is explain to him why the
print was priced as it was. We bought it—it was part of a great
collection. It belonged to [Loys] Delteil, the man who prepared the
catalog of Daumier's prints. It was an exceptionally fine one on white
paper, and we paid a great deal of money for it. And we did not make an
exorbitant profit. Now, I'm going to tell him that it's not customary
for a firm to take back a piece of merchandise which they sold eleven
years ago unless that's proven to be a fake—and he isn't claiming that.
So I'm simply going to say to him, "I'll take it back and give you
credit for anything else you want purchased at the same amount." And I
don't see how he can object to that.
-
GARDNER:
- Right. Now, on the other hand, if he came back to you and said that it
was a fake . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I'd have to defend it to prove that it wasn't, and he'd have to
prove that it is. But then, what we might do if we couldn't agree is,
each one of us select an expert and then let the experts select a third
one, and let them act as jury and agree to abide by their decision.
-
GARDNER:
- Does that happen much?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Not very often. I've made mistakes and I've freely admitted them. I took
back a drawing not long ago that had been sold by one of the people in
the shop, and by God, if it had ever been taken out of the frame when we
took it in, before we sold it, it would have been easily recognized; it
was a photographic copy of a drawing. It was so well done, and it had
been so cleverly treated that it couldn't be detected except if you
removed the glass and looked at it carefully outside of the mat. Well,
it had been sold for three or four years; a woman had paid $750 for it.
She sent it back, and we sent her her money. There's nothing else to do.
Right now I think that one of my former employees is probably
responsible for a few of these efforts to return things that have taken
place lately. This employee has been going around looking at collections
and denigrating some of the things which were purchased from me. But in
every case where they've been brought to me, I've been able to convince
the buyer that they were genuine, and I've offered to satisfy them. And
I haven't had any trouble.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, shall we stop now?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I think that's enough.
MARCH 14, 1978
-
GARDNER:
- As you've been gathering information and you've been talking
about--today we'll go through some of the publications and presses which
you have been involved with, beginning (since we both sort of have it at
hand) with the Mel [Jerome Melvyn] Edelstein bibliography of Primavera.
The first several books don't appear to be Primavera imprints, and I
think that goes for several of the works involved here. Los Angeles in the Sunny Seventies, for example,
is imprinted "Bruce McCallister, Jake Zeitlin," right?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
-
GARDNER:
- So the first Primavera, then, would be this Cavalcade, is that accurate?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I believe so. That was the first time I used the name "Primavera
Press" on any publication.
-
GARDNER:
- The other two before that were just under "Jake Zeitlin."
-
ZEITLIN:
- Jake Zeitlin. The first was Bruce McCallister and Jake Zeitlin, and that
was the Los Angeles in the Sunny Seventies. Then
came the Aristocracy of Art, by Merle Armitage,
which I can't remember how I was hornswoggled into publishing,
[laughter] but as time has gone on, I've wondered more and more, because
I don't find myself at all in sympathy with the philosophy expressed
there. Merle Armitage and I were great pals in those days. He had
delivered this as a lecture at the California Art Club up on Barnsdall
Hill, and he got the idea of publishing it, and I went ahead and got it
out. It amuses me to find it now being offered for sale for as much as
twenty-five to seventy-five dollars. Somewhere in the back room or in my
garage is a large bundle of them which I couldn't sell at a dollar and a
half apiece in 1929, [laughter] but of course, the Depression was going
on then. And besides, it was a most funereal-looking book, all in black
wrappers over black boards with a white paper label printed in black.
[laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Sounds lovely.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it would have made a good advertisement for an undertaker.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the reason for that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it was just the idea of Armitage. Armitage has some rather strong
ideas about book design which he expressed in this, the first of his
books. This gave him the notion of going in for designing books and
publishing, of which he did a great deal over the years; later, mostly
in association with Lynton Kistler.
-
GARDNER:
- My next observation is that your next publication, or actually the
publication which sandwiched these two, were the Carl Sandburg poems.
They also precede the Primavera.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Oh, well, those were done, as well as I remember, sometime in 1929.
-
GARDNER:
- Right, which is the same date as the Los Angeles in
the Sunny Seventies and the Aristocracy of
Art.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, they were hardly what you call publications; they were certainly
what you call private publications. They were not intended to be sold. I
got Carl Sandburg's permission to publish his poem, M'liss and Louie, and we got out, I think, about 100 copies.
It was the result of Ward Ritchie coming to me and saying that he wanted
to get out some poetry and could I get hold of something that hadn't
been published. So I got Carl's permission to publish M'liss and Louie, and this, too, was not what you'd call a
best seller at a dollar a copy. [laughter] Over the years I gave away a
few, and I think there must be a little bundle of those somewhere in our
back room. The last time one was sold in a catalog it was priced at
$100.
-
GARDNER:
- Huh!
-
ZEITLIN:
- Now, I became a little more bold after bringing this out. Carl Sandburg
had left a partly-typed, partly-manuscript poem with me called Soo Line Sonata, and I said to Ward, "You know,
we can't get this out except for very limited distribution. If you want
to make an exercise in printing of it, well, go ahead, but I think it
would be a very good idea for us to print only five copies." As far as I
know, that's all he printed.
1.22. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE TWO
(March 14, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- Carl Sandburg was saying. . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Later, Carl Sandburg got wind (someone might have hinted to him) that I
had published something of his, and the next time he came out he said,
"Jake, if I ever hear of you publishing anything of mine without my
permission, I'm going to sue the hell out of you, no matter how good a
friend you are." The curious thing is that, to go back to M'liss and Louie, he gave me permission to print
it, and Ward Ritchie printed it, and then I sent him five copies. He
must have sent one to Alfred Harcourt, because shortly afterward I got a
letter from the firm of Harcourt Brace saying that this had been
published without their permission, that no copyright notice had been
published with it, and that, therefore, I would have to pay them a fee
as a precedent, in order to protect Sandburg's copyright. I wrote back
and said that Mr. Sandburg had given me permission to publish it, and
they said, "That makes no difference. We have to establish the property
rights in this, and you're going to have to send us ten dollars." So I
sent them ten dollars in order to satisfy their requirements and to
protect their copyright. My friend Mel Edelstein had his own ideas of
what constituted Primavera Press publications and what didn't; and,
after all, I saw no reason to argue with a well-intentioned friend, so I
never insisted. But actually, the Primavera Press books that are listed
in the bibliography at the back of the Garland for
Jake Zeitlin, which was published in 1967, lists a number of
things that were not Primavera Press, and it fails to list a lot of
things that were Primavera Press, as well. The first Primavera Press
book was this Cavalcade of David Weisman, and my
reason for doing that was that I didn't want my name to be attached to
what was obviously vanity publishing; yet I didn't want to refuse my
friends who wanted to have some publisher's name on their books of
poetry and were willing to pay. The same thing was true of Enoch and Other Poems by Medora Nickell. However,
the first book published under the Primavera Press as an organized press
was the Anthology of Southern California Verse.
The Primavera Press became a publishing company in 1930 when Leslie
Nelson Jennings, who was a friend of Sidney King Russell, had come to
me. He needed a job. Sidney King Russell urged me to sort of find a way
to occupy him, so we decided that we would start a separate publishing
concern called the Primavera Press. For that, it was merely a press
name.
-
GARDNER:
- I see.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Sidney King Russell had been associated before that with Harold Vinal,
so he'd had long experience with publishing what were called "vanity
books." He published a great many privately printed books, books
subsidized by their authors, and he was probably the best example of the
so-called vanity publisher. Now, there's really nothing against vanity
publishing, so called: Amy Lowell's first book was published privately
at her own expense; Robert Frost's first book was published privately at
his own expense; Vachel Lindsay's first book, Poems to
be Traded for Bread, was published privately at his own
expense; Carl Sandburg's first book was published privately at the
expense of a friend; H.L. Mencken's Ventures into
Verse was published privately by probably the most successful
of all vanity publishers. Badger and Company in Boston (rather aptly
named) . [tape recorder turned off] Edwin Arlington Robinson's first
book of poems was published privately at his own expense; and Robinson
Jeffer's Flagons and Apples was published
privately at his own expense here in Los Angeles and was for many years
given away by Holmes, who bought the remainder for something like ten
cents a copy and used to sell me copies first for seventy-five cents
apiece, then a dollar and a half apiece. Later on I bought ten copies at
a time for three dollars apiece. Ultimately he went up as high as
fifteen dollars before he closed and went out of business. It is now
something like a $750 book. But we thought we would satisfy the desire
of a number of people who wanted books of their poetry published. We
undertook nothing except to put them into print. We sent out a circular
to sell them if anybody wanted to buy them. The first book we published
was the Anthology of Southern California Verse,
which really was a nicely printed book; it was designed and printed by
Young and McCallister, and it contained a considerable number of rather
good poems. Wind Upon My Face, by Sarah Bixby
Smith, was not a Primavera Press book.
-
GARDNER:
- I was about to ask that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- It was privately printed by Grant Dahlstrom on Arthur Ellis's Albion
handpress. And while it says "250 copies printed," I doubt if there were
that many. It was purely a private matter between Sarah Bixby Smith and
myself. A great many copies were given away, some sold; but it's a
scarce book today, and I think it had considerable merit as poetry.
-
GARDNER:
- Next comes your first blockbuster.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Libros Californianos. By 1931 Primavera
Press no longer had Leslie Nelson Jennings involved in it, and Ward
Ritchie was working for me. Phil Townsend Hanna had come along with this
idea of publishing a selection of the five feet of California books that
would be basic to any library of Californiana, and we added to that the
idea of having Henry R. Wagner, Robert Cowan, and Leslie Bliss make
selections of what they considered the twenty-five most desirable books
in any library of California or southwestern literature (by "desirable"
they leaned rather towards the rare and hard to find).
-
GARDNER:
- Did they each pick things from their own library?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, they picked things which they considered to be of considerable
consequence and also rarities. So it came to be a sort of a guide.
-
GARDNER:
- There's a fairly quick second edition.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. Now, Ward Ritchie was working for me at the time that I started to
publish this, and I said to Ward, "Ward, you don't want to be a
bookseller." (He used to stand in the back of the shop and do layouts on
the wrapping paper when he was supposed to be wrapping books.) So I
said, "Here's a book--why don't you go and print it. It'll be the
beginning of printing for you." He had some friends by the name of
[Edward A.K.] Hackett and Newell who had a printing plant out in
Westwood, so he joined them, and Hackett, Newell and Ritchie Company
came into being. It did rather well, so we reprinted it the next year.
-
GARDNER:
- It says "number of copies unknown" for that second edition. Do you know
how many?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I have no idea how many copies were printed, but I think there must have
been about 500. It went extremely well, the first printing of 1,050
copies. Finally, in 1958, Larry Powell agreed to revise this, and he
added the books that had been published since 1931 that he felt should
be put on a list, with brief notes. There were 1,000 copies printed, and
we thought we'd sold them all out. But a couple of years ago I found
several packages in the back of my shop, so it's again in print. Adobe Days of Sarah Bixby Smith was not truly a
Primavera Press book; it did not have the Primavera Press imprint.
-
GARDNER:
- Again, it's Jake Zeitlin, Los Angeles.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, it's Jake Zeitlin. It was produced by Young and McCallister, but
the unbound sheets were taken over by Ward Ritchie and [Gregg] Anderson.
-
GARDNER:
- It mentions that it's the third edition, so it was something that was
originally published somewhere else.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the first edition was published in Cedar Rapids, Iowa [Torch
Press] in 1925, and then a second edition in 1926, also at Cedar Rapids,
Iowa. Then in 1931 Sarah Bixby decided that it was out of print, that
there was a demand for it, and that she would like to have it printed
again. So she helped finance it, and I published it. Fifteen hundred
copies were printed. The major part of these were destroyed at Ward
Ritchie's.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, right. I think you told that story.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Right, I've told it elsewhere.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, the rest of these are all Primavera.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. However, I want to make a little note about the Reminiscences of a Ranger. The actual sheets of the Reminiscences of a Ranger were printed in Chicago
at the Lakeside Press. They had been intended to be published by Wallace
Hebbard in 1927, but something went awry, and we took over the sheets
and got out this edition with the new title page, binding, and dust
jacket designed by Ward Ritchie. I think it was Phil Hanna who wrote the
blurb for this edition, and the blurb evidently contained something
which was very offensive to the daughters of Horace Bell. They
discovered a copy in Parker's Bookstore and immediately got in touch
with us and threatened to sue us, so that we destroyed all the dust
jackets on all the copies except those which had already gone out. A
copy with the dust jacket of that book is extremely rare. In fact, I
haven't got one myself, and I haven't seen one for sale. The most
beautiful book that was produced under the Primavera Press imprint—and I
think still, from a typographic standpoint and all-around bookmaker's
standpoint, the best book produced in Southern California—was Alexandre
Dumas 's [A] Gil Bias in
California , which was translated by Marguerite Eyer Wilbur.
-
GARDNER:
- This was Saul Marks's first book, right?
-
ZEITLIN:
- This was Saul Marks 's first book. The wood engravings were produced by
Paul Landacre. Ward Ritchie had a considerable hand in the design of it.
Actually, the Plantin Press at that time was in part financed by Grant
Dahlstrom, and he also advised in the production of this book and did a
great deal of teaching of Saul and Ward. But all in all, that is a very
pleasing book, and I think by far the best book ever produced in
Southern California.
-
GARDNER:
- Before you skip on, I notice in 1934 there's another one—oh, no, I take
that back, it says printed by the Primavera Press even though it wasn't.
Okay, pardon me. Now, to move on to the next section . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think we should include, in any discussion of the books which
I've had anything to do with, the books that I've published which, for
one reason or another, Mel Edelstein did not see fit to include. Why he
included some as publications of the Primavera Press which were not and
excluded others [which were] I can't explain. However, I think one of
the outstanding books that was produced by Zeitlin and Ver Brugge under
the Zeitlin and Ver Brugge imprint was Aldous Huxley's Prisons. That was produced in Paris, and it has a rather
interesting history. Arnold Fawcus of Philadelphia had started producing
books in London and Paris under the imprint of the Trianon Press. I had
persuaded Aldous Huxley to do an essay on what was one of his and my
favorite collections of prints, and that is the Carceri, [or] The Prisons , of
[Giambattista] Piranesi. Piranesi's Prisons had
been the subject of essays by [Thomas] DeQuincey and by [William]
Wordsworth and a number of other writers. They have a haunting quality
about them. In them Piranesi did something different from any other
thing he did during his whole career as an etcher. They are sort of a
dreamlike creation. They deserve to be classed with Blake's Book of Job, or with some of the etchings of
Goya. They have a certain terrifying quality about them as well. So
because of the interest in them that Huxley had, and which I shared
because I had handled several sets of The Prisons
and had looked over one set that had belonged to the museum here
together, he wrote this essay. About that time, Arnold Fawcus came to
town, and I told him about it, and he said, "Let's do this together. I
can get John Adhemar, who is the curator of prints at the Bibliotheque
Nationale and who is a foremost authority on Piranesi, to write an essay
describing the different states. We'll do something really fine and have
it printed by one of the good printers in Paris." We agreed that we
would each pay half, and there would be a total of 212 copies--100 for
the Trianon Press and the so-called Grey Falcon Press in Philadelphia,
and 100 for Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, and 12 for Aldous Huxley and
ourselves. Arnold Fawcus produced this, sent me my 100 copies. We got
Aldous to sign all the 212 copies and delivered his copies to him. Much
to my surprise and Aldous 's, we discovered later that Fawcus had also
printed 1,000 unsigned copies which he had turned over to Faber and
Faber for distribution without giving Aldous Huxley any royalty [or]
paying him any fee for the production of these books [and] without
informing me or giving me any share for having participated in the cost
of production. Because actually the composition, the printing, the
plates and everything, were produced out of half the cost, which I
provided. It was more than twenty years afterward, when I was in Paris,
Paul Mellon's librarian, Willis Van Devanter, insisted that I go with
him and his wife to meet Arnold Fawcus at his printing establishment in
Paris, and I went out. Arnold Fawcus by then had become the official
printer and publisher of the [William] Blake trust--very beautiful
books, very sumptuously produced under the editorship of Geoffrey Keynes
and with the aid of Paul Mellon and Lessing Rosenwald. I doubt if books
as sumptuous as these facsimile books in marvelous color have ever been
produced. So when I went to see Arnold and he showed me around, I said,
"Arnold, you know we have some unsettled business." [laughter] "I think
we ought to sit down and talk it over." I told him about this and told
him that he had never settled with Huxley, he had never settled with me,
and had never even informed us of what he was doing. It was not part of
his contract with Huxley and with me. He looked like a man who knew he'd
done something wrong, and he said he was very contrite. He said, "You
know, I was very poor in those days, and struggling, and I'm afraid that
I didn't take the trouble I should have taken to get Huxley's permission
and yours and to settle with you." And he said, "Now, what do you want?"
He at that time had published a very handsome haggadah with
illustrations by Ben Shahn, and I said, "Well, you can give me one of
the haggadahs and you can consider it settled." So that's what happened.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the year of the publication of The
Prisons?
-
ZEITLIN:
- In 1949. It was very nicely gotten up with a full set of the plates in
every one of the states described by Adhemar. It had both Huxley's essay
and Adhemar's essay. Also it had a portfolio in addition to the Dutch
paper binding. It now sells for around $250 to $300. I think at that
time we sold it for $18, and Lessing Rosenwald very kindly bailed me out
by buying about ten of them at the time they were published. I'm sure I
wouldn't have been able to pay my share of the printing cost if it
hadn't been for that. In 1940 I also published a little book of Aldous
Huxley's called Words and Their Meanings, and
that also has a curious history. Aldous Huxley had given me the
manuscript, and I went to Ward Ritchie and said, "I'd like to have it
printed, and I want to publish it." Whereupon he produced 10 copies to
be signed by Aldous Huxley, but he proceeded to produce, according to
what I find in the bibliography, about 1,000 copies for general
distribution. And that bears no reference to me and was published
entirely by the Ward Ritchie Press. What it says in the bibliography is
"Los Angeles, the Ward Ritchie Press, 1940, 1,000 copies." I'm puzzled
that there is no mention of the 100 copies that were printed off for me
and signed by Huxley.
-
GARDNER:
- What was the imprint that you would have had?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I have the original edition that was printed for me, which says "Jake
Zeitlin"; it bears a colophon signed by Huxley, and it is dated the same
year. The fact is that Ritchie went ahead and printed 1,000 copies in
all for his own distribution. One of the notable things about this book
is that jacket and the title page were designed by Alvin Lustig, a very
young man at the time, who had studied architecture with Frank Lloyd
Wright and then had abandoned architecture and gone in for printing
design. I sent him to Ritchie, and he did several notable books there at
Ritchie's press and established a very highly personal style of design,
using ornament in a way that was very much derived from the style of
Frank Lloyd Wright. Gradually he developed a style very much his own.
Later, I introduced him to the man who owned New Directions Press, James
Laughlin, and Laughlin immediately engaged him to design jackets and
become the designer for New Directions Press. He did that for a while.
He went East and ended up teaching typographic design at Yale. He
acquired quite a reputation as a designer. Unfortunately, he developed
some condition with his eyes, and he went blind and died very young--I
think quite a loss in the field of typographic design. He was a really
extraordinary talented, highly individual designer. Now, among the other
books which I have published since, I think one of the notable ones is
an edition of Thomas Salusbury's Mathematical
Collections.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, this is Zeitlin again, "Jake Zeitlin," or is this Zeitlin and Ver
Brugge?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, this is Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, and Dawsons of Pall Mall, and this
is a very sumptuous publication, two volumes bound in full leather by
Zaehnsdorf in an edition of 200 copies. It's a reprint of a work
published originally in 1664 and '65, and the reprint contains an
introductory essay by Stillman Drake. I think I've told somewhere else
the story of how this publication came about.
-
GARDNER:
- Yes. What was the date on it?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It was 1967.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, that's recent.
-
ZEITLIN:
- As I've told before, Volume I is relatively common--there are something
like fifty copies known-- but Volume II was known only in seven copies.
The seventh known copy, which had belonged to de Andrade, came up at an
auction of his scientific books in the summer of 1964. I was present,
Stillman Drake was present, and our chief competitor in the bidding was
the manager of Dawsons of Pall Mall, a man by the name of [Bert] Marley.
The book kept rising, Mr. Marley hung on, and I kept bidding up.
Finally, when it got to 2,800 pounds, I raised to 3,000 pounds, and Mr.
Marley dropped out, but not without sticking his tongue out at me across
the table in the august auction rooms of Sotheby's. [laughter] Well,
that afternoon we had a drink together, and we decided that we would
publish the two volumes in facsimile —with the permission of Joe
Schaffner, for whom I'd bought it—with an introduction by Stillman
Drake. So Stillman Drake provided us with an introduction. The
production of it was under the supervision of Dawsons of Pall Mall. I'm
sorry that I didn't keep more of a hand in on the production side; I
thought they were going to give it to somebody like Curwen Press to do,
but instead they farmed it out to some house who didn't use much taste
in the design of the title page. The interior of the book was very well
done--that is, that portion which was originally set, the introductory
matter written by Drake. Because the volumes were bound in full calf by
Zaehnsdorf, we had to sell the book for something like $365 a copy. I'd
forgotten how much it amounted to in pounds in those days—probably about
175 pounds. We did succeed, however, in selling enough copies to pay
back our cost. The remaining copies I ultimately bought from Dawsons of
Pall Mall, and from time to time I sell a copy. I think I must have
about 50 out of the original 200 left. All in all, it is a very handsome
book and one that I'm proud to have been involved in publishing.
-
GARDNER:
- Can we go back? I don't know what order you have those in, but what
originally inspired this session was Jim Davis's finding of the Harold
Ickes book that was put out by the Breakfast Press and the discovery
that there was a Jake Zeitlin press that no one knew anything about.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it wasn't really a Jake Zeitlin press; Jake Zeitlin was merely one
of the participants. Sometime in the thirties, Preston Tuttle and his
wife Mildred, and Josephine and I, and Paul and Margaret Landacre
started meeting Sundays and having breakfast, and then after breakfast
we would read a play of Shakespeare's. We decided we needed to know
Shakespeare's plays. Some of us had read some of them, but none of us
had read all of them, and we thought we would read through them, each of
us taking parts, and we found this to be very enjoyable. Part of the
time we would meet at the house of Grant Dahlstrom, where he had an
Albion handpress out in the barn, and it was suggested that we print
something on the press on one of the Sundays. So, after having breakfast
and after reading one of the plays, we would go out in the backyard.
Grant usually had set the type in advance and had the forms locked in,
and we would ink and pull the presses. The first book we did was The Amphisbaena, the Crocodile, and Other Poems,
by A.E. Housman. It had appeared in a school paper when Housman was a
boy and had never been reprinted, but it had been discovered by William
White, who teaches now at Wayne University but then was a graduate
student at USC here. William White has a great nose for ephemera. He
publishes very few books, but he publishes lots of half-page and
quarter-page bibliographical notes and brief notes. His bibliography is
immense, consisting largely of bibliographical notes and short reviews,
short essays of one sort or another. But he does have a nose for the
things that are overlooked and forgotten, and he came to me and he said,
"Look here, how would you like to publish a couple of poems of A.E.
Housman that have never appeared separately?" So, without troubling to
get the permission of Mr. Housman (because copyright had run out
already), we proceeded to publish these with the introduction of William
White. I think we must have printed 100 copies. They were printed on
handmade paper, and I think we made the paper ourselves, but I can't
remember. In any event, we folded them—they were printed wet and they
had to be hung up to dry afterwards and pressed on an ironing board with
a regular kitchen iron—and the wives sewed them. Some copies did not
have the cover, so that most of the copies that exist today have only
the title page. But it's a very rare Housman item, and none have turned
up for sale in quite a few years; the last that turned up were bringing
around twenty-five dollars apiece. Later on I ran across an article in
The New Republic by Harold Ickes, and it was
called "When Are You Going to Laugh, America?" It appealed to all of us,
and so we decided to print it. We printed, I suppose, a couple of
hundred copies. In both cases Paul Landacre did a wood engraving--an
ornament for The Amphisbaena, and I think the
same thing for Harold Ickes 's "When Are You Going to Laugh?" So these
are really very scarce ephemera; most of them were dispersed. I'm not
sure that I haven't got a little bundle of The
Amphisbaena somewhere around the bookshop still, and I wish I
could find them, just like the Carl Sandburg things, because I think
that it would be better than finding a cache of gold coins. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- How come you stopped after two?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, it got to be work. As long as it was fun and we did it more or
less as a recreation, it was all right. But when it got to be something
that we felt under compulsion about and didn't have the urge to get out
there and pull at the handpress for several hours on a Sunday
afternoon--Grant Dahlstrom didn't feel like setting up the type in
advance—so, we just dropped it. It was purely for fun, and when it
stopped being fun, we quit. [laughter] Which is the way it should be.
-
GARDNER:
- Were there any other presses which were not Zeitlin or Zeitlin and Ver
Brugge? Were there any other publishing ventures that you were involved
in?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think that I helped George Yamada, a little Japanese fellow, get
started. He had very good taste; he did some good printing. He would
rent the press at Anderson and Ritchie, or he would rent the press at
Dahlstrom, and got out several very nice things. They've disappeared,
most of what George Yamada produced, but they were in very good taste,
very charming. He became an anthropologist and went down into Mexico. He
also wrote a little pamphlet about the Navajos which he's published and
which is now extremely scarce. It is an important item on the Navajo
land problems.
-
GARDNER:
- What was his imprint?
-
ZEITLIN:
- "George Yamada," as I remember it. I can't remember what his imprint
was; he's very much forgotten. Of course, there was Thomas Perry
Stricker, who printed several things for me. I had him write about four
essays on four rare books that I'd sold to Frank Hogan, and in each case
he wrote the essays, and then he printed them up into little books. They
were very charming. He had a tendency toward the French cursive letters.
He had rather a striking, flamboyant style. He went to New York and
became the New York representative for some of the German typefounders
(Bauer and Company) , was involved in the activities of the Typophiles
[Club], and so on. He died there, and the majority of his books are now
at the [William Andrews] Clark [Memorial] Library. Thomas Perry Strieker
was a colorful chap. He worked for me for a while, not only doing these
essays and the little booklets but also as a cataloger during the time
when he was not employed full time. Then, of course, there is Bill
Cheney, who is a story all to himself. The most remarkable production of
Bill Cheney's is his volume called The Type Stickers
of the Southern California Region, which is a collection of
letters between Bill Cheney and H. Richard Archer. Richard Archer had a
little press called the Hippogryff Press, and it was the various members
of the Rounce and Coffin Club that bought the press and a font of type
and enough equipment for him to get started.
1.23. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE ONE
(April 25, 1978)
-
ZEITLIN:
- Today I had lunch with Ann Bobrow, who has been our cataloger for
approximately forty years, and Grant Dahlstrom, who is my friend of over
fifty years. Our purpose was to discuss the projected catalog which we
are planning to bring out in the early fall of this year. It is to be
entitled Our First Half-Century, and it will
contain a selection of books and manuscripts and letters such as we
would have handled over this period (but really books) . Everything
contained will be something for sale at present or recently sold. My
purpose in dictating this is to produce, if possible, what may be used
as a foreword to the catalog—sort of a historical summary of my fifty
years of bookselling and their significance to me. It is as much a
surprise to me as it could possibly be to anyone else that I stand here
at the end of fifty years of bookselling. I really had no hopes of
surviving as a businessman for this long, and in the face of several
periods where the certainty of survival was much less than the certainty
of failure. It occurs to me that sort of a quick sketch of these years
and of those people who have been most helpful to me in furthering my
career as a bookseller would be the best possible way of expressing both
my satisfaction at having reached this point and of my gratitude. I can
honestly say that, my temperament being what it is, bookselling is
probably the only field in which I could have succeeded to the degree
that I have—for it is a field in which you can jump from one interesting
topic of interest to another without having to concentrate too long.
Each day brings some new surprise; each purchase contains something
different from anything else that I have bought before. And in that way,
I'm able to divert my attention and divert myself before any one thing
becomes too tedious to pursue too long. This limited span of attention,
which seems to be a characteristic of mine, has particular value in the
business of selling books and of dealing with the wide variety of people
that one should be able to cope with. In the course of a day, you not
only have your attention shifted from one subject to another, but you
also have your attention shifted from one kind of a personality to
another. And while some people may stay a long time and bring you to the
point of absolute desperation or boredom (the latter of which I have
rarely felt in my life) , in the majority of cases each person that
comes is a challenge, each is a stimulant, and each one brings out
something in me which might have lain latent without the demands of
adapting to that new kind of a person. So what in some fields of
endeavor might be a defeating handicap has in bookselling been a great
asset. In addition, I think that bookselling has been a great outlet for
my desire to explore the personalities of people. I find that the more
interest you take in people, the more they respond to you and the more
likely they are to buy something --whether it's a book or whatever you
have to offer for sale. No one fails to react favorably to the question:
"Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you like. Tell me what you're
interested in." And I must say that I have consciously exploited this
device to very good advantage. But it has given me a great deal of
pleasure, and I think it's also given the person opposite me a great
deal of satisfaction to have someone who asks them those questions and
then listens to them while they talk about themselves. For the privilege
of talking about yourself and what you like and what you're interested
in, you're willing to pay a considerable price, and if there is any one
secret about salesmanship, I think it is that. To go back to my
beginnings and the origins of the development of my own peculiar
interests and tastes, I must say that the roots lie very deep and very
early in my childhood. I was fortunate in being thrown into the company
of, first, the teachers that I had in school, and then the individuals
that I found in the community that I grew up in--I'm sure a very
average, middlesized American town with, if anything, less of the usual
cultural advantages or cultural assets- I was never able to fit myself
into the ordinary social group. I did not play games like baseball or
any of the other team games, first because I was not very dextrous, not
very well coordinated; and in the second place, because I disliked
losing, and I did not choose to participate in any game in which I would
be the loser. So I chose such things as were not competitive, where I
would not have to compare with other people. I chose swimming because
that was something that you could do in or out of competition. I chose
bird watching, and I chose reading because reading and the effort to
write—which I commenced at very early — were activities that you did not
have to immediately stand [in] comparison with anyone else. I was not a
good games player, as I said before, and neither was I good at the usual
social activities of the younger people of my family group. I didn't
participate in the usual dances or parties. I didn't have enough
confidence in my personal appearance to try to dress presentably, so I
dressed as unpresentably as I could; I indulged my eccentricities
because they provided a shield against the necessity for comparison,
rather than because they made me conspicuous. And most of my friendships
were one-to-one associations; most of my social activities consisted of
cultivating single friendships. I never seemed to have any sense of age
differences as a barrier, so that I very early started associating with
people much older than myself. I would go to them and say, "I understand
that you are a botanist," or "You are a geologist," or "You know a great
deal about music and architecture, and I'd like to know whatever you can
take the time and trouble to tell me." So that old Albert Ruth, who was
one of Texas's outstanding botanists of his time, a man who was close to
eighty at the time I met him, said, "Come along with me when I go
botanizing, and I'll show you the plants around here and tell you about
them." And so it was with a number of other people. I used to stay after
school and ask questions of my teachers, and if they proposed a project,
I very eagerly went about doing it. I developed a course in ornithology
at the high school. Of course, we had several trunks of bird skins. The
teacher found that this was a very good way to fill in the time and keep
the classes occupied between the regular lectures they had prepared, or
the laboratory work; so I was allowed to take the bird skins, and I
prepared an outline, which was passed on by the teacher. Here I was, a
young man of sixteen, lecturing to the high school zoology classes about
ornithology—about which, as I remember now, I really knew very little.
But I had, as I say, no sense of any handicap about age difference
between myself and older people, and I also had no sense of inferiority
in respect to other people, whatever their financial or social status
might be. To me, nobody was any taller than I. I think this has been a
great advantage also in my bookselling, because I've never felt any
particular hesitancy or self-consciousness about approaching people of
great eminence or great wealth, and they have usually responded to me
with great interest and kindness. Great collectors, like Lessing
Rosenwald, whom I called on the telephone and asked if I could come and
see at his hotel—he said "Yes, come along." I came. I brought what I had
to offer. I showed them to him. I was neither too agressive nor too
subservient. I didn't attempt to flatter, and I did not put myself down.
And this, I think, served very well, both for them and for me. (By the
way, this is not what I had intended to say, but I think I'll continue
in this vein.) [laughter] When I first decided to become a bookseller as
a result of my association with Ben Abramson—who later founded the Argus
Book Shop—I was driving a truck in Texas, and Ben Abramson was my
helper. I was by far his junior, but I could drive a truck, and he
couldn't; and he needed a job, and I had the advantage of being the
boss's son. After a few days, he started talking. He was a nonstop
talker, a man whose capacity for having no terminal facilities became
famous in later years when he developed his bookshop in Chicago. And so
he enchanted me with his talk about McClurg's bookshop in Chicago, the
Saints and Sinners Corner—which was frequented by people like Eugene
Field in its early days, and later by Sherwood Anderson and Carl
Sandburg—the Dill Pickle Club, the Whitechapel Club, all of which were
more or less formal groups of people interested in books and general
hilarity. When Ben Abramson departed, approximately in 1919, I had
pretty well made up my mind that what I wanted to do was to be a
bookseller. I had developed a number of friendships among the people who
owned books, with the manager of the leading book department in The Fair
department store and with his opposite, a man by the name of Teale, at
Stripling's department store. Both of them were men who had a real
dedication to books and people, surprisingly literate in spite of their
appearance of being purely merchandisers. And so I moved, rather
ruthlessly, as I see it now, away from my own family's business away
from the obligation I had to my family, which was dependent on it--and
took a job as a clerk in the book department of The Fair, a department
store there in Fort Worth. I don't think I was very good at it. People
came in and talked, and I talked to them. My tendency to encourage
people to stay--I encouraged them to talk about themselves and their
interests—became so noticeable that the manager of the book department
spoke to me about it; the merchandise manager in the department store
spoke to me about it. But this was, for me, not something that I could
consciously control. I think that all my life I have moved by tropisms,
sort of an unconscious response to pressures about which I had very
little conscious knowledge. What their roots are I don't know, and I
don't suppose I ever will, and maybe it would be just as well if I
didn't. When I finally decided to leave my hometown, my choice was
purely in terms of what I hoped would be a bookselling future. In fact,
I tossed a coin: if it was heads, I was going to go to Chicago, where I
hoped to go to work for my friend Ben Abramson and his associate Gerry
Nedwick, both of whom had worked for me; if it was tails, I was going to
go to Los Angeles, where my friend Franklin Wolfe had some friends who
he thought could help me find a job in a bookstore. Well, it came up
tails, so I sent my wife by train to Los Angeles to these unknown
friends of a friend. I borrowed fifteen dollars, and I started walking
across the country to Los Angeles. Of course, I had no idea how far away
it was, or the fact that there were dry, empty prairies and deserts and
mountains in between. If I had known it, I'd never have started; and if
I hadn't started, I wouldn't have got here, so I guess it was just as
well. There are great blanks in my own recollections of how I got from
place to place in some parts of New Mexico, and I especially have
trouble remembering how I ever got as far as Needles from Gallup, New
Mexico, and then from Needles to Daggett. It was as if I was moving in a
dream: I can't remember where I slept or what I ate or how I traveled.
Of course, I did hitch a number of rides, and where I couldn't get a
ride, I would walk at night. But in the course of about three weeks, I
got as far as Daggett; and from Daggett to Los Angeles was one quick
ride on a truck. The man who was driving it was selling dairy products--
butter and cheese and milk—to restaurants and grocery stores, traveling
out of Los Angeles. And the trip from the desert down into Los Angeles
was, I suppose, one of the most magical unrolling of landscape and of a
new world that I have ever experienced. Without dwelling in detail on
what I think I have told in some of the previous parts of this series of
interviews, I think the most crucial point in my whole life was the
night of the Sunday in 1925. I had been fired by Holmes the night
before; I had no idea where I would turn next. And that day the house
caught fire. That evening, we found ourselves sitting around the
table--my wife Edith and my friend Bates Booth, a young law student then
attending the University of Southern California law school, who had come
out from Fort Worth. He had previously attended Sewanee [Institute] ,
and he had attended Stanford law school. He had taught English in the
high school in Fort Worth, and he came out to California after I
ventured out here. And he was living in the house with us while he had a
part-time job and was struggling to complete his degree in law. The roof
and ceiling had been burned off the house. We lit candles, gathered up
all the food that was left, made one big meal of it, and sat there. And
my friend Booth said to Edith, my then-wife, and me, "I think we're
licked. I think we've tried, and we've done our best, and I think the
best thing to do is get in touch with our folks, tell 'em we don't have
any money, we have no shelter, and we'd like to come home. And they'll
send money to us. We'll go back home." And I said, "No, we can't do
that. If we go back, we'll be defeated for the rest of our lives. We
give up, and we're done for. We'll be captives. I'm going to stay here,
and someday I'm going to have a bookshop, and it's going to be a
bookshop where you'll find first editions of the classics and the great
names in literature, and beautiful art books, and etchings of Rembrandt
and Durer on the walls, and hangings and carpets on the balconies. And
I'm going to stay here till I get it." We went to a neighbor's house
that night and slept in the attic. The Monday morning afterward, I went
down to the May Company--one of the department stores in town-- to the
manager of the book department. I presented myself and said, "I can sell
books, and I'd like a job. I want you to give me a chance." The manager
of that book department was a woman by the name of May Perks. I'm sure
that she was no candidate for any beauty prize; she was a very
plain-looking woman, and, at that time, seemed to be a rather dull,
unimaginative person. But she had enough imagination to say, "Go down to
the personnel office and tell them that I sent you and that I'd like to
have you in my department. And if there is an opening, they'll give you
the job, unless there's someone that is ahead of you." So I went down,
and the next day I was given the job. This very plain May Perks was the
first person to have the idea of exploiting film personalities for
product sales. She acquired the rights to represent Shirley Temple; and
she licensed the use of Shirley Temple's name, helped develop products
in clothes, in dolls, in books, and in all kinds of other products, and
ended up a very wealthy woman. I didn't stay in the May Company book
department for more than about three weeks. By that time, I'd discovered
that up the street about two blocks was Bullock's, which had a much
higher quality of merchandise, which had a book department that carried
a great many more books of a higher level, had some pretensions to
wanting to merchandise bindings, well-printed books, literary works, and
sets, as well as the usual run-of-the-mill best sellers, the staples of
department-store book departments. Nobody really trained me. I did, very
early, subscribe to the Publishers Weekly. I
started reading the departments of the Publishers
Weekly, the sections which were conducted by Jake Blanck, at
that time, and later by Sol Malkin, for the benefit of the
antiquarian-book trade. I haunted secondhand-book stores in the evenings
and on my days off. A great deal of the time, I would go together with a
young man who worked in a stockbroker's office on Spring Street. His
name was Max Hunley, and Max and I would spend our time going from one
bookstore to another trying to find books which we could buy for a
dollar and take down the street to another bookstore and sell for two
dollars, or take to some of the individual collectors that we'd learned
about. These were the early beginnings. And it was a combination of the
friendships which I formed in the bookshops where I worked, and the
curiosity in my head about books and the desire to learn more and more
about them, the appetite I had for reading, the lack of humility-- which
must have been a considerable asset. I was neither bumptious nor shy. I
wrote to Paul Jordan-Smith, whose book on strange authors I had read—a
book of essays about Ambrose Bierce, James Branch Cabell, Arthur Machen,
and a few other literary names—and told him that I was working in a
bookshop in Los Angeles, that I would like to call on him. I got a
letter back saying, "Please do." So on a Sunday, I took the Red Car out
to Claremont and was met at the station by this tall, very kindly, very
handsome man, with a big German shepherd dog. We walked down the long
rows of eucalyptus trees to a charming old house, and for the first time
in my life, I really saw a collector's library. He was one of the first
men to discover and write about James Joyce's Ulysses, and it was there that I saw a copy of the first edition
in the original blue wrappers. Some of the people he was interested in
never really amounted to very much, people like Eden Phillpotts, who
wrote a tremendous lot. Phillpots wrote one or two books of some merit,
including Children of the Mist, which Paul Jordan
thought was one of the great English novels about Devon, and which I
feel is a book which has merit far beyond which has been recognized. He
collected the works of people like J. Mills Whitham, who nobody had
heard about then and nobody has heard about since. On the other hand, he
was a great follower of John Cowper Powys and Llewellyn Powys and T.F.
Powys, all three of whom had great merit. John Cowper Powys was a
lecturer then and a writer of essays, but he really found his outlet and
found his highest level of achievement in the writing of novels--rather
dour, grim novels which I think have also not been appreciated enough.
Here were first editions of Arthur Machen —The Hill of
Dreams, The Great God Pan--as well as
the first edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy,
the book to which, of all books, Paul Jordan-Smith was most dedicated.
He was engaged in doing a new edition of it in which he was annotating
every reference that Robert Burton made to the various sources that he'd
drawn upon. He was interested in reading (so that he might understand
Robert Burton's sources) all of the works that Burton referred to. He
was collecting them in first or early editions or the editions which had
been read by Burton. So he had a houseful of books that were being
collected not only because of their rarity but because they were useful
in his scholarly endeavors. And I think this really lit the torch more
than anything else; gave me an idea, of what the uses of a collection of
rare books could be, other than that of just being able to possess
something rare and expensive. It was very exciting. It was exciting to
listen to Paul Jordan-Smith because he was a great conversationalist, he
was a man of tremendous enthusiasm, and he was a man of widely varied
interests in special kinds of literature. He became my very strong
friend and sponsor. How I impressed him I don't know. As some of my
friends have said, because I have accumulated in my boyhood in Texas
quite a variety of folk songs, which I used to sing with great
enthusiasm, I gave the impression to some of the people who are still
alive and who remember my performances that I was playing the guitar. As
a matter of fact, I was only singing and clapping my hands in rhythm for
background. While at Bullock's, I met Phil Townsend Hanna.
1.24. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE TWO
(April 25, 1978 and May 9, 1978)
-
ZEITLIN:
- Phil Townsend Hanna became the editor of what then was called Touring Topics, the house organ of the Automobile
Club of Southern California; it later became Westways and now has developed into a very respectable magazine.
Somehow I stimulated the curiosity and the interest of Phil Hanna, and
he in turn brought in Will Connell, a photographer. Will Connell then
introduced me to Lloyd Wright, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright. I met
Grace Marion Brown, a designer. And before very long I had formed a
circle of friends, a quite astonishedly varied circle, which included
Merle Armitage, then manager of the Los Angeles opera; Carl Haverlin,
who was manager of KFI, the leading radio station in Los Angeles; Gordon
Raye Young, who was the book review editor of the Los
Angeles Times. In a very short while, I developed a broad
spectrum of friendship; as I look back on it now, it's hard to explain.
There was Bill Conselman and his wife Mina Conselman. He was a writer at
Twentieth Century-Fox, and between them, they developed a strip called
"Ella Cinders" that made them wealthy. There were many other people in
this circle, and as time went on, I think I became a sort of a binding
element. The person most responsible, I think, was Will Connell, who had
a great talent for bringing people together and who also was generous
beyond the call of duty to a great many people. By the time I was ready
to open my own bookshop, I had formed a wide circle of acquaintances,
friendships which were more than casual. People commenced to take
trouble: to further me, to introduce me to people who might buy books,
to lend me support in all kinds of ways-- help me design my bookshop,
lend me stocks of books so that I'd have enough books to fill the
shelves, send me drawings, prints, photographs to hang on the wall to
sell. As I look back on it now with some perspective, I think it was the
most marvelous spontaneous phenomenon. I was young; I was eager; I was
articulate. And I think all these things affected other people, and very
soon we had, really, the beginnings of an intellectual circle. Some of
the participants weren't so profoundly intellectual, but the chief thing
that brought them together was an interest in one or the other of the
arts, and particularly in books, writing, printing, music. Carey
McWilliams became a part of the group. An architect and designer of
furniture by the name of Kem Weber was a part of the group. Arthur
Millier, the art editor of the Times, was a part
of the group. Why it was a group at all is hard to understand; we took
to meeting without ever really having an organization, at quite regular
intervals, at the French restaurant near us on West Sixth Street, a
place called Rene and Jean. Then we'd repair to the bookshop, sit around
and talk. Of course, this all provided me with customers as well, but as
I look back on it now, I didn't really take the advantage I might have
if I'd known the ways of business better. A great many of the people who
came, participated, and took a lot of my time, and so on, weren't really
customers. They certainly were friends, and they helped build the
ambiance the whole spirit out of which my bookshop grew and which
sustained it even when it didn't do so well financially. I think what
I'm trying to get at is the idea that after a while my bookshop became a
community expression rather than just the expression of myself, and that
is how it has grown. The thing which has kept me going in spite of my
deficiencies as a businessman (and I certainly had many of them to start
with; I've learned something about business management since, but I
certainly didn't know anything about it then) was that after a while the
bookshop became more than the expression of myself; it became the
expression of the wishes and the dreams of a great many other people. I
remember that when I moved and my friends decided to hold an opening
party, it was presided over by a man by the name of A.G. Beaman, and the
people that came represented all facets of the community. There were my
fellow booksellers, like Ernest Dawson and Mrs. Millard; there were
printers; there were writers; there were musicians. They were people
like Hamlin Garland, who wrote me a beautiful letter. I have a very
thick portfolio of letters which were written to me by people from all
over the community, and from all over the country, expressing their
enthusiasm, assuring me that their heart was with me in this bookshop.
It was something different, I think, from any other bookshop, certainly
in this community, and I don't think there's been any other quite like
it. Dawson's, of course, is a community institution. I think as time has
gone on and my business has increased in size, and I've had to isolate
myself more from the public, my shop doesn't represent now what it did
then. But it certainly is a product of the dreams and the good wishes,
the hopes, of a lot of people for whom the bookshop was a personal
expression. They were fulfilling their ambitions as well as mine. I wish
I could name all the people who, in one way or another, went out of
their way to help me, people like Mrs. Estelle Getz, Julius Jacoby,
members of the Jewish community. There was quite a large number of the
Jewish community then--the well-to-do leaders of the organized Jewish
community- -who helped me, men like Sol Lesser, like George Moschbacher.
I can't remember all their names. Then there were medical men, like Dr.
Hyman Miller and Dr. Arthur Cecil and Dr. Elmer Belt, and a great many
more. There were people like Hugh Walpole who came and bought books from
me and extended me their friendship and their support, people like
Wilbur and Ida Needham, who really are among the dearest people that we
ever had in this community. One of the most important people who saw me
through many difficulties and provided the financial support that really
has made it possible for me to go on was John Valentine, a man from
Decatur, Illinois, who had helped found the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in
Chicago and then came out here. He was a man who collected books. He
loved books; he loved good company. He went traveling with me to buy
books, and he supplied me with the funds to buy libraries when I
couldn't have gotten the money any other way. There were people in the
book trade, especially Ernest Maggs, of Maggs Brothers, and there were
librarians like Nathan Van Patten of Stanford University, and Harold
Leupp of the University of California, and Willis Kerr of Pomona
College, Claremont universities, that gave me their patronage and their
advice and their encouragement. And there were other booksellers in
addition to Ernest Dawson, like John Howell, who were very helpful, and
the firm of E. Weyhe in New York, especially the man in charge of the
print department there, Carl Zigrosser. Dr. Rosenbach came out, called
on me, sent me books to sell. Just the prestige of being associated with
him was a tremendous asset. [There were] people like Frank Hogan, one of
the greatest trial lawyers America ever had, a tremendous book lover and
a tremendous friend of book people, who had a particular weakness for
booksellers, and Mrs. Doheny, who was a very faithful patron, and all of
the many small collectors, not just the great and famous ones, but the
many people whose two- and five- and ten- and twenty-five- and
hundred-dollar purchases made it possible for me to keep my doors open.
Whatever my personal differences might have been with Homer Crotty--and
mostly they were differences of politics and ideology--he was certainly
very supportive. Very often he would come over, and I'd say, "Look, I
need to sell some books today," and he would pick out a large pile of
books and take them away. And [there were] men like Will Clary, of the
firm of O'Melveny and Meyers. The bookshop became, as I said before, the
product of so many different people's interests and affection and
loyalty and support that it was not just my shop. And I like to think
that it still isn't. I like to think that what it has grown to be, as a
rather large business, is very much the expression of all the people who
have felt a sense of participation and to whom it has been an expression
of themselves as well as of me.
MAY 9, 1978
-
GARDNER:
- Okay, as I mentioned, I thought we'd start out this evening and finish
up with your publications, talk about what you did with Salusbury's
materials.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the roots of the publication of Salusbury's Mathematical Collections go back to about 1942, when I met
Stillman Drake. In the course of our acquaintanceship, which was related
to a mutual interest in the history of science and history of logic and
philosophy, he talked to me a great deal about Galileo, which was his
favorite subject and still is. Stillman Drake was a product of the
Depression. He'd gone to the University of California at Berkeley, and
he had majored in philosophy. He had to stop school and start earning a
living for his wife and two sons because of the Depression, and so he
never got his PhD. He had a substantial knowledge of mathematics and
particularly of statistics, so that he very early got a job with some
one of the federal agencies, came down to Los Angeles, and wandered into
my shop one day. We got into conversation, and he showed me a book which
he had printed in an edition of about eighteen copies. It was a reprint
of a very rare philosophical work by a remote American philosopher named
A.B. Johnson, of Ithaca, New York, who in 1828 wrote a book called [A Treatise on Language, or] Words and the Relation That They Bear to Things, by far the
earliest American semanticist. I said, "How can I get one?" And he said,
"There aren't any for sale, and I have only a couple of copies left. And
the only thing that would induce me to part with a copy would be if you
could offer me a copy of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Logico Philosophicus. " And I said, "Well, just hang on here. I
think I can get one for you." I reached for the telephone, and I called
Larry Edmunds Book Shop in Hollywood. And I said to Larry, "If you'll
turn around in the seat you're sitting in and look up at the third shelf
from the top at about the fourth book to the right, I think you'll see a
copy of a book by Wittgenstein called Tractatus Logico
Philosophicus." He turned around, he said, "Yes, it's there."
And I said, "Well, you put it aside. A friend of mine's going to stop by
and pick it up, and you bill me for it." And I turned around to Drake,
and I said, "If you go out to Larry Edmunds Book Shop in Hollywood on
Cahuenga"—which is where the shop was at that time—"go in there and tell
them you've come to pick up Tractatus Logico
Philosophicus. "He was very much impressed. Of all things, I
had remembered the location of that particular book on the shelf of this
bookshop when I had been in there scanning the shelves one day.
-
GARDNER:
- What was Larry Edmunds doing with that, just something he'd picked up?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, that was before . . .
-
GARDNER:
- . . . before his specialization.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, before his specialization. It was a general secondhand-book shop,
and Larry Edmunds was specializing in secondhand-book selling and
bootlegging at that time, [laughter] although I think that Prohibition
had already been repealed.
-
GARDNER:
- Which was he better at?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think that he did very well at bootlegging as long as
whiskey-selling wasn't legalized. He was one of these people that you
very often find in the book business. Like Stanley Rose, he appeared to
be almost an illiterate, and yet he picked up enough by ear in the
course of the years to be able to speak with authority on almost any
subject. And that is what a lot of booksellers learn to do.
-
GARDNER:
- Anyway, back to our story.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Drake, in due course, sent me down a copy of A.B. Johnson's Treatise on Language. And the next time he came
to see me, he told me that his great ambition was to translate Galileo's
Dialogue [ Concerning
] the Two [ Chief ] World Systems and that his model for the English
translation, to some degree, was going to be a translation by Thomas
Salusbury in a volume called Mathematical [ Collections and ] Translations, published in London in 1657, consisting of
translations from Italian, French, German, Dutch, Latin of important
works primarily on mechanics and hydraulics. He introduced me to the
obvious information about Thomas Salusbury. The first volume of
Salusbury 's Mathematical Collections was
published in England in 1664, and the second volume in 1665. The first
volume was fairly easy to get; there were about fifty known copies of
it, according to the censuses. But the second volume of Mathematical Collections consisted of about seven
known copies. Just how it happened there were no more no one knew then,
or still do not know, except that the great fire of London might have
destroyed most of them. In any event, of the seven known copies of the
second volume of Mathematical Collections, there
had been one copy described in the middle of the nineteenth century
which contained a life of Galileo, and that was the only copy of Mathematical Collections which contained this
life, although all the other six copies had it listed on the table of
contents. There was a great mystery of how this one copy, which was
complete, had disappeared, but it was known with certainty that it had
existed, and quotations from it had been published. Rumors turned up
from time to time, and have turned up until recently, that the copy was
stolen and taken to Australia. But my queries to Australian libraries
and Australian booksellers, other bookish people in Australia, have not
produced any record of this copy. Drake published a translation of
Galileo's Dialogue, the 1632 work, the one which
caused Galileo to be brought to Rome and tried by the inquisition.
However, he did not depend upon the Salusbury translation. He produced
an original translation. He had taught himself to read Italian; he had
taught himself all that he needed to know in order to translate it into
readable English. And, of course, being well trained in mechanics and
astronomy and the logic of science, he felt that he was better equipped
to interpret Galileo into English than if he depended upon a
predecessor. Simultaneously with the publication of Stillman Drake's Dialogue, and unknown to him, there appeared
another translation of Galileo's Dialogue of the Two
World Systems. Drake's was published by the University of
California Press, the other one translated by Giogio di Santillana [and
published] by the University of Chicago Press. Giorgio di Santillana had
loaned heavily on the Salusbury translation, but in his introduction and
all the way through, he criticized Salusbury for his misunderstanding of
the essentials of mechanics and of astronomy, and accused him of being a
poor translator. Drake felt that this was unjust, but he couldn't really
prove why. He just couldn't see how a man who knew Italian, who had
associated with the people who knew Galileo, could be so wrong. What
Santillana did was point out a number of obvious errors in Salusbury 's
translation. The first publication in Isis of
Stillman Drake's was an essay, "Galileo Gleanings," and this was a
discussion of Salusbury' s translation of Galileo. In it he pointed out
that Salusbury was an unknown figure. There was no proof even that there
was a man by the name of Salusbury. He leaned towards the conclusion
that Salusbury was a pseudonym, and that whoever he was, he was most
likely to have been a Jesuit in hiding in England. He put down all the
known facts, which were very few, about Salusbury. It was not known
where he was born, where he had died, whether he was married, whether he
had any children, and when he had died was not even known. And thus it
rested until one day, in a bookshop in New York called the Scientific
Book Services, a shop which specialized in cripples. . . . The man who
ran it, Sam Orlinick, was really a musicologist, and he knew a great
deal about the literature of music and had a very good stock. But he
also had accumulated over the years a large stock of early science
books. He didn't care whether they were perfect, whether they were
complete or not. He very righfully gave them a home on his shelves,
priced them so that anyone who wanted a copy that wasn't perfect could
find it for very little. In wandering around, I picked up off his shelf
a copy of Salusbury's Mathematical Translations,
volume one. It was a very thin paper copy, and it had been rebound, and
it had belonged once to Augustus De Morgan, a man who wrote A Budget of Paradoxes. And so, in spite of the
fact that it was rather worn, and the title page was ragged on the
fore-edges, I bought it. Much to my surprise, when I brought it back to
Los Angeles and started to look through it, I found a complete errata
sheet. I called up Stillman Drake in San Francisco, and he hurried down.
He immediately recognized that all of the errors for which Salusbury had
been blamed by Santillana were actually corrected in this errata sheet.
There was no other known copy that had that errata sheet except this
one, but it was the vindication for Drake of his faith in the
correctness of Salusbury. It provided proof that it was not Salusbury
but the printer who had introduced these errors, and that Salusbury had
corrected them, but the printer apparently had only put this errata
sheet into a very few copies. So, of course, Drake was exalted. He
offered me not only his own copy of the regular edition of the 1665
Salusbury volume one but a number of other books to make the trade even,
because he knew I knew that this was a unique copy. And on the basis of
that, he promised another "Galileo Gleanings" in Isis in which he expounded on this contention of his that Giorgio
di Santillana had been wrong in blaming Salusbury for the errors. It was
a great coup for him. As nearly always happens when a rarity turns up,
within a year or two, other copies of Salusbury' s Mathematical Collections turned up with the same errata sheet.
But none have turned up since. This, of course, made me feel that I
could be a participant in the discovery of anything else new that might
be found about Salusbury. In the year 1955, late one night, I found
myself unable to go to sleep, and I started to read an article in the
Book Collector about Lord [Edward Hyde]
Clarendon as a book collector. Now, Clarendon is considered the dullest
writer in the English language; his History of the
Rebellion has been offered to condemned criminals as a choice
between reading it and being hung, and I understand they preferred
hanging. [laughter] So I was reading this with very little attention,
hoping that I would drop off to sleep, when suddenly there popped up
before me a statement that went something like this: "I found Thomas
Salusbury cataloging the library of my Lord Dorchester." And then it
referred in a footnote to HA 10066, or something like that, and I knew
that HA meant Hastings Abbey papers, and that this was the entry number
of the paper from which the author, P.H. Hardacre, was quoting. I
remembered this because a bookseller's mind accumulates a lot of
rubbish. I also remembered that the Hastings Abbey papers were at the
Huntington Library, so I didn't sleep the rest of the night, and the
next morning I called up a friend in the manuscript department and said,
"Would you mind taking a look and telling me how many letters of Thomas
Salusbury you have listed in the Hastings Abbey papers?" And in a while
he called back. He said, "I think we've got thirteen letters of
Salusbury." You can imagine how quickly I rushed out there. Sure enough,
there were thirteen letters in his handwriting written to the Earl of
Huntington, who was a very young man at that time, and all signed
"Thomas Salusbury, your humble servant." These letters revealed a great
deal more than had ever been known before about Salusbury: who his wife
was, what his coat of arms were, when they were married, the fact that
he had two daughters, and the fact that he was a translator particularly
proficient in Italian; that he wrote a regular newsletter to the Earl of
Huntington, who was a very young man at the time, in order that the earl
might know what was going on in the world. From the related records in
the collection I was able to determine when he had died and that he had
died of the plague. This was a considerable coup, and I quickly reported
to Stillman Drake, and suggested he publish it. He said, "No, you have
the right to publish that as your own discovery." He encouraged me to do
so, read the manuscript, corrected it. I submitted it to Isis, where it was published in December 1959,
under the title of "Thomas Salusbury Discovered." I got a great credit
out of having tried to find a way to fall asleep. Drake and I went to
Italy in June of 1964. It was the first time he had gone to Italy, and
it was a great experience for him. And on the way over, we went to the
auction of the books of E. de C. Andrade. Andrade had been a sort of a
secretary of the Royal Society. He had collected a notable library of
classics in the history of science, and in his library was one of the
seven known copies of volume two of Salusbury's Mathematical Collections. It was the only copy left out of
captivity; all the other copies are in university libraries, or in
places like the British Museum and will never again be offered for sale.
I had a customer in Santa Barbara, Joseph Halle Schaffner, who had
commissioned me to bid. There were two days of sales. On the first day I
discovered that the bids he had given me were not good enough; they
couldn't hold up against the new rise in prices that had taken place in
the world of scientific-book collecting. And the leading buyer, the bull
of the market there, was a man by the name of Bert Marley, manager of
Dawsons of Pall Mall. So I cabled back to Joe Schaffner in Santa Barbara
and said, "I must tell you that you're not going to get any books unless
you raise your bids." And Warren Howell, who was sort of my anchorman
back in San Francisco, called Schaffner. Between the two of them, they
concocted the idea of calling me back and saying, "Triple all bids." So
on the next day I had one of those great moments which every bookman
dreams of: I sat in Sotheby's rooms and bought every book I wanted or
made the competition pay dearly for it. After a while, they discovered
that it wasn't really smart to try and go against me because I might
drop it on them at a pretty heavy price. I could afford to pay high if I
wanted the book very much; or if they felt that they could pay too much
more than I could, then I would let them have it. After a while, the
leading competitors decided they weren't going to draw my blood.
[laughter] Just before volume two of Salusbury's Mathematical Collections came up, Drake said to me, "I have
commissioned Marley of Dawsons to bid up to 1,500 pounds for this book."
I said, "In that case I will stay out of the bidding until it passes
that figure. But if Marley does not get it at any price up to 1,500
pounds I will step in." The bidding went on, and I stepped in and bought
it for 3,000 pounds. Then I told him Mr. Schaffner had authorized me to
turn the book over to Drake for his use as long as he wanted it.
1.25. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE ONE
(June 27, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- Tonight we're going to discuss a monumental collection that you have just
dealt with.
-
ZEITLIN:
- To begin with, I think I should tell something about Mr. Robert Honeyman
and the formation of the Honeyman collection and my previous
associations with him. While I had known of Robert Honeyman in a very
slight way for many years and he had known of me, it was not until about
June of 1955 that I actually got to meet him, and it is to Warren Howell
that I owe a great debt for having introduced me. Early in 1955, I had
bought one of the Herbert Evans collections of books on the history of
science. It was a very outstanding collection containing many of the
classics. Herbert Evans was certainly the most prodigious of all
collectors in the history of science in this country. His first
collecting commenced somewhere in the 1930s. Early in 1942, as well as I
can remember, he had formed a collection of outstanding classics in the
history of science. He was a famous endocrinologist and physiologist and
was professor of anatomy and physiology at the University of California
at Berkeley. He had a large laboratory assigned to him in the Life
Sciences Building there. Evans was known for having made a number of
important contributions to endocrinology. To begin with, he had done the
first dissection of the thyroid and the parathyroid for [William
Stewart] Halsted at Johns Hopkins. As a result of this dissection,
Halsted radically changed his operation for removal of the thyroid, and
he decided that it was necessary to leave part of the thyroid in the
patient rather than to extirpate all of it. It was found that removal of
the entire thyroid and parathyroid had a bad consequence, and that many
of the patients either died or suffered very bad results. But with the
dissection by Evans and the revision of the operation, Halsted was able
to perform a successful removal of the thyroid and opened a whole new
area of endocrine surgery. Dr. Evans had also isolated vitamin E. He had
developed a test which was known as Evans blue, which gave a quick means
of determining if the fetus in the process of formation was not
developing normally, and that resulted in the introduction of certain
techniques which prevented abnormal births in many cases. He was a giant
of a man physically, and he was a prodigiously active man in many
departments. He was also a naive and childlike man in some ways, and in
other ways he was a man full of guile and temperament, and could
sometimes behave in a rather disturbing manner. One of his great
passions was the history of science, and he had succeeded in developing
a collection which represented the first editions of the classics in all
departments of the history of science. He had canvassed the leading
authorities in the different fields--such as physiology, anatomy,
geology, physics, optics, astronomy, mathematics—and through their
consensus had developed a list of what they considered the greatest
books. He then set about collecting them. He collected with tremendous
zeal and abandon, so that he often exceeded his income and bought many
rare books for which he couldn't pay, and then found himself being
threatened by his creditors; as a result of that, he had to sell a
number of collections. In all, he formed about eight collections; I have
written a complete history of these, or at least tabulated them, in an
article that I did for Isis shortly after Herbert
Evans's death. In 1942, he had been divorced from his first wife for
some time, and his collection had become part of his settlement with his
wife. It was stored in the Life Sciences Building in Herbert Evans's
office at the University of California at Berkeley. The first Mrs. Evans
became ill; she had to come under the protection of a conservator. She
needed money, and it was decided to sell that collection through the
courts. Warren Howell and I decided to attempt to purchase this, and I
in turn brought this collection to the attention of Lessing Rosenwald.
Lessing Rosenwald first got in touch with the Librarian of Congress and
asked him if he would like to have this as a gift, and the librarian
made a mistake very often made by librarians: they made a check of their
own collection and determined that they had about two-thirds of the
books in the collection and therefore decided not to accept it. What
they failed to take into consideration was that the one-third that they
lacked were the greatest and rarest of the books, and they would have
been very wise to accept the collection and then discard the poorer
copies of what they had in duplicate. When the Library of Congress
declined the collection, Lessing Rosenwald decided to give it to the
Institute for Advanced Study, and, as well as I can remember, he gave us
a bid of $36,000 to execute at the auction—at the court sale, I should
say, because it wasn't exactly an auction. We were disturbed for a
while, because Herbert Evans in San Francisco had heard about the
collection being put up, and we feared that he might come into the court
and make an offer which was greater than ours. Warren Howell tried to
prevent Evans from having access to the inventory, but I said there's no
way legally that we can prevent him from having access to the inventory,
and it would actually be to our advantage to have him appear as a
competitive bidder, so that there would be no question of collusion or
any other improper procedures. What finally happened is that he appeared
in court at the time of the court sale but made no bid, and it fell into
our hands and was purchased by us for Mr. Rosenwald. And it was in '55
that I went to Princeton, unpacked the collection, met J. Robert
Oppenheimer, and had a very good opportunity to become well acquainted
with him. This was one of the finest of the Evans collections. In the
meantime, Evans had started to form another collection, so that early in
1955 he was personally heavily in debt and needed to sell. I flew up to
Berkeley, visited him, and made him an offer. I presented him with a
check of $5,000 to prove my serious intent. He in turn discussed it with
his wife and the bank to whom he owed a great deal of money that he'd
borrowed in order to form the collection, and in a few days, I was
informed that he would accept our proposal. Now, I must say that I
didn't have the $27,000 which I offered him for the collection. I had,
in fact, no money at all. [laughter] But a good friend, John Valentine,
of whom I have spoken before, came forward with $9,000 of the money. And
on the basis of that loan of $9,000, I borrowed an additional $18,000
from Justin Turner and was able to close the deal.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, what year was this?
-
ZEITLIN:
- That was in 1955. Later on, Dave Randall of Scribner's said to me, "Jake,
how did you happen to buy this collection when so many other booksellers
were all after it? And I had said to Dr. Evans, 'Dr. Evans, if you're
ever ready to sell the collection, please let me know!'" (I'm quoting
Dave.) And I answered Dave, "Well, it's very simple. I offered him
money." [laughter] In other words, I came to him with a specific
proposition and a check in hand. Evans accepted my offer. I bought the
collection. I tried to sell it to a number of people as a collection,
including UCLA, and none of them would consider buying it. My price was
$55,000, and after they all refused it-- including a very serious group,
the Friends of UCLA Medical School--I decided there was no course left
to me but to break it up. The majority of the geology books went to
Everette [L.] De Golyer in Dallas, and became part of the collection
which he later gave to the University of Oklahoma. I printed two
catalogs, and I wish I had those books now. When I look at the prices I
asked, they are so pathetically small compared to the prices these books
have brought now. For instance, I sold a first edition of Copernicus to
Sam Barchas for $2,000 and a first edition of Newton's [Philosophiae Naturalis] Principia [Mathematica] for $750. The
latest prices for Copernicus that I got was $35,000, and for Newton's
Principia, I recently offered a copy for sale
for $15,000, and it's under reserve now. Well, I had all these beautiful
early books in the history of science, and I had heard that Mr. Honeyman
was collecting. So I asked Warren Howell one day, when he came in my
place, if he would tell Mr. Honeyman about these and if Mr. Honeyman
would give me an appointment to come out and see him. I think it was May
or June of 1955 that I went to see Mr. Honeyman on his beautiful ranch
at San Juan Capistrano. We traveled up the hill on a winding road. The
road was covered with lavender petals falling from the blooming
jacaranda trees, which stretched for about a quarter of a mile along the
road, and came to his house at the top of the hill. He took me into his
basement where he had his collection on the history of science. Mr.
Honeyman was very affable, very warm, as he showed me his books. We
talked about them, and I was so enthusiastic, and I started darting from
shelf to shelf, taking books out and talking about them and expressing
my great pleasure in having found such a marvelous collection. He in
turn became more excited as we talked, and he bought a few books.
Finally he said, "Now, look here, I've only got a fair collection now,
but I have a list of desiderata, and I would like to make this a really
good collection. So why don't you go ahead and bring to my attention any
of the great books in the history of science that come your way, and I
will give you my list of wants, and we'll see what we can do." And thus
began a wonderful working relationship, which, for me, was immensely
valuable, because I could go to the auctions and the booksellers all
over the world with Mr. Honeyman's list and ask them what they had in
the way of important items in the history of science. And if he
[Honeyman] didn't have it, I was in a position to say, "We'll take it."
So it was really a wonderful thing for me; it gave me great prestige. In
1958, he let me go to the sale of the Herschel books in London, and I
bought not only a great many of the important books of the library of
Wilhelm Herschel (Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel) , but also a number of the
instruments of the Herschel Observatory at Slough. I gave most of the
instruments to Greenwich, and it was at very little expense that I got a
great deal of credit and kudos. Because, during the sale, the
instruments were coming up, and they were being sold for four, five,
seven, and ten pounds, and I thought this was terrible and I just kept
going on bidding. When I saw what I bought, this big mass of stuff, I
couldn't conceive of how I could possibly send them back. So I said to
Frank Maggs, who was representing me at the sale and beside whom I sat.
"Tell the people at the Greenwich Maritime Museum that they can have any
of these if they'd like. I'd be glad to give them." So they picked out a
considerable number of the instruments and added them to their
collection. As a result, I was invited to spend a day at Greenwich and
was received by the director. I was asked to sign the great book. I was
given the VIP tour of the exhibitions, and lunch in the great painted
hall. I was also interviewed for television. [laughter] So the few
pounds that I spent on the instruments I gave them was very little in
return for the great pleasure I had and the great consideration I was
shown. Incidentally, I took some snapshots with a cheap camera that I
had--of Frank Maggs and Frank Carr, the director of Greenwich, standing
in front of the Cutty Sark , which had been set up on blocks and
restored at Greenwich. Later, when Frank Maggs died, the only good
photograph that the family had of Frank Maggs to use in some memorial
that was published was the one I had taken there of him standing in
front of the Cutty Sark . It gave me a great deal of pleasure and a
great deal of prestige to be able to go to these auctions, and later I,
in addition, was able to represent Joseph Halle Schaffner in the same
way and go to the Andrade sale, where I bought a number of important
books for Mr. Schaffner, and also some books for Mr. Honeyman.
-
GARDNER:
- Let me interrupt you here and just ask a question or two about Mr.
Honeyman. First of all, where did his wealth originate?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, Mr. Honeyman' s father was an attorney in New York City. They, the
Honeymans, go back a long way in American history; in fact, one member
of the family —John Honeyman, who was a butcher--was a secret agent for
Washington, and he was the man who was responsible for the defeat of the
British at the Battle of Trenton. Bob Honeyman also had married Marian
Stewart, who had inherited a substantial fortune. She was the daughter
of the Stewart who founded one of the largest automobile accessory
manufacturing firms, Stewart Magneto, and a lot of other things. Bob
Honeyman and Marian Stewart were married, I think, in 1927, and they
rented an apartment in New York in which they spent their first several
years. It happened to be the apartment of a man who was a great
collector of books and autographs, Adrian [Hoffman] Joline. So they
found themselves in this apartment, surrounded by rare books and
autographs, and this inspired Mr. Honeyman to start collecting. He
didn't start collecting science books, although he had graduated from
Lehigh as a metallurgical engineer. His grandfather had been a graduate
of Lehigh, his father was a graduate of Lehigh, Bob was a graduate of
Lehigh, and his son was a graduate of Lehigh. Over the years, Bob
collected many rare books and manuscripts, including James Fenimore
Cooper, Washington Irving, Stephen Crane, Walt Whitman. And all of these
literary firsts which he collected, with few exceptions, he gave to
Lehigh. Over the years it was his intention to give his entire
collection to Lehigh. Early in the thirties. Bob Honeyman came across
some catalogs of Henry Sothern in London, and these were catalogs of
early science books which were prepared by a man named Henry Zeitlinger.
Henry Zeitlinger sat down there in that cold basement and wrote
descriptions and notes of these wonderful early science books at a time
when nobody else was paying much attention to them in England, and he
got out catalogs which have now become important reference works on the
history of science. There were many great books there—presentations,
copies of books by [Johannes] Kepler and [Johannes] Hevelius, first
editions of Galileo, first editions of Copernicus 's De Revolutionibus for thirty pounds, first edition of Newton's
Principia for thirty pounds. Over the years
he accumulated a great many of the best books that were offered in Henry
Sothern' s catalogs. He was a very systematic man, and one of the great
advantages that I had when it came to determining its cost, was that he
had a complete record of every book—where he had bought it, when he had
bought it, and how much he'd paid for it. Mr. Honeyman is a very
imaginative man, also a very astute man, and a very good businessman. He
had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at the time of the Depression,
and he survived the Depression-- which is something very few men who
held seats on the New York Stock Exchange did. He managed the
properties, the funds, of both himself and Marian with great judgment;
and, over the years, they accumulated a very large fortune. As I say, he
gave a great many fine books to Lehigh, and he continued, up until a
very short time ago, to plan that his books were all going to be given
to Lehigh. And they would have been given to Lehigh if the
administration of Lehigh hadn't been very stupid. [laugher] A couple of
years ago, I guess it was, somebody at Lehigh got in touch with him and
said, "Mr. Honeyman, you gave us a set of the photographs of [Eadweard]
Muybridge. We need to pay for a parking lot here. It will take about
$30,000, which is what we've been offered for this set of Muybridge. May
we sell it?" And you can imagine what effect that had on him.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, no. . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- He said, "I am not interested in giving them money. If I'd wanted to give
them money, I would have given them money. I have given them some." They
had given him an honorary degree. He had already won a Phi Beta Kappa.
They had honored him in many ways, but the idea that the books he had
spent years collecting, that really had meant more to him than anything
else, might be broken up and sold by the university in order to pay
[for] parking lots and things like that destroyed all that dream. So he
cooled off substantially. In the meantime, I had arranged one exhibition
of books from his collection having to do with the size and shape of the
earth. That exhibition was held at UCLA, and Dr. Seymour Chapin at L.A.
State had prepared the catalog notes. Then, during the Copernicus year,
Mr. Honeyman lent Lehigh the best things he had concerning the
predecessors of Copernicus, the important works of Copernicus and his
contemporaries, and all of the works right up to the early nineteenth
century which had in one way or another contributed toward the
establishment of Copernicanism, and the proof of it as a valid
cosmological theory. Mr. Honeyman not only bought books, but he bought
manuscripts. From time to time, I would bring people who were
authorities in the history of science out to see the collections. I
brought Stillman Drake out once, and it was Stillman, to some extent,
who inspired Mr. Honeyman to concentrate on manuscripts. From the time
of Stillman Drake's visit, Mr. Honeyman was very receptive to any good
scientific manuscript, so that he formed a collection of approximately
150 manuscripts from the tenth century into the nineteenth century of
important works or original manuscripts by important scientists. The
collection was moved several times. He bought a house in Rye, New York,
and he shipped it there, and then he shipped it back. He shipped it into
New York City, and then, finally, he brought it back to California. He
built a special fireproof building on the ranch, with air conditioning,
and temperature and humidity controls, and that was where the collection
was housed. He took great pride in having all the books put into leather
slipcases, and he took great pleasure in having the visits of really
qualified people who weren't just curiosity seekers. Among others that I
brought out to visit him was Dr. Ynez O'Neill on the faculty at UCLA.
Well, when Mr. Honeyman's enthusiasm for giving the collection to Lehigh
cooled, he started to cast about for what else to do with it, and one
day I learned. . . . Well, I must say, first of all, that I had taken
Franklin Murphy out there, that I had taken John Burke, I had taken
Robert Vosper, I had taken Lynn White out there and Rupert Hall and
Marie Boaz when they were here--all with the idea of convincing Mr.
Honeyman of the interest of UCLA in the collection. And then one day
about two years ago I heard suddenly that he had said to Ynez O'Neill,
"Tell the people of UCLA that I will deposit the collection there with
the proviso that it will become their property upon my demise. Now, you
go ahead and find me an attorney who will represent me, and you tell
UCLA to discuss this matter and come up with a proposal." I must say
this was—it was not until many months afterward, approximately six
months after that, Ynez O'Neill or the people at UCLA told me anything
about this. And none of them actually told me— it was Franklin Murphy.
-
GARDNER:
- This was two years ago, you say?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, about two years ago. And then suddenly I heard from Honeyman that he
was very disappointed that the people at UCLA had not shown any proper
interest, they had not come back to him with any proposal, and that he
was damned tired of this thing. And then I called up the people at UCLA,
and I said, "Look, if you want this collection, you'd better get busy."
Well, there were several things that went wrong. Ynez O'Neill had been
sick for about three months, seriously ill. The attorney representing
Mr. Honeyman had gone off on a trip and had let the matter slide. And
the people at UCLA had been told by this attorney that they were under
no circumstances to communicate directly with Mr. Honeyman. And so they
had just sat there and done nothing. Now, if I had been told about this,
I would have put certain things in motion. If Larry Powell had been told
and known about it at the time when he was the librarian, he would have
clinched this thing. And if Franklin Murphy had been the chancellor
still, he would have clinched it, because it was some years earlier that
I got Franklin Murphy to write a letter outlining what UCLA would do if
Mr. Honeyman gave the collection to UCLA. When Franklin Murphy left, the
people at UCLA--no one there (certainly not [Chancellor] Young) was
imaginative enough to carry it forward. When [C.D.] O'Malley died, there
really wasn't anybody who had the right kind of drive. And with the
departure previously of Larry Powell, what UCLA lacked was the kind of
person that could keep the contact up with Honeyman, show their
enthusiasm. Finally, Mrs. Honeyman said, "We're not going to give that
collection to UCLA because they don't appreciate it." So I called up the
chancellor's office, I called up Page Ackerman, and they called a
meeting of all the deans and the people. They invited me. And then they
said, "What can we do?" And I said, "I'll do my damnedest, but I'm
afraid that it's like a love affair: it's cooled." But I said, "Sit down
and write a good letter to Mr. Honeyman. I'll take it out and I'll go
and see him." I went out to see him, and I asked him and Mrs. Honeyman
to reconsider, and then I asked him if they would let me bring Ynez
O'Neill out. So Ynez and I went out and tried to revive this thing, but
the final answer was no. Then Mr. Honeyman said [to me], "I want you to
do an appraisal of this." And for a number of months during the latter
part of 1976, Josephine and I went out weekends and sometimes several
days in the week and did a systematic listing of every book in the
collection. Then I enlisted the help of Harold Graves, who I think is
the most dependable appraiser in this country today. He was formerly the
head of Scribner's, had handled a great many books in the sciences, and
had sold a good many of them to Mr. Honeyman. And I must pause here to
say that I wasn't the only one who sold books to Mr. Honeyman over these
years. When he and I met in London in 1956, I believe, I introduced him
to Dr. Ernst Weil. We went to Maggs Brothers together. He bought a great
many books from Dave Randall at Scribner's, because he and Randall had
known each other for many, many years, and I think that Randall had also
gone to Lehigh. He bought books from. . . . Well, I'm sorry, I just
can't remember the names, but he bought books from a great many other
dealers besides myself, and, of course, continued to buy from the
catalogs of Henry Sothern. But he bought from Quaritch, he bought from
Maggs, and he bought—the man I was thinking about was Goldschmidt; he
bought a great many important books from Goldschmidt. He bought a lot of
important science books from Warren Howell. Warren Howell [and I] worked
together very closely and very amiably, and often we would go and buy
books either jointly, or he would buy some and I would buy some. Over
the years, the collection grew. Mr. Honeyman, in the meantime, continued
to give some of his books to Lehigh; he gave them all of his Darwin
collection. Finally, at the end of 1976 or early in 1977, Graves and I
completed the inventory of his library, which consisted primarily of
works in the history of science but also contained a few very choice
works in English literature and a considerable number of books on Roman
archaeology and other classical archaeology. And then he said, "Well, I
think I'll sell this collection." And I said, "Would you let me be your
agent?" And he said, "Well, that all depends--how much do you want?" And
I said, "I will do it for 5 percent." The inventory which we prepared
and the appraisal that went with it brought the value of the collection
up to over $5 million, and this was a conservative figure, because we
had no intention, and neither did Mr. Honeyman, of inflating the value.
He wanted to have a conservative market valuation on this library, and
that's exactly what Graves and I tried to do. Early in 1977, I prepared
a summary of the library in which I told something about the collection,
including the fact that it was an assembly of collections, made up of
whole collections of books, such as the Struve collection of
twentieth-century astronomy, the Jacobsohn collection of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century science, and a very significant collection of original
contributions by [Otto] Hahn, [Ernest Orlando] Lawrence, [Lise] Meitner,
[Enrico] Fermi--all of the important people who had contributed to the
discovery of nuclear fission—as well as the literary items, which
included the first edition of The Imitation of
Christ, The Confessions of St. Augustine,
the first four folios of Shakespeare, large paper editions of Robinson Crusoe, a very fine first of Paradise Lost, Gulliver 's
Travels, and so on. And I listed some of the outstanding books
in the various fields, such as archaeology, nuclear fission, astronomy,
mathematics. Among other things that Mr. Honeyman had specialized in was
books of exchange; that is, the little handbooks that the people who
exchange money at the fairs and in the markets in Europe during the
sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth century had beside them in
order to determine the comparative value of different national coinages.
These have become very scarce, because from year to year they were
discarded; but they're the best key to the values at different times of
the coinages of different countries. He had decided that this would be
something very desirable to collect, and he accumulated a number of
these. There was an outstanding collection of early arithmetics,
beginning with the first printed arithmetic and other significant
arithmetics. His collection could only be rivaled by the collection at
Columbia University, which had been formed by Dr. Smith many years ago;
this was indeed a distinguished collection in itself. In addition, he
had attempted to collect every edition of Euclid from the first until
the end of the seventeenth century; and at the time that the collection
was sold, I think he lacked only about five of the editions of Euclid
which had been printed during that time. The classics which were
included in the collection were far greater than in any other single
private collection that I knew of. The Horblit Collection could have
been lost in one corner of the Huntington Library. Bern Dibner's
collection was larger in the numbers of books, but in terms of the
quality of the important individual items and the rarity, I don't think
Dibner could approach Honeyman. He had a first edition of [William]
Harvey's de Motu Cordis, and he had the 1472
edition of Valturius's De Re Militare, the
greatest book in the history of military engineering. He had first
editions of [Andreas] Vesalius and one of the few copies, probably the
only copy in the United States, of [Dimitri Ivanovich] Mendelejeff' s
work in which he set forth the periodic tables--things which simply . .
. if you find one of them in one collection, you will not find the
others. So that his collection is certainly the greatest any private
individual ever formed.
1.26. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE TWO
(June 27, 1978)
-
ZEITLIN:
- It was early in 1978 that Mr. Honeyman finally gave me a written
authorization to represent him. In the meantime, I had talked to the
people at the University of Arizona. Larry Powell and Dr. [John Paul]
Schaefer came out to visit Mr. Honeyman. Honeyman actually made a trip
to Tucson; they showed him their new library and impressed him
immensely. And one of the reasons, really, why I feel that I would
rather not have this interview made available is because Mr. Honeyman
wrote into his will a proviso that if he should die before he had
otherwise disposed of the collection, the collection should go as a gift
to the University of Arizona. He was very much impressed by the
enthusiasm of Powell and of Schaefer, and he also was impressed by the
new library and the arrangements they had made for the care of special
collections, including temperature and humidity control. Finally, early
in 1978 . . . [aside conversation] I started approaching various people
in 1977, and one of the first people I approached was Peter Wilson, the
head of Sotheby's.
-
GARDNER:
- What is the date on that?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the first correspondence that I have isn't here, but early in 1977
I brought Peter Wilson out to see Mr. Honeyman. I had previously
attempted to interest the University of Toronto. I had written letters
to a number of other places and got no favorable response. The amount
was staggering to most people. Finally I said to Mr. Honeyman, "Would
you object to meeting the president of Sotheby's and getting their idea
of what they'd like to do about the collection?" He said no, so I
brought Peter Wilson out; I think it must have been in January of 1977.
Then in March he came back with Lord John Kerr, the head of their book
department. Later that month. Lord John Kerr wrote a letter of intent in
which Sotheby Parke Bernet would purchase the Honeyman library for $3.8
million, payable in various installments over a period of two years, and
also telling me that they had made arrangements to send a representative
from London, their rare-book man, John Collins, over to go into the
collection in more detail. So all of this was subject to John Collins
coming over and verifying Lord John Kerr's views as to the value and
completeness of the library. Of course, they were very enthusiastic, and
the idea of making a series of sales of the Honeyman collection appealed
to them greatly. There followed a continued series of visits and
discussions. Peter Wilson came back, and finally in early 1978, John
Collins did come over, and he looked over the collection, was very
enthusiastic, and reported back to them. (No, this was late 1977,
somewhere in November, I think, of 1977.) And another proposal was made
for a total value of $4 million, with 6 percent interest, and this was
to be in the term of a series of irrevocable letters of credit. Well, it
was not until January 1978 that I did receive a letter of authorization
from the Honeymans agreeing to pay me my commission (all my work
previously was just on the basis of a mutual understanding of intent).
And then Peter Wilson, in March of 1978, came back again and drew up two
proposals: one proposal in which they wished to undertake to sell the
collection on commission from Mr. Honeyman; and the other in which they
undertook, through some principal other than Sotheby's themselves, to
buy it. I advised Mr. Honeyman not to consign this collection to auction
for many reasons—not only because you couldn't tell what the proceeds
might be in the end, but also because books have a way of disappearing
when they go to auction: autograph letters and manuscripts cannot be
guarded against pilfering, and I just didn't want to see all those
complications develop. In March, Mr. Honeyman agreed in principle to the
price of $4 million. Then started some very knotty complications. First
of all, the principal did not want to pay interest on $4 million, so it
was agreed that the purchase price would be $4 million less the interest
on the balance —I mean, to include the interest on the balance of the
payments. So that in the end, the total price paid to Mr. Honeyman would
be $4 million. This was very complicated. And the terms of the sale were
to be that he would receive in April of 1978 $750,000, and then not
until September 30, 1979, would he receive $1,625,000, and from then on,
until 1981, the balance. However, this was to be paid in the form of
irrevocable letters of credit drawn on the Morgan Guaranty Bank, and we
then learned that letters of credit given to the seller within the year
of the sale constituted a claim' on the part of the Internal Revenue
[Service] for the capital gains tax on the entire sale, which meant that
Mr. Honeyman would be putting out more money in the first year than he
would be taking in. Then started the hassles, and they continued.
Finally, on March 7, 1978, I did receive a proper agreement from the
Honeymans, stating the terms of my commission, and I was legally
authorized. At that time Sotheby's offered me an additional 2 percent
finder's fee, which would have been very nice. And I went to Mr.
Honeyman and said, "Do you have any objection if it's not going to be
out of your pocket?" And he said no. So I stood to gain not only 5
percent on the sale but 2 percent from the purchaser as well. And so it
stood for a while. About that time, Warren Howell decided to see if he
couldn't get Stanford to buy the collection. So Stanford got into the
act.
-
GARDNER:
- Was this now separate from you?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, it was through me. Warren and I agreed to share the commission, and,
of course, I would have preferred to see the collection stay in
California. So Warren Howell put on a big drive, and there were many
visits back and forth, but I'm sorry to say that they could not get
together enough money. Wallace Sterling came up. All of their big
officials came up. They made all kinds of proposals, but the amount of
cash which they proposed to put up was not enough. I think if they had
come forward with $2 million cash, Mr. Honeyman would have donated the
rest of the value. Then along came the Huntington Library; Dan Woodward
called me in great agitation and said, "Is there any way that we can
have an opportunity to buy this?" And I said, "Yes. I know Mr. Honeyman
would be glad to have a visit from you. He would be glad to give you an
opportunity. He would prefer to see it stay in California." So I took
Gary Bliss and Dan Woodward out there, and we spent a day visiting and
seeing the collection. And Dan Woodward then went to a foundation and
tried to get money, and I must say he tried very hard. I stalled the
negotiations with Sotheby, because I, too, would rather have made less
commission and seen the collection stay here. But in the end. Woodward
simply couldn't get any foundation or any of the other sources that he
had to come up with the money, and he very tearfully (and I must say
that I joined him) informed us that it couldn't be done. So we resumed
our negotiations with Sotheby's, and finally I called Mr. Peter Wilson
in London, and, in turn, I was told to talk to John Marion in New York.
I said, "We have got other people interested. There are some
institutions that would like the collection and have come forward with
offers." (In fact, Stanford did finally come up to a million and a
half.) "So if you want this collection, you had better do something
firm." Finally I received a cable from John Marion on March 22, in which
he said that they were confirming that they were agreed to purchase the
Honeyman collection and that they were commencing the paperwork, and I
was asked to extend the date during which they could carry this out
(this is, mind you, 1978) until May 1st. And then started more
correspondence concerning the terms of payment and the necessity for the
first payments to be large enough to cover the capital gains tax. And
there was very much discussion of the terms, and so on. On April 11,
1978, Mr. Marion suggested a down payment of $1,750,000, with $750,000
to follow within the year and the balance to be paid over a period of
three years.
-
GARDNER:
- Still with the $4 million.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Four million. In April of 1978, we received from a Mr. [John] Ames, the
attorney for Sotheby's, a proposed contract. This was drawn up by a Wall
Street lawyer who had no idea of what libraries consist of and how you
go about dealing with them. He filled it with impossible terms. He
called me, and I discussed it with him, and I said, "You cannot do it
this way."
-
GARDNER:
- What were some of the things?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, he wanted, first of all, that Sotheby's were not the purchasers but
agents for an unnamed purchaser and were to be relieved of all
liability. The second thing is that the sale was to be made FOB London,
and the title was to be given there; that there was to be no contract
until the completion of delivery, which meant that we would be checking
the books, packing them, and shipping them without any signed contract
in the hands of Mr. Honeyman; also that Mr. Honeyman was to guarantee
completeness of every item in the collection and was to guarantee the
collation, and they were all in absolutely flawless condition. The
seller was to indemnify them against all loss, liability, damage
expenses which may be incurred, and so on, and full of all kinds of
legalese. That hassle continued until, finally. I set forth the terms
that Mr. Honeyman wanted, which were that the sale should be FOB the
premises of the seller and that, in order to avoid any liability for
sales tax, the shipment was to be made through a broker, and they were
not to get possession of it until delivery in London. The title they
could have when they paid for the collection, but not possession. Also,
no bill of sale would be executed before completion of all payments, and
authenticity was at the risk of the buyer, who has previously inspected
the collection and accepts it as is without warranty by seller. The
agent must accept liability to the seller, and all brokerage fees and
other fees were to be paid by the buyer. Finally it looked as if the
whole thing was going to fall through because of this lawyer in New
York, and Mr. Honeyman said, "To hell with them. I'll give it away. I
don't give a damn!" [laughter] So I called John Marion and said, "John,
it looks like we're not going to have any deal. I think you'd better get
in touch with Peter Wilson in London, and I'm going to call him tonight.
A few other people want that collection. You'd better get that lawyer
off this thing and tell him that we won't accept those terms." Well, I
called London, and the next thing, I got a call from John Marion,
saying, "If you will waive your fee to Sotheby's, Sotheby's is prepared
to offer Mr. Honeyman $4 million cash for the collection. Do you think
he would be interested in that?" Well, Mr. Honeyman said, "There's about
$24,000 worth of books there that I want to keep, and we can take that
off. But," he said, "I'll go for that. Let them send us a new contract."
So a new contract came, and they had written into it things that were
not in the first contract. And there had to be more negotiations back
and forth, and it looked like it was going to die a second time. So I
again called London. I got ahold of Peregrine Pollen, the
second-in-command of the international company, and explained things and
said, "Now, if you want this collection, you are simply going to have to
explain to this lawyer that there are some things that can't be done. If
you and Mr. Honeyman were face to face, I don't think you'd have any
trouble at all. This lawyer's trying to earn his money, and I'm sure
that he means well, but these are conditions that simply can't work in
this case." Finally, it looked like the thing was going to fall through
again, because they wanted Mr. Honeyman to sign a contract agreeing that
the books could be checked, packed, and delivered within fifteen days.
And I said, "I won't let Mr. Honeyman sign an agreement like that,
because your man's got to come over there. We've got to check through
5,000 books. They have to be packed, and packed in such a way that they
will arrive safely. We've got to make all kinds of arrangements, and I
don't want any time limit. You can be sure that we will act as quickly
as possible, because he's [as] eager to get his money as you are to get
the books. There's one thing he wants. He wants to check before the
shipment leaves his grounds." So, that was all written into a contract.
Oh, there were other factors. They wanted Mr. Honeyman to guarantee
title on all books in perpetuity, that any books that were in the
collection—if anybody should ever claim that they had been illegally
removed or illegally come by, that they were still the property of some
claimant; that Mr. Honeyman was to guarantee the full amount of the
loss, according to the value in the inventory. I succeeded in arranging
a compromise so that Mr. Honeyman agreed to guarantee title but nothing
else for two years, and that he was to guarantee the value up to 80
percent, and also that their representative was to come here and check
the books with me, and that if there were anything missing, they were to
accept books of equal value which had not been valued in the inventory
for a value agreed upon between their representative and mine. Well,
this almost brought things to a halt again. And again I called London at
three o'clock in the morning. Finally the lawyers in New York threw up
their hands and agreed to our terms, and their representative went out
with the contracts, and they were signed somewhere about the
twenty-fifth of May. And before the first of May, John Collins, their
representative in London, was here. Mr. Honeyman erected a magnificent
canopy in front of the library. He provided carpenters and helpers to
build boxes. Richard Tse, who is my right-hand man, undertook
negotiations for the clearance through the brokerage houses, and we got
a team of men. On the sixteenth of June, the entire collection was
loaded onto a container, and the container was sealed, and it stood
there at the ranch while the final agreements were signed. The bill of
sale was signed by Mr. Honeyman, and then we discovered that Mr.
Honeyman's notary was not in the office, so we had to wait another hour
before we found the notary. [laughter] And upon the notary's appearance,
the final agreements were signed. Everything was notarized, and John
Marion, president of the local Sotheby Parke Bernet, delivered two
checks--one to Mr. Honeyman and one to Mrs. Honeyman--for a total of
$3,976,000. And the signal was given and the truck moved off. [laughter]
Wednesday night the shipment left for New York, Thursday night it flew
out of New York, and Friday morning it arrived in England at the
airport. Mr. Honeyman and Mrs. Honeyman took their checks and sent them
off by registered mail to Dallas, which is where they have their
account. And last Monday morning, Mr. Honeyman called up and said,
"Jake, we're in business. Come out and get your commission check ."
-
GARDNER:
- Terrific.
-
ZEITLIN:
- So Josephine and I drove out, and we received two checks--one-half from
Mr. Honeyman, and one-half from Mrs. Honeyman--for a total of 5 percent
of the sale price, and joyfully came home . . .
-
GARDNER:
- How wonderful.
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . and finally drew an easy breath.
-
GARDNER:
- At long last, after two years! [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, after two years. But I must say that Mr. Honeyman behaved in a very
graceful manner; that both parties—both Sotheby's and Mr. Honeyman—had
great confidence in me, and trusted me, and gave me a considerably free
hand in conducting the negotiations. And also Mr. Honeyman wrote a
letter, finally, to Peter Wilson expressing his satisfaction in the way
that I handled it as negotiator; and the way that Richard Tse, who was
in charge of the packing and shipping, handled it; and in the way that
John Collins, their representative, and I arrived at an agreement which
evened out all shortages and left the deal completely free to be
concluded.
-
GARDNER:
- Sotheby's will have this up for sale, then, within the next two years, I
assume.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Sotheby's will have started to catalog the books. There will be, they
told me, a total of nine sales, and they've asked me to do the foreword
to the first catalog,
-
GARDNER:
- So the connection doesn't stop. [laughter] Now what's going to happen
when . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . and when the books come up for sale . . .
-
GARDNER:
- . . . right, and collectors come to you . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . .I'm going to be there bidding for some of my customers as well as
myself, because I know more about the books in that collection than any
other single person.
-
GARDNER:
- That's wonderful.
-
ZEITLIN:
- So, it hasn't stopped yet.
1.27. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE ONE
(September 21, 1978)
-
GARDNER:
- Okay, you said first of all you'd like to tell me a detective story.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, this is something that happened within the past couple of months,
and I think it is especially interesting because it illustrates the
advantage of having been in business a long time and having a wide range
of contacts. I think it must have been a month ago, on a Tuesday
morning, as well as I can recollect. Glen Dawson called me and said,
"There's a man in here with two books that are very unusual and in your
line, and I thought I ought to ask you about them. One of them is a
first edition of Copernicus 's De Revolutionibus,
1543, and the other is a first edition of Galileo's Siderius Nuncius, 1610." I said, "It's very unusual for two
books of such rarity and importance to come up for sale at the same
time. What does he want to do about them?" Glen said, "He's not sure he
wants to sell them. He'd like to just see if I can give him an idea of
value." And I said, "You think you can hold him there until I get over?"
He said, "No. But," he said, "I'll try and urge him to come over and see
you." I said, "Find out what you can from him, where he got them and so
on, if he'll tell you." After a while. Glen called back and said that he
had not been able to get the man to wait; he also hadn't been able to
get the man to say he'd come to see me. But he said the man had
mentioned a lawyer in Providence, Rhode Island, and that the books had
come from the estate of a relative in Providence. I said, "That's very
interesting." He told Glen that he had been in the merchant marines and
that he was staying somewhere near Riverside. And I said, "Well, that is
even more interesting." When Glen hung up, I said, "There's only one
place in Providence that those books could have come from, and that is
the library of a man by the name of Albert Lownes," who's a very old
man, somewhere past eighty-five. He had started collecting books on the
history of science very early, far ahead of most of the other
collectors, and had built a great collection. I had been to see his
library some ten years ago. He was a very courteous, very quiet, modest
man, who lived in an old wooden house in Providence. He was a very
important officer with one of the insurance companies there. I called up
Thomas M. Adams, who is the librarian of the John Carter Brown Library
at Providence, and said, "Tom, what has happened to Albert Lownes?" He
said, "He's a very sick man, and he's now in the hospital." I said,
"There's a man out here offering two books that he says came from
Providence. I think you ought to go over to Lownes's house, if you can
get in, and find out if these books are there." He said, "Well, his
daughter is living there, so I'm sure I can get in." I knew that Lownes
had willed his books to Brown University; among them, a first edition of
Audubon's Birds and a great many other important
science classics. Tom went over and had a look, then called back and
said, "We found an empty place on the shelf where the Copernicus should
be, but we don't know exactly where the Galileo might have been." I
said, "Well, I know that Lownes bought a very special copy some years
ago from John Fleming and paid a record price for it. And I think it was
a presentation copy." And he said, "We can't find the book. Albert is in
too bad shape for us to talk to him." So I said, "I'll look into this
further." Then I called Glen again, and I said, "What did the man say
his name was?" And he said, "Basche." Also he said he had sold some
books to Jeremy Norman. So I called Jeremy and said, "There's a man
around here who's been trying to sell a Copernicus and a Galileo, and I
understand he's sold you some books and offered you some others." And he
said yes, and he said, "I bought a Camerarius De Sexu
Plantarum from him." I said, "There are only two people in the
United States who have a Camerarius: one of them is Bern Dibner, and the
other is Albert Lownes." And I said, "Did it occur to you that this man
might be selling you some books from the Albert Lownes library?" He
said, "No. Why do you think that?" I said, "Well, he refers to a lawyer
in Providence." Jeremy said, "Yes, he gave me the lav/yer ' s name for
reference, but I didn't think I needed to call." He also said, "I bought
the Camerarius from him." I said, "Didn't you buy something else?" He
said, "Yes, I bought a couple of other things." So I called Tom Adams in
Providence again, and I said, "Tom, I think you've got an FBI case,
because the value of the books is over $5,000 and they have crossed
state lines." He said, "We've already alerted the police and the
insurance company." And I said, "Well, you ought to see if they won't
bring the FBI into it." Within a couple of hours I got a call from a
local FBI man asking me for information, and I referred him to Glen
Dawson, and Glen gave them the information that he had. Then I referred
them to Jeremy Norman. They called him, and by Friday they had the man
in custody. He had taken twelve books in all.
-
GARDNER:
- How did he take them?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He was a male nurse, and he had been working at Albert Lownes 's house.
He had said, "Mr. Lownes, tell me about your books." Lownes loved to
talk, and this was an attentive young man, so he told him about his
books. And the nurse said, "Mr. Lownes, which are the most valuable
books in your library?" And Mr. Lownes told him. Of course, the Audubons
were too big to carry away, but there were these other smaller books,
and apparently when Lownes went to the hospital, this man removed a
total of twelve books. So it seemed that Jeremy was out about $4,500
dollars. The man was in custody here in Los Angeles. They evidently
moved very quickly through the courts, because last week I had a call
from the FBI saying that the man had been tried, and he had pleaded
guilty, but they had recovered only eleven of the twelve books; the
other book they hadn't been able to identify--they didn't know exactly
what he took. They couldn't find out from Mr. Lownes because he's still
very ill. And the thief wouldn't tell, because sentence had yet to be
passed, and they assumed that what he was doing was bargaining for a
reduced sentence if he revealed the title of the missing one and where
it was. Following this, the FBI telephoned and said they would come down
and have me pack the books for shipping and sending them by air. About
three days ago the local FBI man called up and [asked if he thought]
that airmail is safe for these valuable books-- asked Josephine; I
wasn't there. She didn't know what had gone on before, and she said she
would hardly send anything that valuable by airmail. The man said he
really thought these books deserved a courier, and so he thought it
would be nice to fly to Boston, where he had friends. And according to
the last I heard, he was going to take them there himself and deliver
them to the people from Providence.
-
GARDNER:
- But just eleven.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Just eleven. The FBI was hoping they might get the information out of
this man, where the twelfth book was. And now I understand that the rest
of the books are being removed from Mr. Lownes's house and are going
over to Brown University Library. I have had a phone call from Stuart C.
Sherman, who is the librarian there, concerning it. They are very
pleased. So I seem not only to have helped them recover these books but
also to have precipitated their being placed in safety in the library.
Another interesting detail is that I told the story, as far as it had
gone, a couple of weeks ago to Roger Stoddard at the Houghton Library at
Harvard, and he said, "That's very interesting." It seemed this list of
twelve books had been offered to Goodspeed's, and among them there was
this Camerarius. Roger said he was really very hopeful that they were
going to get this book, which is one of the foremost rarities in the
history of science.
-
GARDNER:
- How many copies are there altogether, do you know?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I would say less than ten. I don't think anybody has yet thought of
going to Goodspeed's and asking them-- I've already passed this on to
the FBI—what the list of twelve books were, because if they did, they
might find out what the missing book is. I think I will make another
phone call tomorrow
-
GARDNER:
- Fascinating. Jake Zeitlin, FBI agent.
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, I wasn't an FBI agent. The FBI was complimentary to me. They said
that one of the hardest problems in the case of stolen books or jewelry
or anything of this sort was to get the trade to cooperate. Here, for
instance, was a case where it was necessary for me to tell them what I
knew about Jeremy Norman's being involved. And Jeremy Norman took a
loss, of course, because he had bought this stolen property, and they
had reclaimed it, and he had no recourse. In general, the trade is
always afraid they'll open up other cans of worms, and there's hardly an
important rare book in the world that hasn't been stolen at some time in
its history, whether it's recently or 500 years ago. The FBI men were
most complimentary to me for having told them about other people in the
trade and giving them other clues.
-
GARDNER:
- Is this the first time you've broken a case that way?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No. I'm trying to think—my memory isn't very good tonight. I have on one
or two other occasions--I can't pinpoint them right now--been involved
in the discovery. . . . There was a young man who came in to see me and
offered me one book in a Doves binding. It had cost marks written in
which looked like Harry Levinson's. I called Harry, and I asked the
young man to wait. Harry came over, and he said, "Oh, yes, these are my
books, and this young man has been coming in and out of my shop." And he
said to him, "Where do you live?" The young man told him, and Harry
said, "We're going to drive right over there." [laughter] Harry
proceeded to drive the man over to his house. When they arrived, the man
said, "I can't let you in until I've talked to my wife, because she's
been sleeping here. Would you allow me to talk to her before you go in?"
Harry said, "Not unless I come in with you." Harry started to push his
way into the house, and I said, "Harry, you'd better not do this,
because you will be making a forcible entry of his house. If you do
that, you'll get yourself into trouble." So he abstained from doing
that, but the young man then came back and let him in, and Harry found a
number of other books which he claimed. I didn't go in--I decided that
it was not wise for me to go in there—but Harry recovered quite a few
things. And then the next morning this boy's parents' lawyer called up
and threatened to sue Harry.
-
GARDNER:
- For what?
-
ZEITLIN:
- For forcible entry and for—they had a lot of charges against him. You
see, Harry wasn't satisfied to turn the job over to the police, who know
what their legal rights are and could have proceeded legally by getting
a search warrant. Before he was through, Harry was very glad to be just
let off the hook by the parents. They didn't want the boy prosecuted,
and Harry didn't want a lawsuit on his hands. But you have to be very
careful when you find that something has been stolen from you. If a man
has it on his person while he's in the place, you cannot take it away
from him. You have to follow him out of the place and take it from him,
because if you take it from him on the place, he can claim that all he
was doing was keeping it on his person until he could pay you for it.
And of course, he can charge you for having publicly humiliated him,
with creating a confrontation, false accusation, and so on. You have a
very difficult time. And the thing is that these people all know their
rights. I don't remember right now other cases, but I have been involved
in several where there was a theft. The problem, as I said, is if you
know a man has stolen something of yours and he has it in his
possession, you [then] have a serious problem if you accuse him and
threaten him with police, and he challenges you; also you may have a
false-arrest suit on your hands.
-
GARDNER:
- Is it hard to establish proof of. . . ?
-
ZEITLIN:
- It's very hard to establish proof, and the district attorney's office is
not very cooperative. And in spite of the fact that we did a very
thorough workup on a case where we had a theft of about forty books from
us that we discovered this past year, the district attorney's office did
not feel that they had a very strong case. The man did not come up for
arraignment; he skipped bail. Later he did return; was tried and
sentenced.
-
GARDNER:
- You did figure out who—an alleged suspect, or however you put in in
legalese.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, these are not the very expensive books we lost. These we've never
recovered. These were a group of about forty books which were offered to
Bennett and Marshall. And Danny Geiss called up and said, "There's a man
over here in a Hollywood Boulevard apartment that's got a group of books
that look like they came out of your place. What's more, his
descriptions all look like your descriptions ."
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, you mean he left the descriptions in those volumes?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He inked out our price and put the equivalent price in French francs,
thinking that that would be a way of getting the best value for them.
Danny said to this man, "Look, I can't make you a fair offer without
doing a little research. Do you mind if I make some notes?" He wrote
down the titles and descriptions of the books and then called us when he
got back to the place. Then we went through our files and we found our
descriptions and the date when we had last seen them. Then I got ahold
of the police. It took me a full day to get them into action, but they
finally did go over. At first they were going to do a stakeout, but
finally they just went right up to the door and knocked and said, "May
we come into your place? We're looking for some property," and he said,
"All right." They came in and found our books on the living room table.
Then under a mattress they found all of our descriptions of the books.
They brought the man in and booked him. They wouldn't let me see him
because they felt that might prejudice his rights. I went over the books
themselves and identified them as books which I knew we had owned. The
man wasn't even held for twenty-four hours. They just took him right
before the desk sergeant, I guess, who set bail at $2,500, and the man
reached into his wallet and took out twenty-five $100 bills and gave
them to the police. All the police could do was hold the books. He
finally didn't appear for arraignment. His attorney called up and said
that he'd been so nervous he couldn't come, but if they would not issue
a warrant for him on bail-skipping, the attorney would bring him in
within a week. A week passed and the man didn't come in, and by that
time he'd gotten all of his affairs together and was able to skip the
country. Now, this man had a police record of two similar offenses, and
yet, when one of us went down to the city hall to attend the arraignment
and appear as a witness and identify the books (we had a lot of
cooperation from the sergeant of detectives at Hollywood), the district
attorney's man walked in five minutes before the hearing was scheduled,
looked at our evidence, and said, "I don't think we're going to be able
to hold the man." He came back, was arraigned and held for trial. I was
never advised of the outcome. We do have the books back, and we've sold
some of them. There was a total of over $7,000 worth of books in that
lot.
-
GARDNER:
- But those expensive ones you never recovered?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Never recovered. I have no clue, but I suspect the man—he had some
connection with an airline, he may have been a steward or something, or
his wife may have been a stewardess, or his girlfriend. In any event,
the more expensive books weren't there.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, okay, that puts you on one side of the law. I thought perhaps you
could recall for us some of the times that you were on the other side.
You've always been active in the fight against censorship, and there are
two or three cases I know of, and I thought I'd ask you to think of the
important ones to you and then other ones as they come to your memory.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I've really not directly been involved in many cases. I remember
that when the [Memoirs of ] Hecate County case came up I was not directly consulted, but I
was asked if I knew of some respectable-looking lady who would appear as
a witness for the defense, to testify whether Hecate
County was a book containing obscenities and was an indecent
book. And I knew a very charming, very presentable lady; white-haired,
dignified. Her name was Margarete Clark, and she'd been a member of the
school board and active in a number of political campaigns, very
fine-looking woman with a great dignity. . . . And so Hecate County lost. Now, the case I was involved in was called
Zeitlin , Ferguson v. Arnebergh . [Roger] Arnebergh was the city
attorney of Los Angeles. This was a case in which I was not the
defendant; I was the plaintiff. I was in no jeopardy, and there isn't
any special credit to me, but what Ferguson and I sued for was: I for
the right to sell, and he for the right to buy this book.
-
GARDNER:
- Who is Ferguson?
-
ZEITLIN:
- He taught English at L.A. State College. And what we based our suit on
was the fact that in San Diego County a man had been acquitted for
selling Tropic of Cancer, and then in Los Angeles
he had been found guilty of selling Tropic of
Cancer. Here was a case where there was a conflict which we felt
should be brought before the state supreme court, so we carried it from
the municipal court to the superior court, from the superior court to
appellate court, and finally up to the state supreme court. And we got a
very wonderful judgment throwing out the conviction, or rather declaring
that. . . Well, what it did was, it effectively brought to an end all
the prosecutions on grounds of obscenity in this state. The decision was
written by Justice [Mathew] Tobriner, and it was a magnificent decision,
one which I wish could be reprinted because I don't think there's ever
been a finer statement with regard to freedom of the press, freedom of
speech, and freedom of the right to communicate ideas. Well, Arnebergh
was the city attorney, and later I had occasion to realize what the
consequences could be for being the plaintiff in the case. But in the
meantime, he lost the case; and, as I say, this effectively brought to
the end any prosecutions on the same basis as Tropic
of Cancer.
-
GARDNER:
- About what period would this have been--what year? Do you remember?
-
ZEITLIN:
- I think it was 1955. In any event, the case of Zeitlin v. Arnebergh is
in the law books, and it is a landmark case in the history of the battle
against censorship. Although it isn't mentioned in the newest volume on
banned books, it is mentioned in several other anthologies and
bibliographies.
-
GARDNER:
- Weren't you involved in something with Connor Everts?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. That was much earlier. I was involved, but I made no court
appearance. Richard Sherwood, who is a member of the respectable firm of
O'Melveny and Myers, became the attorney for the defendant in this case.
Connor Everts had exhibited some drawings in a gallery on La Cienega
Boulevard which were regarded as being obscene. They evidently were
rather explicit drawings of the pudenda of women and the sexual organs
of men, and at that time the district attorney's office had a man
attached to it--I think his name was Casey--who was a deputy specially
placed in the district attorney's office for ferreting out violations of
what were considered the decency laws. Dick Sherwood asked me if I could
provide him with any examples of explicit sexual art by great masters,
and it happened that I had an etching of Rembrandt's Joseph and Potiphar 's Wife, and so I lent it to him to
present as evidence, in order to sustain the argument that the subject
matter of great artists had not avoided the explicit illustration of the
sexual organs of people. This was one of the telling exhibitions. Connor
Everts was acquitted, I think, and that case went down in the records as
one of the important defenses of freedom of expression in art. But I was
not a witness.
-
GARDNER:
- Were there any other cases you can think of?
-
ZEITLIN:
- None that I was associated with.
-
GARDNER:
- You've always been close to the Los Angeles art community, but more so,
say, through the first thirty years.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, that's true. I was giving original exhibitions to artists because
there were very few galleries, and artists had few opportunities to
exhibit their works. The County Museum was not showing much in the way
of contemporary art, and there were only a handful of galleries around,
and many of those were so far up on the scale that they didn't want to
be bothering with the small, local artists, the beginners in the field.
So I had exhibitions like Edward Weston's first photography exhibition;
Peter Krasnow, exhibition of lithographs. There was a very fine woman
artist by the name of Grace Clements; a man by the name of Anders
Aldrin, who was a distinguished artist; and Fred Sexton, who had great
promise. I showed drawings by S. MacDonald-Wright . There was a very
considerable group of artists, some of whom became well recognized, that
I showed first at my place. I did sell some watercolors, some of the
California watercolors group—of people like Millard Sheets and Tom Craig
and Phil Paradise, Milfred Zornes, Jim Patric, Phyllis Shields, and
Arthur Millier—some of whom were forgotten and may never be resurrected,
others who are commencing to be rediscovered. One of the people that I'm
most proud of having exhibited was Paul Landacre, whose prints I showed
for the first time in any gallery, and who did illustrations for some of
my announcements. In time he became well known as an illustrator of
books by Donald Culross Peattie and did a number of illustrations for
the publications of the Limited Editions Club.
-
GARDNER:
- When did you begin to drift away from the local art scene?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I did show other artists a long time ago. I showed people like
Kathe Kollwitz in 1937.
-
GARDNER:
- We talked about that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- And I had exhibitions of a good many of the English etchers of the time:
John Austen, G.L. Brockhurst, Eric Gill, Muirhead Bone, who were all
from quite a distance. I had a sort of working arrangement with Weyhe
Gallery in New York, which was then managed by Carl Zigrosser, who
became a prominent authority on the history of the print in America. He
used to send me exhibitions of various artists. Rockwell Kent was one of
them. Then I had exhibitions of Orozco and Siqueiros, mostly of their
graphics. When I moved over here on La Cienega, my wall space commenced
to shrink as the book stock grew, and I had less and less exhibition
space. The other problem was that living artists commenced to crowd in
on me so much, demanding that I look at their portfolios, that they
occupied too much time. It interfered with my work, interfered with my
ability to tend to business. I had to finally announce my policy that I
was not exhibiting any living artists. This was unfortunate, in a way,
because it didn't give me the opportunity and didn't give the artists
who were deserving of attention the opportunity to exhibit. But it was
also fortunate in that I didn't have a great many of the problems that
came along with the temperaments of some of the artists that I
exhibited, people who were often outstanding as artists but a little
loss than outstanding in terms of their sense of obligation.
-
GARDNER:
- It's ironic, in a way, that at the time you moved to La Cienega, La
Cienega was becoming the center of the Los Angeles art scene in some
ways.
-
ZEITLIN:
- At the time I moved here, in 1948, there weren't any galleries showing
contemporary art. That all came after I moved here.
-
GARDNER:
- But the point I'm trying to make is that at that point the galleries are
out here, and yet you're pulling away from the contemporary art scene.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, yes, of course it's always been my policy to pull away from
competition. If the competition got too strong, I left the field to them
and carved out another area. And I've always been able to discover new
areas, where the competition was less, into which I could go. That's
been true throughout the history of my bookselling and my art selling.
When everybody was selling abstract impressionism and the New York
School, I went back to selling some of the old fogies. I was having
exhibitions of people like Whistler and Forain and Durer and Rembrandt
because there was no competition; there were no dealers exhibiting these
things. In the late forties and early fifties, black-and-white graphics
had practically no market. There were very few outstanding collectors
around the country and a few very quiet amateurs who were collecting the
people they liked. Certain highspot etchings were bringing what then
seemed to be extremely high prices: in other words, Adam and Eve of Durer would bring a high price. Three Trees of Rembrandt would bring a high
price--or the Hundred Guilder print of
Rembrandt—but a lot of the other things were bringing very little money.
There was at that time a considerable interest in people like D.Y.
[David Young] Cameron. But the great drive was to buy Matisse and
Picasso and Cezanne and Chagall, and I wasn't handling them. Except for
an occasional rare graphic, I was not trying to cater to those kinds of
customers. I mostly sold the kind of art that went with books and that
appealed to the people who were collecting books or who were essentially
tradition minded; they looked to the past rather than the future.
-
GARDNER:
- What about dealers? Were there any art dealers you were particularly
friendly with, close to?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the great model for me in the field of graphics was a man by the
name of Irwin Firman, a very brilliant man, a man who had been an
outstanding chess player. At one time he had been a business
reorganizer. He decided to liberate himself from the pressures of
business and opened a little gallery out in Hollywood, on Sycamore
Street. Irwin Firman had the choicest prints of anybody of his day or
since in this part of the world. He had really first-class Whistlers,
firstclass Rembrandts, first-class Durers, and nobody since —and I'll
include myself—has ever had so fine a collection as he had. He had a
small clientele, overall, except for the people from out of town who
would come and buy from him. When he started to close out, he sold me
his reference books and some of his prints, but I was not perceptive
enough and I didn't have capital enough to buy the major prints that he
had in stock. I'm sure that nobody before him or since him has come near
Irwin Firman in the quality of the materials that he had. I knew him
quite well; we cooperated, and we were friendly. I also knew Earl
Stendahl, who was a delightful buccaneer, a very engaging man who'd been
a dining-car chef, who loved to cook, and who, when his business was
most successful on Wilshire Boulevard, used to start in and manufacture
candy every year before Christmas and take advance orders. I used to put
in orders for about 100 two-pound boxes of chocolate. They were very
good and made great Christinas gifts for my customers. In modern art
such as Picasso and Matisse, Frank Perls, who came here in the early
forties, was above all the outstanding dealers. He was also a man of
great integrity, unsparing in his hatred of fakers and charlatans.
1.28. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE ONE
(September 24, 1979)
-
GARDNER:
- As I mentioned to you, I have three topics that I'd like to discuss, in
no particular order. So let me start out and ask you to talk about the
museum that Bart Lytton was involved with, which you said was a motion
picture collection, since Mr. Mink has instructed me to inquire into
that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, that began with a man by the name of Mogens Scott Hansen, a very
charming Dane who came over here to Hollywood as the UNESCO
representative to the film industry, the idea being that he could get
the film industry to slant their productions in one way or another to
build up support for UNESCO and the United Nations; spread it around the
world where all the films were going. Scott Hansen was a very charming,
highly cultivated man. His wife [Elin] was as charming a woman; her
father [Karl Henriques] was the leading private banker of Denmark. Of
course, being the leading private banker of Denmark makes you about the
equal of some of our small-town bankers around here. But he was a
charming man, too, and an international figure, a man of great
understanding and tolerance and remarkably liberal. Their idea of a
progressive banker in Denmark would make him into a socialist here.
That's a digression, except that Scott Hansen had over the years been
very much interested--he was a film producer in Denmark, and he'd been
engaged in forming a collection of the history of the cinema before the
modern motion picture: everything from the itinerant traveler with a
magic lantern to the different devices which were used to create the
effect of moving figures. He had assembled a great collection of
praxiniscopes and magic lanterns, camera obscura and so on; it was one
of the finest that'd ever been formed. He'd spent many years at it.
Around 1945, he went back to Denmark, and he wrote to me that he'd
decided to sell this collection because he wanted to buy a place in the
country--they didn't have the money otherwise, and did I know of
someone. At that time Sol Lesser, who had also become a friend of Mogens
Scott Hansen's, was developing the Hollywood Motion Picture Museum. I
got in touch with Sol, and I said, "Scott Hansen wants to sell his
cinema collection, and it's almost a museum in itself. Wouldn't it be
great if you could join it to the Hollywood Motion Picture Museum that
you're promoting?" He said, "Yes, that's fine. Let me think it over, and
I'll get in touch with you." Sol Lesser is an unusual kind of man: if he
says something like that to you, he means it, and he will surely get in
touch with you. In a short while he called me, and he said, "Write a
letter to Bart Lytton, in Lytton Savings and Loan; tell him about the
collection, and tell him that I suggested that you get in touch with
him." Bart Lytton had come to Sol Lesser and said, "I want to do
something in connection with the museum, but I don't want to just make a
trifling gift. I want to do something important for which I can get the
benefits of publicity and credit for having done it." And he said,
"After all, I was a film writer, I'm interested in films, and I'd like
to help promote this museum." So Sol had called up Bart Lytton and said,
"Bart, you always said you wanted to do something special for the
museum; now, here's an opportunity." And Lytton said, "Well, fine, have
Zeitlin write me a letter giving the details and give me the poop on
it." I had an album which showed all the different pieces of equipment
and described the collection. It was very well prepared by Scott Hansen.
I sent it on to Lytton. Then I got a phone call from Lytton 's lawyer to
come over and talk to him. Lytton at that time had space in the lower
floor of his savings and loan at the corner of Crescent Heights and
Sunset Boulevard. He was setting up a kind of a cultural activity which
included exhibition by different artists around town, lectures, and
recitals. He had an auditorium. He had decided to link himself to the
cultural side of the community activities as a way of getting his bank
noticed and attracting a certain type of depositor. He had a very fine,
brilliant woman [Josine lanco-Starrels] who was running it, and he had a
publicity man by the name of Herb Klein--not the same Herb Klein that
was public relations man for . . .
-
GARDNER:
- . . . Nixon?
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . Nixon.
-
GARDNER:
- No, your friend Herb Klein.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Nor my friend Herb Klein.
-
GARDNER:
- Not that one, either? [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- No. He was another man by the name of Herb Klein, who was in charge of
public relations and particularly in charge of this sort of cultural
center that went with the bank. Bart Lytton's attorney called me in and
said, "Mr. Lytton will buy the collection." Then he gave me a written
contract which Lytton had signed and which I was to sign in which they
agreed to buy the collection for $45,000. I assumed that this was all
done with Sol Lesser 's knowledge and that it was going to the museum,
but after I signed it and I reported to Lesser, Sol said, "What do you
mean? This guy isn't buying this for the Hollywood museum. He's buying
this for his own private show over there at the Lytton Center." Lesser
was quite indignant about it. He had as his lawyer the most powerful
lawyer in town at that time, at least in the motion picture industry,
Mendel Silverberg. Sol came to me and said, "I want you to rescind that
contract. I want you to just notify Lytton that you will not deliver
those things to him on the basis that"--you see, I hadn't delivered them
yet; they were still in transit, and so I hadn't been paid—"on the basis
that he had misrepresented me. You can say that you were led to believe
that Lytton was buying this for the museum. Now it turns out he's buying
it in order to set up his own museum of the history of the cinema." Sol
Lesser also said, "I will give you an absolute warranty. I will sign a
contract agreeing to defend you against all suits or any demand for
damages that might come from Bart Lytton." I went to my lawyer, and my
lawyer, who was then Bob Kenny, and Mendel Silverberg worked out a
contract which was intended to protect me, and then I wrote a letter to
Bart Lytton notifying him that I was rescinding the contract, Bart
Lytton, of course, was indignant and threatened to sue me for breach of
contract and so on, and I simply didn't do anything. Sol said, "You
leave it to Silverberg and me." The collection was in transit.
Fortunately, it was directed to the Los Angeles County Museum, where it
was to be stored so that Mr. Lytton couldn't lay hands on it, couldn't
take possession. The museum people took possession because it was
directed to them, according to the forwarding papers, and then they went
into conference with Mr. Lytton. They got Mr. Lytton to agree that he
would give it to the motion picture museum. In the meantime, he would
have the right to exhibit it until the motion picture museum was built;
that is to say, he could set it up and install it in his establishment
and exploit it, and the motion picture museum was to get it, provided
they had a museum actually built and set up to function within five
years. After five years he was no longer obliged to give it to them if
they did not fulfill the plan. I paid off Scott Hansen. Bart Lytton then
set about working out a plan to wreck the motion picture museum. The
motion picture museum—through funds that Sol Lesser had been able to
accumulate in various ways, and through the funds that the county had
appropriated—had acquired land opposite the Hollywood Bowl. When the
properties were condemned, there was a big argument. One of the tenants
there refused to move. He was an ex-marine, He barricaded himself with
guns, and got a great lot of publicity. They finally evicted him, and
like so many of the things where eminent domain is invoked, to this day
nothing has been built on that spot. Bart Lytton worked very shrewdly.
He got together with Ernest Debs, who, I think, had learned various ways
to line his pocket without taking it out of the public till. And between
them they got into an arrangement with [William] Pereira. Pereira came
up with what he called the Pereira Plan for a museum to be built on the
ground which had now been acquired for the Hollywood museum. The Pereira
Plan was presented to the committee of the board of supervisors, was
found to be unacceptable, and the entire plan for the museum ...
-
GARDNER:
- . . . was scrapped.
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . was scrapped. Mr. Lytton got his way . . . insofar as he got to
retain the collection. But of course he didn't keep it for very long,
because Mr. Lytton, while a brilliant man, was also a megalomaniac and
had very poor discrimination when it came to matters of what was ethical
banking and what wasn't. The Lytton bank often had more funds than it
could properly lend out, and the practice of savings and loans and banks
who can't lend out their money directly under the conditions of banking
laws is for them to lend the money to other banks at a lower rate of
interest; other banks that need more money can borrow the money from
them for, say, 6 percent, whereas they're paying their depositors 5
[percent], so that they make a little money, while the funds are not
applied to more profitable loans. Mr. Lytton had several million dollars
at the time to deposit with other banks, and there wore other banks who
could use the funds; but whenever he lent money out to the other banks
he made a condition that they should make him personal loans for some of
his investments, so that if he lent them $2 million or $3 million
through the Lytton bank, they often would lend him in turn $100,000 or
$200,000, which he could use for making loans that would never pass the
bank examiners. He had friends who were in the quick-profit
jerry-building business and using federal financing. There were
structures which went up in Hollywood which purported to cost a million
dollars, and there was probably $300,000 of excess charges in there that
were fed back to the people who participated, the difference being what
were the inflated charges that were put into the mortgage that the
federal money had financed, and other things like that. The only trouble
is you couldn't—a bank couldn't lend that money to these kind of
promotions, so they had to go to private lenders, and in turn they paid
what then was a considerable rate of interest: 12 percent, whereas the
average rate of interest was 6 percent, so it would appear to be very
lucrative. In order to get these loans, these personal loans, so that he
could lend the money to his friends who were promoting these scams, Mr.
Lytton would have to put up his own stock in the Lytton Savings and
Loan, put that up as collateral for the money that was lent him. And
after a while the amount that was lent to him commenced to increase, and
some of these scams didn't work, and he didn't get his money back from
some of those promoters that he was involved with. And one day the banks
got together and discovered that between them Mr. Lytton owed an awful
lot of money, and they were holding his controlling stock. So they
closed down on him, took over his controlling stock, and took away his
voting powers in the Lytton Savings and Loan. And Mr. Lytton found
himself virtually out—certainly out of control—and a pensioner of the
banks. When that happened, the leading stockholder who took over the
Lytton Savings and Loan (they couldn't afford to let it go on the rocks,
because that would have been bad for the whole savings-and-loan
industry) was Glendale Savings and Loan, and apparently Glendale Savings
and Loan in turn was one of the many subsidiaries-- as far as I am
informed--of MCA. Jules Stein, Lou Wasserman, and MCA in turn owned
Universal. So Universal Pictures, without being required to bid
competitively against anyone else, was allowed to purchase the cinema
collection from the Lytton bank, and the cinema collection is now out in
Universal City; the idea being to create a motion picture museum someday
in the future.
-
GARDNER:
- And in the meantime, nothing?
-
ZEITLIN:
- In the meantime, nothing. The Scott Hansen collection is in storage, as
far as I know. I made several attempts to go to the officers at the
Glendale Savings and Loan, which had taken over Lytton, and buy the
collection. I told them I was prepared to bid competitively. I had been
asked to do this by Sol Lesser, who still wanted it to go, as it
originally was intended, to the Hollywood museum. But they ignored my
efforts and my approach, and sold it off for a token sum to Universal.
-
GARDNER:
- And there it is today.
-
ZEITLIN:
- There's where it is.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, that was a fascinating story, and I'm glad that Jim Mink prompted
me to inquire. I suppose that his personal interest is that he too would
like to see materials like that made showable.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, there was a considerable amount of books, and broadsides, and early
prints, and other literature in this collection. The library was quite
extensive having to do with the forerunners of the modern film.
-
GARDNER:
- To shift subjects now, subject number two (which was originally my
subject number one) : since this is your definitive biography, in a way,
I'd like to try to catch up with and get some idea of your family
structure—your wives in order, your children, and where did they come
from? Your first . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- That's a complicated ...
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, I know it's a complicated tree, but. . . . We talked about Edith
Motheral, right, your first wife?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Edith Motheral, yes. She was my first wife. I married her in Texas, in
1925. I sent her out here to Los Angeles to stay with some friends of
friends of mine.
-
GARDNER:
- The Calverts.
-
ZEITLIN:
- She stayed with the Calverts. I just got a letter last week from the
granddaughter of Mellie Calvert telling me she had died. I'm very sad
about that because Mellie was a lovely woman, a wonderfully kind person
and one of the kind of people that makes the world as good as it is. And
if there were enough of them, they'd make it much better. Edith came out
here in April of 1925. I hitchhiked out, and I arrived, as well as I
remember, in May. I was stunned. I had never been in a city where there
were such crowds. I was completely dazzled by the enormous numbers of
different kinds of people and how they streamed down the sidewalks and
across the streets. And I remember the first time I went downtown, Edith
had to take me by the hand and lead me across the street.
-
GARDNER:
- Edith was with child, wasn't she?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, she was--we were expecting a child, and I went to work. I hitchhiked
across from Texas . . .
-
GARDNER:
- Right. Well, that story's already been . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- . . . I've already told in a previous part of this all too long
narration. [laughter] And so we were very kindly allowed to stay in the
Calverts' house, but there was very little room: there wasn't enough
room for them. We started immediately to look for a place to stay, and
there were ads for people to work--they were supposed to be apartment
house managers, and they were to be given an apartment in exchange for
managing the apartment house.
-
GARDNER:
- When was the child born?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, the child wasn't born, but we didn't have any money. I went around
job hunting. I got a job first in Boos Brothers Cafeteria, and then I
got a job for E.L. Doheny's oil company as a gardener. And we answered
one of these ads, and we were given an apartment in the St. Catherine
Apartments over in Hollywood in exchange for which Edith slaved all day
long and did all the laundry, all the vacuuming, all the cleaning, was
kept busy from dawn till dark. What these people got in exchange for
their apartment was full-time slave labor. Well, she was expecting a
child, and we couldn't remain there very long. This woman didn't want a
baby in her apartment house. She didn't want a man who came home from
working spreading manure all day, and smelled like it and looked like
it, coming in through the front door, and I wouldn't go in the back
door. It was a matter of maintaining my ego with me. And so we finally
found a small apartment out near USC . I think it was Twenty-Eighth
Place.
-
GARDNER:
- And this is the place that burned down.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, and this is the place that caught fire and burned down. Edith and I
moved sometime afterwards to Landa Street, which is at the north end of
Echo Park Avenue. It was down a dirt road, and there was a little group
of redwood houses there. I don't know who owned them, some woman to whom
we paid something like thirty-five dollars a month, and it was a
charming place--lovely view of the river below and the railroad yards
and Forest Lawn and the Sierra Madre range. Mount Wilson. And we had
some nice neighbors.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, has your first child been born yet?
-
ZEITLIN:
- The first child was born in October of 1925. That was Judith Louon. The
name Louon seemed to have had a special attraction for Edith. And Judith
was my contribution. It seemed to me that a child with a name of Louon
would have a great handicap when it started to go to school. Something
like "Judith," which could be contracted to "Judy," would be a little
easier to cope with. And we remained on Landa Street.
-
GARDNER:
- Now, the next question is a tricky one. How long did the marriage last?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, she had a breakdown in the summer of 1927. I had been in the Barlow
Sanitarium, and I came home and was just getting started, and one night
I got a phone call. Edith had taken a job distributing samples of soap
for Procter and Gamble Company. They had teams of people who went around
and just knocked on people's doors and left samples of soap and cleaning
powder; this was a rather nice job. She traveled with this crew and made
us a little more money. In the meantime, I was recuperating, and so I
was staying home, taking care of the child. One night I got a phone call
from San Diego, from a Dr. Arthur Cecil, a man I never knew and never
met before, and he said, "I'm calling you from San Diego. Your wife was
at the Coronado Hotel, and she was obviously very much disturbed. So I
talked to her and I could see that she needed care. I have taken the
liberty of putting her into a sanitarium here until you can get down and
bring her home." I got a friend by the name of Charlie Dunning, who was
a friend of Carl Sandburg's, to drive me to the station. I took the
train and went to San Diego, and when I got there it was morning, and I
went to the Coronado Hotel and met this Dr. Arthur B. Cecil, a southern
gentleman who was a notable urological surgeon from Los Angeles. And he
arranged for me to go over to this sanitarium, and when I got there I
spoke to the attendant, and the attendant said, "I don't think you'd
better go in and talk to her. She'll only be more violent." And when I
went in the room she was very violent, and I had to leave the room.
Suddenly she was violent towards me, and I went back to Dr. Cecil, and I
called some friends in Los Angeles. The woman had been my secretary
during the time that I was trying to get my business started from my
home. She wasn't very well paid, but she needed a place to stay, so she
had stayed there in the house. Her first name was Henrietta; I can't
remember her last name. But she by that time had met a very close friend
of mine, a man who had been very good to me and a patron, bought books
from me and sort of kept me alive, a man by the name of Maurice Warshaw.
He was an accountant. Maurice Warshaw had a great reverence for
literature and everything having to do with books, and for some reason
he had taken me under his arm. So Maurice Warshaw and Henrietta came to
San Diego. A nurse was assigned to come with us and take care of Edith.
She was put under sedation and we drove back to Los Angeles, and Dr.
Arthur Cecil, who owed me nothing, paid the entire bill for the
sanitarium and for the nurse and for her care until we got down to Los
Angeles.
-
GARDNER:
- How marvelous.
-
ZEITLIN:
- When we got to Los Angeles, I had another group of friends, some people
by the name of Levine. She was a social worker, and she arranged, first
of all, for Edith to go to Dr. Aaron Rosanoff, who then was the leading
psychiatrist in Southern California. He talked to her, tried to evaluate
her, and recommended that she be put into a sanitarium. And he said that
she was a manic-depressive, that her condition was advanced, and that
there was no hope that she would ever recover, which was rather a blow
to me, with a child to look after, two and a half years old by then.
Edith did have periods when she was lucid and cooperative, but they
never lasted very long, and so we remained married until 1929. During
that time she would disappear at times; she would take up with people
who were as unstable as she was, mentally. It was a [pauses] hard time
for me.
-
GARDNER:
- It must have been incredibly difficult, with the new business and with
the baby.
-
ZEITLIN:
- I had no money. I was being helped by friends who bought books from me. I
was being helped by friends who lent me some money. But of course the
most disturbing thing was that she would disappear, that she was
rebellious, that she was hostile, that she couldn't look after the
child. She . . . she simply was not a disciplined person. And finally it
was she that decided that she would be better off if she could divorce
me. She got the notion that there was some magic in divorce, that if we
were divorced that she could somehow or another be liberated and go her
way in the world, and that I wouldn't stand between her as a sort of a
disciplinary figure. I was advised by the psychologist, Dr. Rosanoff, I
was advised by the social workers that I consulted, and by friends, this
was the thing that I should do. I didn't like the idea. I'd made such a
gesture of defiance to my family and the whole background out of which
I'd come by marrying her and going away and undertaking to start without
anything. It was an admission of failure. And I had no idea how I would
keep the thing going, but I did not like the idea of getting divorced.
Well, finally that's what happened. She became interested in weaving,
and she got to be a very good weaver. By that time I had a little shop
going, and I was able to give her some support, and she, I think, got
some WPA funds as well, so that she had a weaving shop out in San
Fernando Valley. She was doing weaving of fabrics. It was good therapy
for her, as long as it lasted. But as soon as she found herself with
other people of similar instability, they all sort of blew up. The first
thing, they became so infatuated with each other--that they were the
most wonderful people in the world, and as long as that lasted, it was
fine. And then, of course, they fell out, and it was a crash, a mental
crash, and everything else. I continued to provide her with as much
money as I could, and to sort of step in when there were crises. I had
taken a house in the Echo Park Avenue area near Elysian Park. I hired a
housekeeper, and I kept the little girl at home with me. I had a
neighbor by the name of Hester Scott, and she had a son a little bit
older than my little girl. And so we had this duplex house, and we were
able to trade off on babysitting, we were able to entertain mutually,
and we were very good friends. We were enamored, to a degree. But I
certainly had no idea of becoming involved with her, or marrying her. I
had a feeling that this was not the kind of person I wanted to marry. I
had a number of other women friends, and the one that I really was very
much attached to, devoted to, was a young woman much younger than me,
Marjorie Rosenfeld, who had a fine family; her mother was a beautifully
groomed woman who entertained and had a good home. They used to invite
me there a great deal. It was sort of a second home. I was always free
to come and have dinner. They had many parties and so on. And the one
evening Marjorie 's brother Pete Rosenfeld asked me if I would pick up a
young lady by the name of Jean Weyl—this was approximately 1931 or
'32—and bring her to a party at their house one evening. Jean Weyl's
father was a superior-court judge. Her father was of a San Francisco
Jewish family but not very much identified as a Jew. Her mother was of
French origin. She'd been a Catholic, but. . . .
1.29. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE TWO
(September 24, 1979)
-
GARDNER:
- Continue the story of Jean Weyl and her mother.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Her mother's maiden name was Moisant, and the Moisants were a very
spectacular family who had been in the ship-channeling business in San
Francisco. One of the brothers was John Moisant, who was a pioneer
aviator and who crashed in New Orleans; Moisant Field in New Orleans is
named after him. One of the sisters was Matilda Moisant, who was the
first licensed woman flier in this country, although she yielded number
one to a woman by the name of [Harriett] Quimby, because Quimby wanted
to make a profession of flying and wanted this special prestige mark.
The Moisants were very well off. Matilda Moisant had barnstormed in this
country and in Mexico. As early as 1912, 1913, 1914, the Moisants had a
flying school on Long Island where they taught people to fly airplanes.
It was the first flying school, I think, in the United States. Then the
Moisant brothers had gone down to Central America, to San Salvador, had
acquired coffee fincas and become very large landowners, and had become
part of the ruling junta of San Salvador. So this was Jean Weyl's
family. She was little, she was sparkling, she had a great deal of
physical charm, and I was quite infatuated with her. And I thought,
well, this is a young woman with good background, her father's a judge;
she has a stable home. I like her, she seems to like me, and it's time I
stopped trying to live alone, bring up my child without a mother. We got
married. We were married by Rabbi [Max] Dubin at the Wilshire Temple.
Then we got into my car, we drove down to Mission San Luis Rey. As we
walked through the mission just as it was getting dark, she burst into
tears and told me that she didn't really want to get married. She hated
the whole idea; she wasn't ready for it.
-
GARDNER:
- Oh, Lord! How old was she at this time?
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I suppose . . . well, I was about thirtyone; I think she was about
twenty-six. And that's the way that marriage began. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- I take it from the way you say that, that things didn't get better.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I was determined that it was going to work out. The Depression was
on. Her family was struck by it very hard. Her father by then no longer
had a judgeship; had run for re-election and lost, and entered into the
practice of law. He and his wife were separated. He moved out. Her two
brothers were just getting out of school and college. They were
undergoing hardship. The two aunts really felt that she had married
beneath her. I had this bookshop going which was just barely creaking
along. but I was able to keep the house going to provide the turkey for
the family Christmas dinner, and we had a child, David, a very sweet
boy. We moved up to a house on Altivo Way, which is also at the north
end of Echo Park Avenue, a house hanging off the cliff, partly, just
below the house where Neal Harlow and Marian Harlow live right now.
Marian Harlow's father owned the house, and he was very friendly and
sympathetic, and if my rent got to be a couple of months past due, he
never threatened to evict me.
-
GARDNER:
- Why can't I find landlords like that? [laughter]
-
ZEITLIN:
- I don't know. The times are different. There's not a depression. And a
man who paid his rent once every three months was better than a man who
didn't pay any rent at all. [laughter] But his name was Gardner, as I
remember, and this was one of the houses they had lived in. The house up
on the top of the hill was the house that he had lived in, but then he'd
moved out to Orange County and rented out the house. So Jean and I lived
there until about 1935, when we moved over to Waverly Drive. It was not
very far [from] near where Alvarado starts to drop off into Glendale,
overlooking Riverside Drive again but further west. We lived there until
1937. My daughter Judy, and David, who was Jean's son, lived there
together with us, but all along she was dissatisfied. She was
discontent. I was a struggling, small merchant, and I wasn't showing
promises of making a fortune or being able to provide her with the kind
of life--what she felt she should have. And she was immensely jealous;
she was temperamental. She could be very charming. She was attractive to
men; other men made her all kinds of attractive promises, as long as she
was married. Finally, in 1937, I went off on a trip around the country.
I went to Texas, to Louisiana, then to New Mexico and visited Frieda
Lawrence and met Aldous Huxley, and when I came back Jean informed me
that she was getting a divorce.
-
GARDNER:
- So at this point you were 0-for-two, and a year later your home run came
into your life, right?
-
ZEITLIN:
- No, I met Josephine in the summer of 1937, before I left on this trip.
However, I had no intention of becoming involved with her. I was very
much attracted- I felt that she had the qualities that I'd always wanted
in a woman--but I had also made up my mind that I was married. I'd
failed once, and I wasn't going to let anything bring about a
dissolution of a second marriage. I was going to stay with it no matter
what. But when I got back from my trip, Jean had in the meantime made
her own plans and decided that she wanted a divorce.
-
GARDNER:
- Fate plays a strange hand.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well ...
-
GARDNER:
- As a result, you've now been married to Josephine for over forty years.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, we didn't get married right away. I rented a house separately and
moved into it, overlooking Silver Lake. And Josephine would come up
there and visit me on weekends, and we got to be closer and closer. A
friend of ours--Katy. . . ? i can't remember it. She was a designer and
a sculptress and a little, perky woman, wonderful spirit, and she had a
husband, Charles, who was not very much. He couldn't keep a job; she was
the one who was the person. She was going to have a baby, and they had
no house. So Josephine and I rented a house, which we occupied jointly
with them, so that they could have a place to live. And that went along
fine until some mutual friends of ours said, "This won't do. You and
Josephine can't go on living together. It's going to alienate a lot of
people that you need, your customers, friends and so on—people that your
place in the community depends on." Especially Remsen Bird, who was the
president of Occidental College then, counseled me. Josephine moved into
a separate apartment, and I moved into the bookshop, which by then was
over on Carondelet Street. We had an apartment upstairs over the
bookshop, and I lived there. Josephine would come over evenings and
prepare meals, and she had a job meantime with the Haines Foundation. It
was not until October 28, 1939 that we were finally able to get married.
One of the reasons for that is that Jean had thought things over in the
meantime and decided she really didn't mean it, that she didn't want to
be divorced. But things had gone too far, and I couldn't turn back. And
I certainly couldn't ask Josephine to step out after the support she'd
given, and I'd had a taste of what the good life could be. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Forty years next month! You'll celebrate it in London.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes.
-
GARDNER:
- So, two children by your final marriage.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Josephine and I had a son, Joel, who's now thirty-seven years old; and
then two years later we had a daughter, Adriana. And from the time I met
Josephine on, my life has been very content. I've been a very contented
man, and life has been much more peaceful than I ever dreamed it could
be.
-
GARDNER:
- Right. So wonderful. I would like to ask you to say a few words about
your children. I know about a couple of them. What is Judy doing now? I
met her at the "Diamond for Jake."
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. Well, Judy lives in Laurel Canyon. She has for many years had an
acting bug. She's gone to a number of acting classes; she's taken a lot
of schooling; she's really dedicated to it. And I must say that when
I've seen her perform I've been astonished at how she simply is
transformed into the part she plays. I don't think she will ever be a
great actress, and I don't think she thinks so, but it's what she wants
to do, so she won't take any other jobs. She's now a member of the
Screen Actors Guild. She's a member of AFTRA. She manages to get several
days of acting a month. I don't know—she's a grandmother. She has a
house she rents out. She lives in another house on the property. With my
occasional help, she's able to live. And on top of that, she is a very
good person. There's no malice in her. I've never heard her say a
resentful thing about anyone. She's never said a resentful thing about
either of the husbands she was married to (she's been married twice, but
she had both of her children by her first marriage) . And when someone
else is in trouble, when her younger sister was ill for a while, she
just dedicated herself completely to being supportive, to looking after
her. Whatever lack of practical success that she may have is certainly
outweighed by her wonderful human qualities, her sweetness. So I find
myself very pleased with her, all in all.
-
GARDNER:
- David is next. David has a reputation of his own around town as a
guitarist and guitar teacher.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, David has always been a very lovable person. When he was quite
young he was interested in music, and he used to drive Josephine
mad--with his drums, with his trumpets, with all the instruments he
could master. And he seemed to have a very quick grasp of any kind of a
musical instrument—and so far as that's concerned, any kind of mechanism
as well. He's very good at taking apart and reassembling complicated
things like clockwork, and building motors and fishing reels and things
like that. When he was quite young, I had a visitor, a man by the name
of Sam Eskin, who came to see me because I had collected a number of
folk songs. And from time to time I would be looked up by people like
John Lomax and Leadbelly and other people who were interested in songs
and got the idea that I had some that they hadn't picked up before. Carl
Sandburg had taken some of the songs I knew and put them in The American Songbag. This man Eskin, who had
been quite a successful engineer with the United Parcel company, had set
out to be a folk-song gypsy around the country, and traveled with his
van and recording equipment. And he would come to our house and play the
guitar and also encourage me to sing songs which he would record. I had
a set of [Thomas] Percy's Reliques, a collection
of ballads that Bishop Percy had collected, and this was an especially
good set because the footnotes and the annotations were more extensive
than the text itself. He wanted the set and said he'd like to buy it,
and I said, "Well, instead of buying it, why don't you find me a
guitar?" So he went to a hock shop and found an early Martin, a
pre-Civil War Martin with a lovely tone, and he traded it to me for this
set of Percy's Reliques. Of course, he then set
out to try to teach me, and I discovered that I cannot play the guitar;
I cannot coordinate two hands, and I cannot keep time, and I cannot stay
on key. Otherwise . . . [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- Other than that . . .
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, I'm a good musician. But the legend still persists—among people
that I met forty, fifty years ago —that I used to play the guitar and
sing folk songs.
-
GARDNER:
- Wilbur Smith tells that.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes. Well, I never played the guitar. I only clapped my hands. I could
keep time by patting my hands. And yet there are people who will swear
that I used to play the guitar, and I can't contradict them. It's no
use. They're eyewitnesses, and you know how reliable they are. But David
took this guitar and started to play around with it. My friend Sam Eskin
showed him a few things about it, and he quickly picked it up, started
to play it. And then I sent him to a Mexican guitar teacher here in town
by the name of Ylloriaga. I've been told since that Ylloriaga was the
worst possible teacher I could have sent him to, [laughter] but I didn't
know any better; and, you know, David, while he admits that the method
was terrible, learned a great deal about playing the guitar, about
classical guitar. From then on he got engagements to play for parties,
play at coffee houses, and in some of the small Sunset [Boulevard] night
clubs, and then he started teaching. And he's an excellent teacher.
Really, he's a good performer for small groups, but he has no ambition
to be a performer, He loves teaching, and he's taught hundreds of young
people around town who remember him, who are very fond of him, and he's
fond of them.
-
GARDNER:
- He's been associated with McCabe's for years.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, he's been with McCabe's for years, and he earns a living that way.
He's married, and now he has a little son,: Benjamin, two years old, and
they're about to have another.
-
GARDNER:
- Move on to Joel, next. I have a particular affinity for Joel since he
has the same name and same birth year as I do.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Yes, well, Joel is a very warm, easy person. He was a golden child. He
had golden hair and he was slim and self-assured, and he was lovable
from the very beginning. I think he got a great many of his equable
qualities from his mother. And I think as he grew he just seemed to do
things the right way. He never excelled in any of the sports: he played
on the basketball teams and so on, but he never was a very good
basketball player. He quickly picked up games which required brains. He
liked playing chess. He was not a chess prodigy, but he got to be a
pretty good chess player. And he was an attractive person. He was a
leader among his friends in school. He gave us very little trouble; he
was never a problem child. And he went through high school with a pretty
high level of achievement. He went to UCLA; he majored in mathematics.
He got his degree, doctorate. It's all seemed to come in natural order.
Now he is grown up, married. He was married once before, to a
high-school sweetheart, a girl that was the daughter of friends of ours,
Gregory Ain, the architect--didn' t work. They were divorced after a
very short while—I think it was a year or so, they were divorced. She
felt that she had married too soon. They were both nineteen; it was too
young for them to get married. It was a blow to him—I think it unsettled
him to some degree—but he never lacked for girlfriends, and he
recovered, and he ultimately met Ann, his present wife, They lived
together for quite a while, then got married several years ago. He'd
discovered that he really isn't a research mathematician, but he loves
teaching. He does it well. He is a responsible person. He seems to be
very active in taking his share of the duties that go with departmental
activities in the school itself, at Northridge, and I understand that he
gets on well. People think well of him. And he lives a good life. And
what's more, he's very good to me. [laughter]
-
GARDNER:
- That's wonderful. I remember one evening that we sat, and the two of you
exchanged commentaries on the history of science. And I found that
fascinating that you, with your interest in history of science, should
have spawned one scientist. It seems reasonable.
-
ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think I stimulated some of it in him. I wish I'd been able to
stimulate more, because I think if he had specialized in the history of
science along with his teaching mathematics he might have developed a
very useful specialty that would have served him well in his academic
career. But then, it's not what I like and what I want that's important.
I have had to learn that my children must find their own way of life and
live it as best they can.
-
GARDNER:
- Well, that brings us then to your fourth child, Adriana.
-
ZEITLIN:
- My fourth child, Adriana.
-
GARDNER:
- Your next-door neighbor.
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ZEITLIN:
- My fourth child, Adriana, was always a very volatile child, and very
self-assertive. She was, I think, rather obsessive. When she was quite
small, she dressed in older people's clothes; she tried to appear beyond
her age. And she was, I think, competitive with her brother. I don't
think Josephine or I ever told Joel or Adriana that we expected them to
excel, but I think it got across to them. [laughter] She was a leader in
high school, did very well. But then when she went off to the University
of California at Santa Barbara, she discovered in her first year that
there's quite a difference when you're on your own and when you have to
make your way through the educational maze on the basis of your own
resources. I don't think she was prepared for it. So she left for a
while, and she came back here, had rather a hard time. She simply had to
take time out. And she was going with a young man that she'd met in high
school, a man obsessed with jogging and with athletics who's become a
sociologist of sports. She went back to school at UCLA and got her
bachelor's, and they were married and went to Santa Barbara, where they
had two children and he got his bachelor's and doctorate—he got his
bachelor's at UCLA, got his doctorate at Santa Barbara, in sociology.
And they moved back down here. Then they discovered some strong
incompatibilities. It's hard to be judgmental because we are of course
partial to our own child. But finally, for reasons which I think were
very good, she decided they could no longer live together, and they are
now divorced. She has the two children and is very happy and in a very
good mental state. She comes into our shop, she helps Josephine with her
part of the business, and she also substitutes as a bookkeeper. And she
is a very quick learner. She has sharp intuitions. I think her judgment
of people is remarkably good, and her intelligence must be of a very
high level because she can master anything she undertakes. Somewhere
along the way I think she had a blow—it may have been that first year at
the university eroded her self-confidence, and it's taken a long time
for her to acquire her self-assurance again. But I think she has. She is
more like my mother than any member of the family. My mother was the
kind of person who seemed to quickly grasp a situation, know the right
thing to do, wasn't afraid of emergencies. Adriana is like that. If
anybody is injured in the neighborhood, she's the one takes them to a
hospital or does anything that needs to be done. If some woman decides
to have a baby delivered at home, she's the one that goes and takes care
of her and helps with the delivery. She is this little, thin wisp of a
woman who has got a whim of iron and a tremendous amount of strength.
And so I think she will continue to grow into being a fine woman.
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GARDNER:
- A question I feel I really should ask, since we have talked about
generational bookshops and so forth and so on. Did any of your children
ever exhibit real interest in getting involved in the book business? Did
you ever encourage or push that, or did you. . . ?
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ZEITLIN:
- No, as well as I could tell, none of them really wanted to go on with
it. It may be my lack of ability to involve them. All of my children at
one time or another have worked in one way or another at the bookshop,
but they always seem to feel that they couldn't learn what I know. Well,
I've said to them I didn't know it when I started; it's taken me years
to learn a little bit, and you can certainly learn as much as I can. I
don't think salesmanship or bookselling is a special gift. I think it's
a learned technique, and I think anybody of ordinary intelligence and
acceptable personality could learn to do it as well as I have. The only
thing that has made me successful to the degree that I am has been the
pressure of need and the awful fear of failing. As long as I've had to
do it, I felt that it should be done as well as I could do it. And I
also never had a moment, until the last four or five years, where I
could feel economically secure. But none of my children seem to want to
carry on the business, or feel equal to it, and I don't think we're
going to inveigle them into it. I think our daughter Adriana is going to
come the nearest to it, because she at least has stepped in and learned
something about what goes on.
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GARDNER:
- The actual operation.
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ZEITLIN:
- Yes. I think if she had a will to, she could really get to be very good.
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GARDNER:
- You have been very successful, clearly, as a bookseller, through the
years. Do you ever regret that you abandoned poetry?
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ZEITLIN:
- No. I have no illusions about that.
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GARDNER:
- Are you content to have been a bookseller?
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ZEITLIN:
- I'd like to have gone on and written something serious. The things I
wrote to the point in my life where I tapered off writing were either
love lyrics or expressions, of a certain degree, of my own philosophy.
But unless you can learn to draw the long bow, there's no sense in going
on writing love lyrics and minor poems, and you can't do that unless you
dedicate your whole life to it and give [it] all of your thought. I
don't think you can be a good part-time poet.
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GARDNER:
- Isn't it true of anything?
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ZEITLIN:
- Well, I don't know. I think that Wallace Stevens seems to have been able
to do it, but he was in a peculiar position: I think that his job with
the insurance company was a sort of an off-and-on job where he wasn't
held to much of a performance standard. But poetry has to be a constant
concern. You can't start off the day thinking about composing that sales
letter you're going to have to write or doing a big pitch about a book
that you want to sell, drawing up a proposal to buy a collection, and
have much of the kind of spiritual energy that you need to write poetry.
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GARDNER:
- And yet, at the same time, it requires the same sort of energy and
concentration to create the bookselling business, not to mention
acquiring the vast range of knowledge that you have through the years.
It required that same sort of dedication.
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ZEITLIN:
- Well, the thing is, you don't have to focus it so much. It's a matter of
quantity rather than quality. You can expend a lot of energy in a lot of
different directions and get a percentage of good results; whereas when
you're writing poetry, you can't have near-misses, you have to either
produce or nothing.
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GARDNER:
- Well, we're nearing the end of the tape. Do you have any final comments
you'd care to make, any sort of overviews about your career, your. . . ?
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ZEITLIN:
- Well, I think I've been very fortunate. I've been able to live the kind
of life that I could live most successfully with my peculiar
personality. I think of a remark that John Graves, a writer down in Glen
Rose, Texas, made when he was being interviewed by Bill Moyers recently.
He said, "The only thing you ever own is your own knowledge, the ideas
that you've mastered. Those are the things that can't be taken away from
you. You can't sell them, and you can keep them with you no matter what
else you lose." I think that's a pretty good summing up of a good
philosophy. Knowledge, and sensitivity to experience, sensitivity to the
world in which we live, growing in sensitivity as we live, growing in
knowledge, to the extent that we can know anything, is the greatest
reward we can get out of life. I've been lucky in that.