Annotations

Last week I watched the 2019 documentary The Booksellers, an elegiac look at antiquarian and rare book dealers focused largely on New York City. In the 1950s, we’re told, New York was home to 360 bookstores. I was surprised to learn that 79 remain in business. I grew up in Cleveland, where all the bookstores I patronized as a kid, some founded before the Great Depression, are long gone. Inevitably, The Booksellers is a wistful look at a depleted world. 

Several of the dealers interviewed for the film cite A.S.W. (Abraham Simon Wolf) Rosenbach (1876–1952), the Philadelphia-born dealer who bought and sold eight Gutenberg Bibles and more than thirty First Folios. Among his other purchases were the manuscripts of Ulysses and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I was interested enough to borrow Edwin Wolf II’s Rosenbach: A Biography (1960) from the library. Wolf, who worked for Rosenbach from 1930 to 1952, is a middling, indiscriminate writer who lards his narrative with gratuitous detail, leaving the reader with much to skim.

 

Wolf tells us Rosenbach never raised the pay of his employees. His older brother, Philip, once gave an employee a $1,000 bonus. Abraham deducted the sum from the employee’s year-end settlement. The episode is described on Page 230. In the margin beside the paragraph, written in pencil, is the only annotation I find in the entire book: “typical cheap Jew bastards!”

 

It reminds me of an incident described by Terry Southern in "Twirling at Ole Miss," his account of a visit to the University of Mississippi first published in Esquire in 1963 and later collected in Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes (1967). Southern’s timing was superb. It was the summer of 1962. William Faulkner had recently died and James Meredith was about to enroll as the first black student at the university. Southern enters its library and describes what he found:

 

“After looking around for a bit, I carefully opened a mint first-edition copy of Light in August, and found ‘nigger-lover’ scrawled across the title page.”