Two Hurt Books And Their Former Owners

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Some books, like their owners, live long healthy lives.  Some don't.  Two books in My Sentimental Library Collection didn't:
 Paul L. Ford's copy of Volume One of The Complete Works of William Shakespere, in Commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of His Birth, London, 1864,

and D. Van Pelt's copy of The Charter of the City of New-York, With Notes Thereon.  Also a Treatise on the Powers and Duties of the Mayor, Alderman, and Assistant Aldermen, and the Journal of the City Convention, New York, 1836.                                                        

I bought the Shakespeare book because I wanted a book formerly owned by Paul Leicester Ford for my Sentimental Library Collection.  I already had eight books written by him, and one book by his brother, Worthington Chauncey Ford.  The Shakespeare book was inexpensive because it was a hurt book, and because it was an odd volume of a three-volume set.  Both boards were completely detached.  The first signature containing the front endpapers, frontispiece, title page, and table of contents, was completely detached.  And three quarters of the leather formerly covering its spine was lacking.

On the front flyleaf, someone wrote the following presentation inscription:

On the front pastedown, Paul L. Ford's daughter pasted her bookplate:

Paul Leicester Ford was born in 1865.  He was a small sickly boy who wore a back brace because of a spinal deformity.  He never grew over five feet tall.  His father, Gordon L. Ford, had the best Americana Collection in the world: 100,000 manuscripts and 50,000 books.  As a teenager, Paul established the Historical Printing Club together with his father and Worthington, publishing various tracts and pamphlets from his father's collection.  As an author, he made many contributions to history, from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 1892-1899, to the Franklin Bibliography, 1899.  Switching to fiction, his novel, The Honourable Peter Stirling, 1894, became quite popular.

Unlike knowing Ford, I didn't know the owner of the New York City book from Adam.  I bought the book for my small but budding New York City Collection.  It was inexpensive because it, too, was a hurt book.  Its front cover was completely detached.  The scotch tape which once held the cloth to the spine was long gone, along with the cloth, leaving the spine exposed.

On the front pastedown, a bookseller pasted his bookseller's ticket:

Kleinteich's bookstore was previously located at 334 Bedford Ave. Brooklyn until sometime in the 1890s.

On the front flyleaf, a former owner wrote his ownership inscription:

When I researched Van Pelt, I discovered that he bought the book for his own New York City Collection.   Daniel Van Pelt was born in the Netherlands in 1853, graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1874, and from the Theological Seminary at New Brunswick in 1877.  He was the pastor of the Remsen Street Reformed Church, one of the most prominent churches in Astoria, but resigned his position in 1898 to devote more time to writing.  He was an acknowledged expert on early Dutch history in America, and in New York City history, publishing articles and books on both subjects, including the massive three-volume work, Leslie's History of the Greater New York, New York, 1898.


Weather permitting, Daniel Van Pelt enjoyed taking a midnight bath in the East River near his home in Astoria.  But on the night of Tuesday, Oct. 23, 1900, he never made it home.  He drowned.  They found his clothes the next morning folded neatly on Scaly Rock, Hell's Gate, Astoria.  His body washed up on the shore in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn the following Monday.  Dead at the age of forty-seven.  According to one newspaper report, Van Pelt's wife, Gertrude Scott Van Pelt, was devastated by the news, and was contemplating suicide. But the hurting didn't stop there. Van Pelt's only son, Leonard Irving Van Pelt, died the following year on his sixteenth birthday, Dec. 14, 1901.

Was it Leonard who doodled on the page below?

Is this a drawing of his father drowning?

Paul L. Ford did not have a long and healthy life either. He had another brother, Malcolm Webster Ford,  who was one of America's best-known athletes.  Gordon L. Ford wrote this son out of the family will because of his flamboyant lifestyle. Gordon L. Ford died of Typhoid Fever while nursing Malcolm in 1892.  At the inheritance trial instigated by Malcolm two years later, Paul L. Ford said of his father, "He gave a worthy life to save an unworthy life." For years afterwards Malcolm argued that his brothers cheated him out of his inheritance. Finally, on May 8, 1902 Malcolm entered Paul L. Ford's library and murdered him.  Shot him dead at the age of thirty-seven.  Then Malcolm killed himself.

Two hurt books.  Two sad stories.  I had always intended to fix these two hurt books, but after researching the stories of their former owners, I'm thinking of leaving them in their current condition.

What do you think?

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Changing Bookplates: Multiple Bookplates of Famous People

This blog entry was inspired by Maureen E. Mulvihill from a recent ExLibris-L thread about Arthur M. Schlesinger's bookplate. She remembered seeing an earlier Schlesinger bookplate in 1983, and wondered if other famous people had changed their tastes in bookplates.


Lew Jaffe, the bookplatemaven, provided the multiple bookplates of five famous people, along with comments about their bookplates:

Stephen Vincent Benét and Kenneth Roberts both had bookplates when they were very young and changed them as adults

Clark Gable and Rockwell Kent changed bookplates as they changed wives.

Nelson Rockefeller must have gotten bored with his first bookplate and called his friend Pablo to design a new one.

Linde Brocato (Urbana, Il.), a scholar on Early Spanish Literatures, wrote:

The Picasso bookplate is like a sort of "Victor" that graduates of Salmanca write/paint on the walls when they graduate--whether this is particular to Salamanca (examples are from as early as the 16th c. I believe) or it's from some other model, I don't know.  There's an article in the Spanish wikipedia that says it originated in the 14th c. to celebrate achieving the doctorate:

The collector, bibliographer, and typographer, Mark Samuels Lasner, provided the images of Frederick Locker's bookplates from Madison C. Bates's book That Delightful Man: A Study of Frederick Locker, Cleveland, 1960.

The following multiple bookplates are from my own library:

Henry Blackwell, the New York bookbinder and Welsh scholar, had two bookplates, the top one engraved by Edwin D. French, and the bottom one by H.T. Sears.

He used the Sears bookplate to identify books in his Welsh Collection.

Henry Blackwell engraved a leather gift bookplate for a book he gave to one of his cousins.

Most people are familiar with the jester bookplate of the lyricist, Harry B. Smith, but how many have seen the bookplate fellow lyricist and illustrator, Gene Buck, engraved for him?

The renowned book collector, Paul Lemperly, used the bookplate below on some of his books.

For the books he wanted signed by their authors, he used this bookplate:

Luther Brewer's Leigh Hunt Glutton bookplate was not his first bookplate.

Underneath it in a book he formerly owned was this bookplate:

I didn't know that the English politician and writer, Augustine Birrell, had two bookplates.

Nor do I know which bookplate he had first.

I think I read somewhere that the book collector and author, Vincent Starrett, had four bookplates.

I have two of them.

The author and bibliophile, John Carter, had two different bookplates.  He had another that included his wife's name as well.

Mary Hyde, the author, scholar, and book collector, had a toad bookplate which she used before she got married.

She and her first husband, Donald Hyde, used four bookplates with different color backgrounds.  John Overholt, Assistant Curator of the Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson at Harvard, remembers reading somewhere that each color denoted the season a particular book was acquired.

Have you any Changing Bookplates to display?
Please contact me if you wish to contribute additional bookplates.

Arthur Schlesinger's Bookplate: The Whole Picture

I like a bookplate that tells a story. One that tells me what its owner is all about. The bookplate below does the trick. It belongs to the historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.(1888-1965). His bookplate is a panorama of life in America:

See the family of four standing on the hillside? They are about to embark on an American journey. The little boy points at the scene below. The mother looks back at us, as if to say, "Want to join us?"

The family of four looks down from the hillside. They see children playing jump rope and baseball in the yard of a schoolhouse. They see a Model T Ford parked against the trees. They see two cowboys conversing in a field. They see a wagon train on the trail that winds past an Indian village. They see a train traveling along in the distance on the outskirts of a town full of buildings, the tall steeple of a church its most prominent feature. Beyond and above the town, they see smoke billowing from the factory smokestacks of another generation of Americans. The smoke blows away from the densely populated residential community. And on the very top of the most distant hill, they see a metropolis. Flying over the skyscrapers, they see an airplane and a blimp. A beautiful picture of life in America, yes? But that is only half of the picture.

Last Friday, on a bookshelf in Dan Sheppard's CrackerHouse Books in Arcadia, Florida, I found a book whose spine read:


THE RISE OF THE CITY –– 1878-1898
SCHLESINGER


A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LIFE X

I pulled the book down from the shelf. The front cover read:

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LIFE ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER DIXON RYAN FOX EDITORS

I opened up the book and in my left hand, on the illustrated endpapers, I saw a familiar scene, only it was twice as long as I remembered it, and twice as beautiful:

Yes. The complete panorama of American Life. From the ships in the harbor, to the Pilgrims and the Indians, to the colonials embarking on a stagecoach, to the farmer plowing the field. And to Ben Franklin flying his kite high up in the American sky. My sky. Arthur Schlesinger's sky. Arthur Schlesinger's History of American Life from beginning to end.

Always Be On Time

In this New Year, I will strive to post at least one blog entry each month. This first title, "Always Be On Time," will be an appropriate reminder for me.

For My Sentimental Library Collection, I collect books formerly owned by authors, bibliophiles, and other famous people. I also want books written by or about them, bookplates if they have them, catalogues of their libraries if such were published, and autograph letters either to or from them. Usually, I look for books formerly owned by authors I collect, and then try to complete the cycle of acquiring bookplates, catalogues, and autograph letters. In one case, however, it was the bookplate that got me started first. And I didn't know the owner of the bookplate from Adam.

In 2004, I wrote an article for the now defunct online periodical, AB Bookman's Magazine. My article was titled "The Story of a Bookplate." If you haven't read this article before, you should read it now. It provides background information for this blog entry.

The bookplate was pasted on the inside cover of a pamphlet commemorating the Battle and Massacre of Wyoming, Pennsylvania, July 3, 1778. I don't remember exactly where I acquired the pamphlet; there were two commemorative pamphlets, but I gave one to "fellow" collector, Jan Clark. I may even have bought the pamphlets specifically because of the bookplate. I have done that in the past.

I kept track of the copies of Edward Martin's autobiography, Always Be On Time, available online, but was unwilling to pay $75 for a copy. But in June 2009, one of the booksellers had a 50% off sale, and you can guess what I bought.

Edward Martin inscribed this book "For David D. Fleming – A fine and loyal American – with appreciation – Edward Martin, 31 Dec 62."



Colonel Fleming underlined his own name in the text:

This book title is part of a motto Edward Martin's father practiced and preached: "Be on time, be loyal and speak the truth." Edward Martin lived by that motto himself, as a general, as a governor, as a senator, and as a man. I wish there were more politicians like him today. We need them.

Here is a picture of Private Martin:



Here is a picture of General Martin:



Here is a picture of Senator Martin.

I started reading Edward Martin's book soon after I acquired it in 2009, but somehow got sidetracked. I started reading it again this week.

Here are some more images from the book:

In all my twenty-three years in the military, I never witnessed a General marching with his troops. That is General Martin leading his troops in formation.



During his long military career, General Martin used several modes of transportation for moving his troops. From using carabaos (water buffalo) in the Philippines in 1899:



To using trucks along the Mexican border in 1916:





To using Wagon Trains – No, this is not the Wild West. It is a picture of the 110th Wagon Train at Camp Hancock, Georgia in 1917:

Why the sudden interest in Edward Martin? The last thing I bought in 2010, on December 31st no less, was a Typed Letter Signed (TLS) by Edward Martin. I acquired the letter from Linda Harris, an ebay seller from Spartanburg, S.C.

I don't believe there is a catalogue of Edward Martin 's library–a photo of his library will have to do.

I have, therefore, completed the cycle for My Sentimental Library!

Drumroll please!

A book from Edward Martin's library

His bookplate,

A book by and about him,

An autograph letter.

And a Happy New Year already!

A Cornerstone In American History

What does the book, Wee Macgreegor, have to do with American history? Nothing really, except that it belonged to a Scotsman named William A. Brodie (1841-1917) who, at the age of two, emigrated to America with his parents.

Unless you're from Geneseo, New York, you probably never heard of William A. Brodie. He was a Master Mason of the Great State of New York. He was also the mason who set the cornerstone of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.

To verify that this is the bookplate of the William A. Brodie who set the cornerstone, I also have a book formerly owned by his son, Warren J. Brodie, Geneseo, New York

He signed his name on the title page of his copy of the Book of Snobs.