Is This The Worst 19th C. British Novel?

by Stephen J. Gertz

It’s rarely a good idea to begin a novel with a Preface. It’s never a good idea to write a Preface as apology for what is to come. And what writer in their right mind would trust that their readers be indulgent and not too.critical of what they are about to read? Only a novelist who subconsciously knows that he is issuing a warning: Caution! Train-Wreck Ahead.

Santa left ashes in the author's Xmas 1893 stocking.

No such luck for The Author, one T. Duthie-Lisle. The reviews for this three-decker upon its publication were devastating; this may be the worst 19th century British novel ever published.


"The hardiest spirit may well quail before the stupendous task of giving any accurate idea of what is, apparently, the first-fruits of Mr. Duthie-Lisle's imagination" (The Saturday Review Dec. 30, 1893); "...obtrudes itself on almost every page as deficient in sense as of grammar" (The Academy Oct., 21, 1893); "...this incredibly foolish book" (The Speaker Sept. 16, 1893); and this dart to its heart: "One of the missions of the literary critic is to warn off intending readers from books that are utterly worthless, and 'The Heirloom' comes within this category" (The Athenaeum Sept. 9, 1893). 


Seventy-eight years later Robert Lee Wolff, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, declared it "...unbelievably awful as to style - antiquated, ungrammatical, melodramatic, like a parody of itself." 

Of the author, little is known; it is hoped T. Duthie-Lisle survived the reviews to live in hiding. It appears that this was TD-L's first and last foray into “the wildest schemes which his imagination [could] conceive, the marvelous combinations which a turn of the magic kaleidoscope of eventualities, and what we misname fortune may produce, are again and again out acted in real life.”


Why was this novel issued? It was not the sort of book that its publisher, Gay and Bird, usually published.

Wolff suggests that it was a “‘prestige’ publication.” If so, Gay and Bird’s standards for prestige were decidedly low; the book deals prestige a deadly blow. Could the brain trust at Gay and Bird have been so devoid of taste and discernment? Their publication of this novel strongly suggests that they possessed the editorial instincts of a cane toad, Australia’s answer to promiscuous publishing: cane toads will attempt to copulate with dead animals including dead female cane toads, dead salamanders, dead rodents, dead reptiles. Hence the dead on arrival publication of this dreadful doozy. 

Yet beyond its status as arguably the worst nineteenth century British novel, The Heirloom is significant as being among the last of the three-deckers, a format that ceased to exist by the end of 1894, with only an occasional three-decker published in the twentieth century, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the most notable example. This copy of The Heirloom was deaccessioned from a circulation library and that tells us a story.

Introduced in the early nineteenth century, three volume novels were expensive - the average retail price was 31 shillings.6 pence  - far too expensive for even middle class readers. But though three-deckers did indeed provide a measure of prestige to the publisher, author, and the book, because of their expense the major source of reading distribution was through a circulation library. Yes, you could buy inexpensive reprints in single volumes but if you wanted to read the latest "prestige" novels you had to borrow from a library. With low print runs (generally 1000 copies or fewer) and high price a publisher could earn a tidy profit. Ultimately, however, publishers of three-deckers had to bow to commercial pressures and began to issue single volume novels. Single volume novels were less expensive to produce, could be sold for less than a three-decker, and though their price was low, greater profits could be earned via dramatically increased sales volume.

At this point, you may be curious about the plot of The Heirloom. It is the sorry plight of the reader to plow through it. Three-decker novels typically possessed complicated plots, often dealing with marriage and property. The Heirloom cubes the complications,  throws in a lot of mush, and the result is a plot so convoluted that one is tempted to go full-Alexander the Great and take a sword to this Gordian knot. It would, alas, take a machete to hack through it but with no guarantee of success. 

It begins with the near-death ravings of Bertram Gonault, the presumptive hero of the story, as he lies in bed at Vernwood Manor. He made a fabulous fortune, and met a beautiful girl, who mysteriously vanished just prior to their wedding. As usual when a man loses the woman of his dreams, Bertram hit the road of dissipation that ended in deathbed delirium, an old man at 50 on page one, "at what a price!" A half hour after his feverish diatribe he was murdered. By the end of volume one, after an at best wearisome telling of the story of Bertram’s life, “the reader feels relieved when at the end of [that volume] he resumes his place in Bertram’s bedchamber” (The Speaker). You may want to get in bed with Bertie and take a quick nap before the murderer shows up.
 
The remaining two volumes are devoted to discovering the mystery murderer, finding a beneficiary for Vernwood Manor, the title's heirloom, and locating a mysterious ring, another heirloom to pad out the narrative. This is tantamount to asking readers to take a hundred mile hike with a hundred pound rucksack. Really, an army Ranger with a reading habit would be challenged to get though this book without giving up. 

Oh, lordy, this book's a doozy. And quite scarce.
___________

DUTHIE-LISLE, T. THE HEIRLOOM; or The Descent of Vernwood Manor. London: Gay and Bird, 1893. First (only) Edition. Three octavo volumes (7 3/3 x 4 3/4 in.). vii, (1, blank), 247, (1, blank), 16 (catalog); vii, (1, blank), 222, (2, blank), 16 (catalog); vii, (1, blank), 246, (2, blank), 16 (catalog) pp. Publisher's original gray cloth, gilt lettered title, sprig of leaves in black.  Cloth soiled, lt-mod. wear, a few sm tears to spine tails, spine exhibits library label ghosts, "Lorde Circulating Library" stamped in purple to preliminary blanks, offsets to preliminary blanks from bookplate of Britten Memorial Library, otherwise a Good copy of a genuinely scarce work. Wolff 1966. 

 

Christopher Isherwood and Me at the Gym

 by Stephen J. Gertz

(Written five years ago, the following has the honor of being rejected by every literary journal in California secondary to length (and perhaps certain content). Time to get it out, throw it on the wall, and see if it sticks).


“I’ve started going to the Physical Services gym at Westwood and Santa Monica, and already the exercise makes me feel good. I needed it so badly. That’s a good habit started. I must keep it up.” (Christopher Isherwood,  Diaries, January 12, 1954).

Chris stood at his locker with a towel wrapped around his waist and shower sandals on his feet. He was soaked. He usually set aside a couple of extra towels; they were too small for any one of them to completely dry a body. He seemed lost and said nothing but it was clear what the problem was: a jerk too lazy to walk to the locker room entrance and get his own had walked off with Chris’. His partner, Don Bachardy, wasn’t around; perhaps still in the shower, or not present at all; I don’t recall. I brought Chris (for that is how he asked to be addressed after my initial “Mr. Isherwood”) a few more. It was part of my job: gym instructor, physical therapy aide, towel boy. 

“The smog was so bad yesterday that Bruce Conners [sic] at the gym said one really shouldn’t go out jogging in it; making yourself breathe heavily and inhale all that stuff does you much more harm than the exercise does you good.” (October 3, 1970).

The gym was the Bruce Conner - Al Hinds Health Club, established in 1947 as Bruce Conner’s Physical Services by Bruce Conner (1919-2010), a physical therapist with roots in competitive gymnastics and weightlifting, and the original Muscle Beach. Unlike the franchise model established by his friends, Vic Tanny and Jack Lalanne, Bruce opened what was at the time the only gym in the U.S. for men and women offering physical therapy and massage services. It’s quite possible that every orthopod in the area referred patients to Bruce; because it was operated by a physical therapist and respected athlete it was legit, not strictly for health nuts and ironheads, a nice space (Chris thought the atmosphere at Vic Tanny’s in Santa Monica, “squalid”), and Bruce was quite likable. Word got around. 

It was located on Little Santa Monica Blvd. one block east of Westwood Blvd. on L.A.’s Westside. Because of its proximity to Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Santa Monica and its canyon communities, the gym attracted wealthy celebrity and civilian patients and members, as well as the general, non-wealthy public. In 1964 Bruce trained eleven Olympic medal winners,   and the Russian Olympic weightlifting team once worked out at the gym. It was old-school—a small neighborhood spot with separate facilities for men and women, few machines, and little chrome, mostly for the ladies. I was a member for a few years before I worked there, 1976-78.

“I went to the gym, where [actor] Richard Egan works out in a hooded sweater with a mackintosh pair of pants over it, presumably to make him sweat that much extra”  (November 14, 1961).

It was where I became friendly with many appropriately dressed, overdressed, underdressed, and completely undressed film, television, and music personalities. 

Riccardo “Rick” Montalban didn’t bother with the graceful glide he had adopted to mask his pronounced limp and was thankfully amused when I once described a workout bench as being upholstered in rich Corinthian vinyl because I couldn’t resist. Richard “Dick” Jaeckel, a short, scrawny kid in his acting debut in Guadalcanal Diary (1943), had subsequently morphed into a mighty tree stump with blond hair, eternal tan, and solid chops (see Sometimes a Great Notion). Film director George Sidney, like me, grew up in Queens, NYC, and was a trove of vintage Hollywood lore and legend I could listen to at length and did because George liked to talk about the old days and dump on the new while exercising - or eating donuts he brought in and offered to all. A patient of Bruce and Al, Jan Berry, of Surf City’s Jan and Dean, never fully recovered from brain injuries after totaling his ’Vette ten years earlier near Dead Man’s Curve on Sunset Blvd. in Beverly Hills, two years after Jan and Dean’s Dead Man’s Curve became a top ten hit. Vito Scotti played Nazorine, the baker whose unwed daughter had a bun in the oven and boyfriend without green card in The Godfather. Password game-show host Allen Ludden was a good sport when I once asked for the password as he entered the steam room. 

There were many more, including screenwriter Bill Kerby, who, during pre-production for The Rose, his take on Janis Joplin starring Bette Midler, wrote Van Nuys Boulevard, mercifully unproduced to spare the public from a scene appearing on page 62:


INT. BRUCE CONNER - AL HINDS GYM - MORNING

With a searing CRASH! Man Mountain Wawrzeniak drops loaded dumbbells to the floor and looks at himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. He nods his head. Next to him, FRED DRYER (Defensive End for the L.A. Rams) and STEVE GERTZ, stand by and openly stare. They are both specimens, themselves, but now they’re in the presence of Greatness and they know it.

                          STEVE GERTZ

                                Good set.

                           MAN MOUNTAIN

                                  Yeah.

                            FRED DRYER

                       You should’ve gone 
                              t’the pros.

                            MAN MOUNTAIN

                               Football’s pussy.

And with that, he turns and walks into the locker room. Gertz and Dryer look at each other.

                             STEVE GERTZ

                               An intellectual…                                             

Yes, Fred was a member, too. “Kate the Great” Schmidt, a close friend who held the American (and soon World) record in women’s javelin, began to workout there, then Jane Frederick, American record holder in women’s heptathlon; Maren Seidler, who had a lock on the American record in women’s shot put; and Italian track star Giulia Montefiore. The Montreal games were on the horizon and the gym again became an unofficial Olympics weight-training site, at least for the Olympians I knew.

“At the gym I feel very strong” (September 12, 1962).

It’s where I reconnected with Lolo, a dear friend from high school who worked the front desk. It’s where I became friends with Levey, an instructor who, like me, was a former NYer, jazz drummer, and competitive boxer with a big, tough father sired by a tougher father, each of whom had been fighters; we shared issues as well as interests. 

It’s where I met “Schitzo Nitz-o,” who, prior to working at the gym, did time for manslaughter after a bar fight went bad; kept a copy of the Physicians Desk Reference at home so he could investigate whatever pharmaceutical he was considering for abuse then take it no matter what the PDR said; was my co-bouncer at a couple of Westside bars; and accompanied me on evictions I handled for a gym member with upscale rental properties but a few downscale tenants who required emphatic assistance to immediately vacate. 

It’s where I caught up with Lisa Lyon, another high school friend, who joined the gym to build strength while studying kendo, became Schitzo’s workout and otherwise partner, and later wound up as the first Women’s World Pro bodybuilding champion, and muse to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and philosopher, neuro-scientist, and psychedelicist John C. Lilly. 

It’s where I met Karl, an elderly, easily irritated and delight-to-incite staff masseur, he of the wandering hands and thankful distaff clientele. He, with fluffy gray-to-white hair on the loss, hard, ice-blue Nordic eyes, and Teutonic accent, we suspected had been Hitler’s personal masseur who fled the bunker after indiscreetly makin’ mit der shiatsu mit Eva, and whose delivery of Schatziputzi, a German term of endearment, remains the most obscenely creepy thing ever heard—just ask Lolo. 

It's where I met Abbye  (strictly ironic “Pudgy”) Stockton, a staff instructor and Muscle Beach alumnus who, during the ’50s health and fitness scene, was “America’s Foremost Bar-Belle." Her husband, Les, another Muscle Beach graduate and staff instructor, was a merry old philandering satyr with a twinkle in his eye and apparently a sparkle in his dick, judging from the effect on the women in the gym he sacked.
 
It’s where I met The Amazing Mary, a middle-aged, formerly miserably married, sexually repressed lady who, according to her liberator, Les, was a subject of study at a sex institute in Santa Monica where she earned the world record for most orgasms within a given brief period of time. It’s a feat I can vouch for, having been treated to a clinical demonstration while sitting in the passenger seat of her VW Beetle in the gym’s parking lot in broad daylight as she, at the behest of Les, digitally drove herself in the driver’s seat. Les and a few men from the gym kept an apartment nearby for entertainment purposes, the purpose being to entertain themselves with Mary, who enjoyed entertaining and being entertained.

The gym was where I met Mambo, the woman who would eventually become my ex-wife due to my instability, with stupidity a close second.

“153 1/2 [lbs.]. We went to the gym” (July 22, 1976).

And it was where I met Christopher Isherwood.

I became aware of him when I was fifteen years old. My mother took my sister and me to see the original Broadway production of Cabaret and I saw his name in the Playbill. I read Berlin Stories a few years later and it sparked an interest in Weimar culture. By the time I began working at the gym I was mindful of his larger literary reputation but hadn’t read any of his other books and was unaware that he had written screenplays. Berlin Stories was sufficient to make a profound impression. When Chris was in the gym I was in the presence of Greatness and I knew it.

But I didn’t do much about it. In fact, I did nothing. I’ve regretted it ever since.

Chris had been a member on and off for twenty-two years before I made his acquaintance, for some time also a member of Lyle Fox’s gym in Pacific Palisades, returning exclusively to Bruce’s when the Fox gym closed. He came in regularly, and stepped on the men’s locker room scale as if punching a time clock. Because I was either busy with a new member, PT patient, laundering towels, in the ladies gym where I spent half my workweek, or preoccupied with my own workouts, I never had many opportunities to talk to him. And Chris and Don kept to themselves, which I respected. But I could have engineered situations. The reality is that I was paralyzed by shyness. As a seasoned Hollywood veteran (I’d worked, after all, as a studio laborer, greensman, and propmaker) I had no trouble kibbitzing with the show biz set. But Chris, he was another matter. I was a precocious reader as a kid and, though I certainly loved movies and TV, accorded book writers with a degree of respect and awe reserved only for heroes. I’d placed him on a pedestal and was completely star-struck. That was not the case with Ray Bradbury, who I’d met a few years earlier while working in a Beverly Hills record shop. Ray was warm, open, and initiated conversation. Chris was not, and did not.

During this time I was also touring the East, reading the Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabarata. I was interested in Vedanta. I would have loved to talk to Chris about this stuff, as well as literature. I probably would have been intrusively annoying, or so I sensed otherwise I would not have been so pathetically timid. It’s not that Chris had some sort of force field that he deliberately turned on to keep people away from him, but he projected an element of self-possession and reserve that might be interpreted as aloof, distant, and/or cold which, as I’ve since learned, he was not. I know because, like him, I was (and remain) a Virgo, his birthday falling on the day after mine, though I hope the reaction he got when answering “what’s your sign?” was better than I’ve ever received: “oh,” the “I’m so sorry” tacitly expressed. Maybe Chris and Don, like most people, just wanted to get in, workout, and get out; the likely explanation.

“154 1/2 [lbs.] We saw Stay Hungry (with Jeff Bridges), went to the gym.”  (July 19, 1976).

For an instant in the continuum of human existence I had the most spectacular calves in the cosmos. With a pair of glorious gastrocnemius, solid gold soleus, peroneus longus and brevis to long for, and with each sharply cut and precisely defined, I was “Mr. Universe from the knees down,” a wry homage by former Mr. America, Mr. World, and 4-time Mr. Universe (as well as escort service mogul, organized crimester, and arm-wrestling hustler who often earned over $1,000 a week from that alone) Dennis Tinerino, yet another gym member. 

Support for that sterling epithet presented itself when, as a contestant in the 1977 Jr. Mr. Southern California competition, I was called out as the ideal against which all other contestants’ calves were to be judged, and the enthusiastically vocal audience, now awestruck at the appearance of my dogies, gasped before erupting into wild, unrestrained bravos as Also sprach Zarathustra heralded my ascension into the pantheon, the heavens opened up, a golden shaft of light bathed me in its numinous glow, I experienced ego death, everything was everything, I took my place on the Great Mandala and was at one with All, even the guy in the front row who for a moment looked like a hipster chimp with goatee and shades. On stage, posing before a packed auditorium, with an applied tan, shaved and greased-up from the neck down, and wearing only the suggestion of a Speedo that highlighted my religious heritage, things weren’t surreal enough so I’d dropped a cap of mescaline halfway through the event.

Afterward, I rendezvoused with Spin and Lolo and her sister in the lobby and waited for our chauffeur, Gibson, to bring his limo around. Spin (gym member, natch’), who I’d been with for a few months, dropped her cap. The plan was to go Dada post-contest; I just arrived early. Lolo and Gibby (gym member, of course) had been dating; the limo ride was his idea and it was refined after a committee was formed to consider the possibilities for pagan worship. And so The Golden Calves Revue hit the road.

“Good workout again at the gym today” (February 28, 1961).

Because of work, travel, and various ailments in 1964, Chris wasn’t going to the gym very much. If he’d observed the following he would have surely recorded it.

Photo courtesy of Royal Books.

That year the gym earned a footnote in modern American art history when painter, sculptor, assemblager, filmmaker, and art-provocateur Bruce Conner visited Bruce Conner’s Physical Services and demanded that Bruce remove his name from the building: there was only one, true Bruce Conner and the town wasn’t big enough for the both of ’em. Suffice it to say, Bruce Conner, physical therapist, gave Bruce Conner, artist, the heave-ho and don’t ‘cha come back no mo’. Incensed (mock or otherwise), Bruce Conner, artist, returned with actor-photographer Dennis Hopper, who documented artist Conner and a gaggle of models posed beneath the gym’s painted sign on the outside west wall. (Original prints of Hopper’s photograph now sell for upwards of $20,000). The visual pun was intended - and unintentionally appropriate: the place was Libidoland.  Afterward, Bruce Conner, artist, went inside and distributed buttons to the membership that read, “I am not Bruce Conner,” while sporting his own button, “I am Bruce Conner.” It was a happening, baby! The gym’s signage remained when, in 1971, Bruce retired and turned the business over to Alan Hinds, a physical therapist who had been his assistant. 

“The only achievement for me has been at the gym” (July 28, 1966).

The ladies gym was a garden. If I’d had the temperament for promiscuity I’d have needed a thirteen-month calendar to schedule dates. This is not ego; it was the same story for the other instructors. A member once told me she wanted to see what it was like with a big, built guy. Musicians looking like dental floss with legs may have been the ideal in the outside world during the mid-1970s but inside the gym muscle was exotic and, apparently, tempting, the apple on the tree. I had the astonishing opportunity to meet a lot of women, get to know them, become friends, and then and only then, ask them out if I was interested in something more. This was a first. Prior to that I didn’t meet many women so when one crossed my path discrimination tipped its hat to desperation and took a hike. Though I had a couple of escapades between them, prior to meeting Mambo I had two intense amours fous with women I met at the gym.

You could fit Spin in a tea cup and still have room for a tea bag and two lumps of sugar but she had big ideas. Most of them involved sex, many of which I enjoyed, others not so much. She held my testicles hostage to being “open-minded” and so I always said yes when my head was often screaming no. On one occasion she’d contrived I felt like a crash-test dummy at an orgy. She lived a few blocks away from the gym with her long-term boyfriend in an open relationship well on its way to closing up shop. She scared the hell out of me when she once lost consciousness after an orgasm and I thought I’d killed her, but she finally came to and wanted more. But I made excuses, afraid anxiety might kill me. During an evening shift, we once trysted in the gym’s ultrasound/hydrotherapy room, from within which on enchanted nights it was not unusual to hear ultra-sounds having nothing to do with standard therapeutic modalities. I was volunteered to pose for the boyfriend, a professional photographer with a scheme to broaden his portrait business with “fine art” erotic photography catering to sophisticated couples. His shot of me, however, looked like a porn bar mitzvah commemorative: naket boychick in full profile, head bowed and turned away in reverence with shadows for the sacred and solemn but head not turned and shadowed enough to mask the bar mitzvah boy’s punim. It was not a photograph I was keen on anybody ever seeing but people did when the weasel set up a display in The Pleasure Chest in West Hollywood without my consent. I had to pay him a social call to request all prints and negative, a visit I hope his recollection of stimulates the panic I witnessed when he opened the door and saw me looking nothing like happy. Macho has its appropriate moments.

Rima was smart, exotic, and pensive, with a face like a bright full moon with a dark cloud hovering over its surface. She was a successful business machine saleswoman six years my senior whose twisted on and off relationship with her demon shrink she hoped I’d be the cure for. She told me she loved me and I believed her but couldn’t say it back because I didn’t want to believe it even though I felt it; doomed if I do, damned if I don’t. A hothouse flower, she wore Jungle Gardenia, a scent so overpowering that I often swooned when we embraced, so I asked her to tone it down. She did, confining it to down below. She asked me to hurt her during sex but that was new to me and I was too scared; I couldn’t meet that need and felt that I had failed her in a fundamental way. She wanted me to run away with her, somewhere, anywhere but I didn’t have the guts or maybe it was just good sense because I felt something wrong inside her, like a dog can smell cancer. I raced to see her at 2AM when she called, drunk and in tears two months after she once again fell under Freudenstein’s spell, and begged me to come over and hold her and I did, rocking her in my arms on her couch for as long as she needed because you don’t leave a wounded and defenseless animal in the middle of the road, you just don’t. But I abandoned her without a note after carrying her to bed and tucking her in when she finally passed out, a careless act not meant to be so that has haunted me ever since.

“Today I did my first full day’s work at Fox. I have what seems to be a dream secretary, Eleanor Breese” (September 24, 1956).

I was anxious to move on from the gym; I was serious with Mambo and needed to demonstrate that I had a future. Lisa was a story analyst at American-International Pictures, and the knowledge that there was a job informally  called “reader” was a welcome revelation. Sometime later I was talking to Bill Kerby about this employment manna and he said that a friend of his might need some help. He arranged a meeting. I put together a few writing samples, met his friend and for the next four years worked as assistant to and reader for a dream employer, Eleanor Breese, executive story editor at Lorimar Productions, at the time the number one television production company. During that period Eleanor talked about working in the Scribner’s steno pool for Maxwell Perkins and assignments he sent her on, e.g. working at the kitchen table in Thomas Wolfe’s Brooklyn apartment, typing up manuscript pages as he threw them over his shoulder while using the refrigerator as a standing desk. She mentioned working at Fox, but Chris never came up, which is odd because as I’ve subsequently learned the two became friends and socialized outside of work. If she had talked about him I’d have remembered.

I asked Lolo what she remembers about Chris. Not much of anything, it turns out. Chris was gentle, Levey recalls. “He’d say ‘hi,’ when he came in. He fidgeted around; he didn’t sweat buckets.” Lisa, who was a friend of Don, doesn’t recall seeing Chris at the gym at all. Apparently, he possessed the power of invisibility when he wanted to move through the world unobserved.

I’d have asked Schitzo but restlessness consumed him and he went AWOL. For three years if my phone rang in the middle of the night—as it did around once a month; it was his metaphysical menses—I knew who was calling and what to expect: in the midst of an existential crisis and heavily drugged he would channel The Beach Boys. And I’d respond in kind to keep him on the line and away from the ledge. I’d pick-up the phone and without greeting he’d begin.

“I’m gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same old strip. I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip.”

“Don’t worry, Bobby, everything will turn out alright.”

“Now it’s dark and I’m alone, in my room. What good is the dawn that grows into day? The sunset at night, or livin’ this way?”
 
“At least you’ve got the warmth of the sun.”

“Yeah, but will I look back and say that I wish I hadn't done what I did?”

He already wished that. Time to distract.

“Perhaps, but here’s a little peninsula, and over here’s a viaduct leading over to the mainland.”

“Why a duck?”

And we’d run that Marx Bros. scene.

Schitzo scrammed to Australia and worked in a health club in Sydney. When he got kicked out of kangaroo-land for lack of a work permit he wound up in Hong Kong, working in another health club. At one point in the mid-‘80s a mutual friend called to tell me that Schitzo was in town and wanted to get together. So I went over. I met his recent bride, a young Chinese girl who spoke no English. Schitzo didn’t speak Chinese. That can only have improved the marriage’s prospects for success. I would have asked him about it but he wasn’t around. Just before I arrived he announced to our friend that he was going out for a few minutes. I waited a few hours. He never showed.

“154 1/2 [lbs.]. Don in Santa Barbara. By myself at the gym today, old Dobbin puttering about. I don’t do very much but it makes me feel as if I am really trying, and I am in my old Dobbin way. I am so lazy and exercising is so boring but I must do it. I fear that I will be too consumed by sloth to attend my own funeral. (I must stop thinking about death. Courage. Onward!). After showering, I went to my locker and found that someone had walked off with my towels. But Stan, one of the instructors, was kind to get some more. The young man is nice, and seems to always be on the verge of asking me a question but never does. I sometimes find myself  staring at him, an Adonis from the knees down.”

I wish he’d written that entry, even if he got my name wrong. Most fans of anyone feel that they know the person. This is particularly true with authors, who foster one on one relationships, the writer and reader engaged in a pas de deux, a rendezvous of minds with a strong tactile element: the feel of a book in the hands, the touch of a page. There is a certain intimacy. People curl up with a book; no one curls up with a movie. Yet whatever the medium fans would like to be acknowledged and set apart from the crowd. It would have been very satisfying to have gained Chris’ attention in a diary aside however trivial, silly, or critical. I regularly saw the guy, I (sort of) knew the guy. I was someone special! It is a vanity I confess to, an egoism I accept, just as Chris accepted his own vanity and egotism. I struggle to find connections, however tenuous, between us, forcing synchronicity where it doesn’t exist. Perhaps Chris’ guru, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, could have made more of coincidence than I can. One of the few things I get out of it is the gnawing sense that crossing paths with him was an augury that I ignored; that a life with books was my fate but I wasn’t paying attention until decades later when I finally awoke from an unsettling sleep.

Taps has blown for the golden calves, and time hasn’t done me any favors from the knees up. The armor has fallen away and I feel lighter inside, though terribly vulnerable. Yet the world doesn’t hurt as much as it once did. As my body rides off into the sunset I watch from my homestead porch with amused irony. I have reverted to the tall, thin bookworm I began as, the intervening years as if a 45-year aberration, a strenuous journey essential to finding a place within my family, myself, and the world.

For three years the gym was the center of my life and a formative experience that influenced all that followed. It was to me what Weimar Berlin was to Christopher Isherwood: a way station and safe place to explore young manhood, pursue adventures in masculinity, and observe and experience a fascinating, decadent milieu, albeit from a different orientation, and certainly without Nazis in the background, unless you count Karl. I wasn’t a camera but my Kundalini was taking notes.

“Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this happened” (Goodbye to Berlin).


Nor can I. Memories are viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, so far away yet a nanometer nearby, trapped, stretched, and distorted between perspectives. The appearance of a golden age of youth is no more than that. When I woke up in the morning the days were dark and I’d hope they’d get light. The anger, confusion, and depression so well disguised that I fooled even myself remained veiled, their origins evaded until they could no longer be avoided. The past lies in wait, and it is patient. If you don’t deal with it, the past will deal with you. 


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A Bodhisattva of the Book: William Dailey

by Stephen J. Gertz

With a note of sadness, Booktryst is otherwise pleased to announce its latest publication, A Bodhisattva of the Book: William Dailey, a memorial to the Southern California bookman who tragically died in December 2017.

Featuring heartfelt contributions by John Burnham, Michael R. Thompson, Pom Harrington, Ari Grossman, Peter Háy, John Martin, Barry Humphries, Bruce Whiteman, Bettina Hubby, Peter Kraus, Johan Kugelberg, myself, and others, the book celebrates the consummate rare and antiquarian bookseller who was a mentor to many, a friend to many more, and whose book shop in Los Angeles was the hip Mecca on Melrose for bibliophiles.

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A Bodhisattva of the Book: William Dailey. McMinnville: Booktryst, 2019. Octavo (8 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.). 69, (1) pp. Color photo-illustrated wrappers. $25.

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John R. Payne Reviews Catalogue 1: Rara Eros

by John R. Payne

John Payne’s most recent book is Great Catalogues by Master Booksellers, published in 2018.  He is also the bibliographer of the English ornithologist and novelist, W. H. Hudson.  John collaborated with the book collector, Adrian Goldstone, to compile a bibliographical catalogue of his collection of works by and about John Steinbeck that was published by The Harry Ransom Center in 1974. I am honored by his kind words -SJG.

First Catalogues

 First catalogues by booksellers are always cause for celebration.

“There is never anything elusive about a dealer’s catalogue,” wrote Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern.  “If it is a good one it will be its maker’s earthly representative and hopefully remembered.  A catalogue is a dealer’s showcase.  In it he displays his wares, parades his knowledge, offers his expertise.  His first catalogue is extremely significant.  He has made his public début before a critical group of connoisseurs.  This, his first catalogue, occasionally becomes his hallmark, stamping him as a specialist in Western Americana, medieval arts and letters, or modern firsts.”

Stephen Gertz’s Catalogue One: Rara Eros 16th-20th centuries is a sensitive, thoughtful, and bibliographically carefully described selection of 16th through 20th century imprints. Each title is illustrated in color, some with multiple illustrations. Prices range from $100 to $4,500.  At the lower end is Claire Willows’ Modern Slaves: A Profound Study of the Forces of Destiny ….  With ten full page illustrations.  New York: issued Privately for Collectors by The Gargoyle Press, no date (1931).  Limited edition of 1,350 copies.  $100

Books illustrated by Mahlon Blaine are priced $400 to $3,000, the later price being for a copy of Venus Sardonica. 50 Extravaganzas …  New York: (Jacob Brussel), 1929 (1938).  Limited edition of 160 copies numbered and signed by Blaine.  This is considered by Blaine and critics to be his finest work.

The least expensive item in the catalogue is Issue No. 1 of Exotica.  New York: Selbee Associates [Leonard Burtman], n.d. (1960), Second Series in large format of Leonard Burtman’s classic fetish magazine published subsequent to Exotique.  (Catalogue item 25).  $35

Mr. Gertz gained his expertise with rare books the hard way: by working with other well-established booksellers, first from 1999 to 2007 with Bill Dailey, as head cataloguer and later as manager of his shop.  After Bill closed his shop in 2007, Stephen worked for David Brass, as head cataloguer and later as Executive Director of David Brass Rare Books.  He now describes his experience as running the gamut from incunabula through 20th century vintage paperbacks.

“My interests as a collector have always been erotica and drug literature, which I bring to bear as a seller.  But one cannot live on sex and drugs alone—too risky in real life, too narrow to depend upon as a bookseller.  So, while those are primary specialties, I will be offering, as the subscript to Booktryst states, ‘interesting and curious rare and antiquarian books, etc.’ I have an eye for the unusual, provocative, and controversial. My uncle, famed Chicago First Amendment and civil liberties attorney, Elmer Gertz, won Tropic of Cancer’s first victory in the U. S. in 1962.  I must carry on the family tradition!”

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You can access Rara Eros here.

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Catalogue 1: Rara Eros 16th-20th centuries

by Stephen J. Gertz

Booktryst is pleased to announce Catalogue 1: Rara Eros 16th-20th centuries.

Featuring 60 items, including books and prints, it is illustrated with over 82 images, the majority in full color. The catalogue was designed by Poltroon Press in Berkeley, CA.

Within you will see many scarce and obscure books that have not been seen in decades if not longer, artist proofs, and titlepages and illustrations published for the first time outside of the books themselves.

You may view the catalogue as a double-page spread PDF (recommended) here.

If you prefer a single-page PDF you can view it here.

It pains me that given the current cultural climate I must offer a trigger warning: sexually explicit imagery (by respected artists mostly working anonymously or under pseudonym) is present within the catalogue. So, gird your loins, take a tip from Dante and "abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

A print version is available in a strictly limited edition of 50 copies only. It is 11 x 8 1/2 in. 32 pp. on 70# matte Titan white, 82 color and black and white illustrations, permabound, full color cover on 10 pt C1S/white stock with matte layflat lamination. Because of the nature of the material, its scarcity, the rigorous descriptions, informative and engaging annotations, and exceptional design, this catalogue will become collectable.

Purchase a copy of Rara Eros in print for only $55.

Booktryst At Rare Books - LA

by Stephen J. Gertz

Booktryst makes its book fair debut at Rare Books Los Angeles, at the Pasadena Convention Center February 1-2, 2019.

With many scarcities not seen in decades if not longer, and a gathering of books and prints that will have your eyes popping out of their sockets, our Booth 704 will definitely arouse your interest and may be the most provocative of the weekend.

This is also Rare Books - LA's debut and I'm pleased to be a part of it, all the more so on my home turf and among friends in the Southern California trade and local collectors. Kudos to Brad and Jen Johnson for organizing the event

Please stop by and say hello. That is, of course, if you're not left speechless by what Booktryst has in store for you. I'll publish a partial preview tomorrow.
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Booktryst Returns With Booktryst Anew

by Stephen J. Gertz

Having recently emerged from a secret lair within British Columbia where I'd been hibernating with a sloth of grizzly bears that had adopted me, I bring news of Booktryst.  

Booktryst now sells books. 

Over the last 18-24 months I've been slowly transitioning Booktryst from blog to bookseller, remaining true to my tradition of doing things ass-backward. During this reorganization, I've been acquiring interesting and curious rare and antiquarian books, etc. (note  new subscript below our header), sending out miscellaneous lists  to a select few, growing sales, and carefully building the business toward a public debut.

That time is now. 

I'll be posting important news over the next few days, with a major announcement on Friday, so keep an eye out (you can put it back in afterward).

In the meantime, I'm so post-hibernation hungry I could eat a raw tarantula.

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New Book: The Remarkable Martin Stone

by Stephen J. Gertz

Booktryst is pleased to announce the publication of its newest book and first fine press edition, The Remarkable Martin Stone: Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist.

The edition is limited to 150 copies (of which 25 are hors commerce w/o hand-numbering), binding designed and text designed and printed by Alastair Johnston at Poltroon Press on Hahnemühle Ingres paper with type composed in Monotype Bell. It is bound by John DeMerritt. And it features an engraved frontispiece portrait by Frances Butler.

Each copy is signed by the designer/printer, binder, and artist on the colophon.

The Contributors:

Nigel Burwood; Tom Bushnell; John Eggeling; Marianne Faithfull; James Fox; Peter B. Howard; Barry Humphries; Ed Maggs; William Matthews; Michael Moorcock; Jeremy Reed; Charles Seluzicki; Iain Sinclair; and Sylvia Beach Whitman.

Advance Praise:

“From its stunning binding and elegant design to its superb, heartfelt writing, The Remarkable Martin Stone is a bibliophile’s dream. Seeing the legendary book scout through the eyes of those who knew him best--booksellers, writers, and musicians--gives us one final, glorious glimpse of a man who was charming and generous to the last. This is a book that anyone who knew, or simply knew of, Martin will hold dear; I know I will” (Rebecca Rego Barry, Fine Books & Collections).

By Subscription Only, no billing. Books will be ready to ship in early December 2017. However, I expect the edition to sell out sooner rather than later, so order asap.

Booksellers who wish to buy 3 or more copies for resale can purchase them at a 30% discount. You must, however, contact me directly; the discount cannot be granted through the buy option below.

Net proceeds will be donated to the ABA Benevolent Fund, which provided assistance to Martin during his illness.
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The Remarkable Martin Stone. Remembering the Celebrated Rare Book Dealer and Blues Guitarist. McMinnville. OR: Booktryst, 2017. Octavo. 53, (1) pp. Engraved frontispiece portrait. Patterned Japanese cloth over decorated paper boards. Printed spine label. Cobalt blue endpapers. Plum cloth slipcase. $200.

A Book Shop Owner As Stuntman

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

At the Megalopolis Book Shop, Mickey Tsimmis was all about customer service. No matter how potentially catastrophic the request (i.e. pulling a book from the shelves), Mickey was ready to sacrifice his life to help out. Coolly insouciant (or idiotic), he ignored the peril that was routine while navigating through the thicket that was Megalopolis. Danger was his business and to satisfy a customer no obstacle was too great to overcome. Scaling the shelves was an Olympic event in his jungle jumble of books, where organization was overrated and safety was for sissies.

Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

"Screamingly funny" (Bookstore Memories). 

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.

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A Rare & Used Book Shop Owner's Lament

Illustration by Arnold M. Herr ©2016

Poor Mickey Tsimmis, his innocence lost in cruel Hollywood, the burg without mercy, the hamlet of vulgarity, the city without a soul. It's Despairsville, man, a drag and a half. But relief and change you could believe in were routinely found at his Megalopolis Book Shop on Melrose Ave. east of La Brea, west of the moon, south of no north.

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Illustration from The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer by Arnold M. Herr, "one of the wildest rides since Thompson and Steadman (or perhaps Mr. Toad) took to the highway."

Herr, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Illustrations by the author. BUY NOW.
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Apologies to Kay Nielsen and Charles Bukowski.
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A Legend in the Hollywood Book Trade

by Stephen J. Gertz

The following appears as the Preface to this just published collaboration of Poltroon Press and Booktryst.

 

 There are legends in the Los Angeles rare and used book trade.

In 1905, Ernest Dawson established L.A.’s first book shop exclusively devoted to rare books. Continued by his equally respected sons, Glen and Muir, the shop remained in business for 105 years. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Jake Zeitlin ran a rare book shop that became a locus for fine printing and local artists and typographers. A Texan by birth, Stanley Rose migrated to Los Angeles in the 1920s and began in the trade by peddling books on a push cart through the writers’ buildings at the movie studios  He opened a shop on Hollywood Blvd. that became a hangout for screenwriters and local and visiting novelists. Rose had a back room that after the shop closed in the evenings became an “art studies” salon that concentrated on studying the nude female form, comely models provided for the students’ edification and attention to detail. Rose was also notorious for selling clandestine erotica, and published a few one-handers written by starving screenwriters.  In the early 1960s, the Weinstein brothers established a junk store in Compton, CA that sold used books in addition to dross. Ultimately focusing exclusively on books, they developed their business into the most successful rare book firm in the world with final headquarters in a former mortuary to the stars in West Hollywood.

And then there was the late Eli Goodman (1925-2016) of Cosmopolitan Book Shop on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Established in 1958, Cosmopolitan was Hollywood’s oldest used bookstore. A luminary in the shade of the Los Angeles rare book trade, Eli Goodman was a legend based strictly on eccentric character. And he was a character, one too singularly colorful to have been invented; a novelist could not have dreamed-up the man.

Refusing to ever retire, he never did. His final promotion on the Cosmopolitan website was a calculated plea for mercy and desperate tug on the heartstrings: “I’M 91 YEARS OLD – PLEASE HELP ME!  TAKE MY WONDERFUL BOOKS FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!”

If Eli’s long-time assistant, amanuensis, and literary voice, Arnold Herr, is not exactly James Boswell, Eli Goodman will never be confused with Samuel Johnson - except for their pure love of books. Eli Goodman - within these pages “Mickey Tsimmis” - was passionate about them.

Parts of this book were originally published in the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) newsletter and later episodes on my blog-site for rare books, Booktryst.com. They are collected here, as they were on Booktryst, in serial form but with additional material not found in the online edition [now offline]. The episodes are based on journal entries made by Mr. Herr over many years. Some end with a cliff-hanger. The dangler could be Eli or Arnold hanging onto a steep, flimsy bookshelf for dear life - or somebody trying to hang onto their sanity.

In the 19th century, color-plate books were often “heightened with gum arabic” (as described in bookseller catalogues) to intensify the colors and provide a light sheen. It’s fair to say that the stories herein have been heightened. But it would be misleading to characterize them as tall-tales. They are not. But Mr. Herr was clearly wearing lifts in his shoes while writing them down.

I could go on about Eli Goodman, who I only knew from experience, and Arnold Herr, who has been a friend for many years. But there’s a guy wedged in a truck tire rolling down the street in my direction frantically waving his arms and shouting, “Get out of the way!” And so, hello, I must be going.

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HERR, Arnold M. The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Bookdealer. Berkeley: Poltroon Press in association with Booktryst, 2016. Octavo. Photo-illustrated wrappers. 136 pp. Cover photo by Shelly Vogel. BUY NOW. 

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Sartain's Original Engraved Steel Plate Of Charlotte Brontë Portrait Comes To Market

by Stephen J. Gertz

The plate.
(Image surrounding engraved oval is a reflection off the plate while photographed).

The original steel plate of the mezzotint portrait of Charlotte Brontë engraved by John Sartain has surfaced.

Sartain (1808-1897), known as the "father of mezzotint engraving" in the U.S., produced the portrait, engraved after George Richmond's famous portrait in chalk, in Philadelphia c. 1857.

The 10 1/4 x 7 inch beveled steel plate, engraved with Sartain's signature (verso with dagger-and-S mark of John Sellers & Sons Sheffield, an English manufacturer of steel and copper plates for engravers, amongst other goods, with an office in New York), appears to have been made to accompany the long review essay, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, in the October 1857 issue of The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and Art, which Sartain had an early financial interest in. 

A print struck from the plate.

John Sartain was arguably the foremost American engraver of his time and inarguably the pioneer of the mezzotint process in this country. He popularized the intricate printmaking process when he emigrated to the United States from England in 1830. His mezzotint prints possess a strong and rich texture that heightens and intensifies their aesthetic character.

Sartain was born in London in 1808. Left fatherless at the age of eight, he became responsible for the support of his family.  At age eleven, he took a job as assistant scene painter to an Italian pyrotechnist working at Covent Garden under Charles Kemble’s management and at Vauxhall Gardens in London. 

John Sartain.

In 1823, Sartain became an apprentice to engraver John Swaine (1775-1860), with whom he studied and worked for seven years.  Sartain also learned to paint, studying miniature painting with Henry Richter (1772-1857). He moved to Philadelphia in 1830.

He then produced engravings for various American periodicals including Gentleman’s Magazine, The Casket, and Godey’s Lady’s Magazine.  Sartain, beginning 1841, made quite a few  engravings for Graham’s Magazine, and, in 1849, he, along with William Sloanaker, bought the magazine for $5,000.  They changed the title to Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Among Graham's noted contributors were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe (an assistant editor there, as well), who became a close, personal friend of Sartain.

Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, 1850.

George Richmond (1809-1896), in his youth a disciple of William Blake, was a painter and draftsman with 326 portraits to his credit.

Brontë's publisher, George Smith of Smith Elder & Co., commissioned this portrait in chalk of the novelist from Richmond as a gift for Brontë's father, who saw in it "strong indications of the genius of the author." Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell recalled seeing the portrait hung in the parlour of the Haworth parsonage, and a copy of it appeared in her biography of Brontë.

Only a handful of likenesses of Charlotte Bronte have survived,  Richmond's portrait is by far the most celebrated, and Sartain's mezzotint is the finest engraving based upon it.

The plate exhibits the mezzotint (half-tone) process very well. Mezzotint achieves tone variations by working the plate with thousands of little dots made by a metal tool with small teeth called a "rocker." In printing, the tiny pits in the plate hold the ink when the face of the plate is wiped clean.  Subtle gradations of light and shade and richness in the print can be accomplished in skilled hands, and Sartain was a master of mezzotint, the first tonal process used in engraving, with aquatint to follow. Previously, tone and shading were possible only by employing hatching, cross-hatching, or stipple engraving, line or dot-based techniques that left a lot to be desired for nuanced effects.

There is no truth to the rumor I started that the Van Morrison-penned song, Mystic Eyes (recorded by Them, 1965), was inspired by the Richmond-Sartain portrait of Charlotte Brontë.

The plate is being offered by The 19th Century Rare Book & Photography Shop, of Maryland and New York.

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[BRONTE, Charlotte]. SARTAIN, John. Charlotte Bronte mezzotint portrait. Original steel plate, signed in the plate by John Sartain after George Richmond. N.P., [Philadelphia], c. 1857.

Original beveled steel plate (7 x 10 ¼ in.),  Light surface wear, a small tarnish mark.

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Brontë plate and print images courtesy of the 19th Century Rare Book & Photography Shop, with our thanks.

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1st Edition Of Emancipation Proclamation & Final Edition Of Lincoln's Hair

by Stephen J. Gertz

A copy of the first edition in book form of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document that freed the slaves in the Southern states during the American Civil War, will be offered by Heritage Auctions in its Americana and Political Signature sale May 24, 2014. It is estimated to sell for $5,000-$7,000.

The Proclamation in its preliminary form was issued by President Lincoln on September 22, 1862. It stressed military necessity as the basis for the freeing the slaves. The revised and final Proclamation became official on January 1, 1863. It was published as a broadside and simultaneously as a  seven-page booklet (3 1/8 x 2 1/8 in.) in pink wrappers in December 1862 by John Murray Forbes, a Boston Unionist who helped to raise troops, including the famous 54th Massachusetts Regiment. The booklet, seen above, was intended for distribution to Union troops who, in turn, could distribute copies to slaves in regions of the South occupied by Union forces.

It has the original thread binding and a brass grommet through pages 5-7 and the back cover. It is estimated that less than ten copies have survived.

Collectors of celebrity and historical hair will have their own stand on end and dance a jig in their follicles when Heritage offers five strands of Abraham Lincoln's scalp hair, part of a lock clipped while The Great Emancipator was on his deathbed. The hairs are estimated to sell for $1,000-$1,500.

The lock was originally owned by Dr. Charles Sabin Taft who was the second surgeon to treat Lincoln on the evening of his assassination. The five hairs are part of the most authenticated lock of Lincoln's hair extant. It was originally removed by Dr. Charles Leale, the first surgeon to arrive in aid of the dying President, so he could have clear access to examine and treat Lincoln's wound.

The lock was given to Mrs. Lincoln who soon returned it to Dr. Taft as a gift in appreciation of his efforts. Taft was a young surgeon who attended wounded Union troops at a Washington hospital and had become acquainted with the President during Lincoln's visits to the recovering soldiers. Dr. Taft willed the hair to his son, Charles C. Taft, who sold it to William H. Lambert in 1908.

Upon Lambert's death, the Lincoln hair was sold to Henry C. Hines, in whose possession it remained until 1993 when it was discovered in his estate. The small hairs are preserved in a plastic sleeve and barely perceptible in the image above. Copies of dozens of letters, documents and articles accompany the strands of hair as well as a Certificate of Authenticity from John Reznikoff of University Archives, holder of the Guinness World Record for the largest and most valuable collection of celebrity hair. A dubious distinction to the artifact-jaded, perhaps but I, for one, think DNA testing on literary celebrities' hair could be quite revealing; I'd like to get a load o' Georges Sand's genome, for historical purposes only, of course.

Included is a letter from Charles C. Taft to Civil War sergeant, writer, and famed collector of Lincoln memorabilia, Osborn H. I. Oldroyd (1842-1930), offering the lock of hair in 1907.

Dear Sir,

I am in receipt of yours from the 13th and contents noted. in reply will state that I will sell you the Lock of Hair and cuff button from the late President Abraham Lincoln for one thousand dollars. I consider this a very low figure for such precious articles, and were it not that I can use the money, I would not part with them at any price. Awaiting your reply.

Very truly yours,

Charles C. Taft

It is unknown how many strands of hair were in the original lock. Charles C. Taft split hairs, presenting six strands to John Hay, Lincoln's personal assistant and, later, Secretary of State. Hay had his six strands put inside a ring and in 1905 presented them to President Theodore Roosevelt upon the occasion of his inauguration with a letter that read "The hair in this ring is from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Taft cut it off the night of his assassination." The rest of the lock remained in Taft's possession.

His offer to Oldroyd declined, in 1908 Taft wrote to General James Grant Wilson offering the Lincoln Hair and a cuff button for sale. Wilson couldn't purchase the items but he alerted Major William H. Lambert. Lambert purchased the Lincoln items in a well documented sale on March 12, 1908.

For collectors of Americana, particularly of Lincolniana, these five strands of Lincoln's hair should be tantamount to five leaves from a Gutenberg Bible yet they are being offered for only $200-$300 per strand.

For perspective, a lock of Elvis Presley's hair sold in 2009 for $15,000. Our cultural priorities appear to be twisted; sic semper tyrannis, Jack. Perhaps if Lincoln had  sung Heartbreak Hotel while  wearing blue suede shoes on the night of the assassination his hair would be  appraised at higher price.

Not too long ago twelve strands of Michael Jackson's hair sold for $2,000, a price that seems rather low but the hairs were singed in 1984 while Jackson was shooting a Pepsi commercial and his head accidentally caught fire during the pyrotechnical display: condition is everything. Michael Jackson hair in fine condition would surely have been a thriller and fetched a great deal more.

Hair today, gone tomorrow, the auctioneer declared then ducked a tomato thrown his way.

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Images courtesy of Heritage Auctions, with our thanks.
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Mark Twain, Collector Of Compliments

by Stephen J. Gertz

Little Montana Girl's Compliment
"She was gazing thoughtfully at a photograph of Mark Twain
on a neighbor's mantelpiece. Presently she said, reverently,
'We've got a Jesus like that at home only ours has more trimmings.'"

On January 11, 1908, The Lotos Club in New York City, one of the oldest literary associations in the United States, held a dinner in honor of one of its members, Samuel L. Clemens, aka Mark Twain.

Founded in New York City in 1870 by a group of young writers, journalists and critics, the Lotos Club initiated Twain to membership in 1873, who, waggish card that he was, immediately declared it “The Ace of Clubs.” At the dinner - attended by many luminaries - the guest of honor gave a speech announcing that he had become a collector of compliments. PBA Galleries is offering one of those compliments, in Twain's hand, in its Historic Autographs & Manuscripts with Archival Material sale May 8, 2014. It is estimated to sell for $2,500-$4,000.

As reported in the New York Times, January 12, 1908, Twain told the gathering:

"I wish to begin at the beginning, lest I forget it altogether. I wish to thank you for your welcome now and for that of seven years ago, which I forgot to thank you for at the time, also for that of fourteen years ago which I also forgot to thank you for. I know how it is; when you have been in a parlor and are going away, common decency ought to make you say the decent thing, what a good time you have had. Everybody does it except myself.

"I hope that you will continue that excellent custom of giving me dinners every seven years. I had had it on my mind to join the hosts of another world - I do not know which world - but I have enjoyed your custom so much that I am willing to postpone it for another seven years.

"The guest is in an embarrassing position, because compliments have been paid to him. I don't care whether you deserve it or not, but it is hard to talk up to it.

"The other night at the Engineers' Club dinner they were paying Mr. Carnegie here discomforting compliments. They were all compliments and they were not deserved, and I tried to help him out with criticisms and references to things nobody understood.

"They say that one cannot live on bread alone, but I could live on compliments. I can digest them. They do not trouble me. I have missed much in life that I did not make a collection of compliments, and keep them where I could take them out and look at them once in a while. I am beginning now. Other people collect autographs, dogs, and cats, and I collect compliments. I have brought them along.

"I have written them down to preserve them, and think that they're mighty good and exceedingly just."

[Twain began to read a few. The first, by essayist, critic, and editor Hamilton W. Mabie, declared that La Salle might have been the first man to make a voyage of the Mississippi, but that Mark Twain was the first man to chart light and humor for the human race].

"If that had been published at the time that I issued that book [Life on the Mississippi] it would have been money in my pocket. I tell you it is a talent by itself to pay complements gracefully and have them ring true. It's an art by itself.

"Now, here's one by my biographer. Well, he ought to know me if anybody does. He's been at my elbow for two years and a half. This is Albert Bigelow Paine:

"'Mark Twain is not merely the great writer, the great philosopher, but he is the supreme expression of the human being with its strengths and weaknesses.'

"What a talent for compression!"

[Novelist, editor, and critic William Dean Howells, Twain said, spoke of him as first of Hartford and ultimately of the solar system, not to say of the universe].

"You know how modest Howells is. If it can be proved that my fame reaches to Neptune and Saturn, that will satisfy even me. You know how modest and retiring Howells is, but deep down he is as vain as I am."

"Edison wrote: 'The average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person he generally selects Mark Twain.'

"Now here's the compliment of a little Montana girl, which came to me indirectly. She was in a room in which there was a large photograph of me. After gazing at it steadily for a time, she said:

"'We've got a John the Baptist like that.' 

"She also said: 'Only ours has more trimmings.'

"I suppose she meant the halo.

[Since the offered "compliment" is numbered “4” and the Times reported the little girl’s compliment after three prior, this sheet was most likely Twain’s reading copy; he extemporaneously changed some of the words but it was basically the same story].

"Now here is a gold miner's compliment. It is forty-two years old. It was my introduction to an audience to which I lectured in a log schoolhouse. There were no ladies there. I wasn't famous then. They didn't know me. Only the miners were there with their breeches tucked into their boot tops and with clay all over them. They wanted someone to introduce me, and then selected a miner, who protested that he didn't want to do on the ground that he had never appeared in public. This is what he said:

"'I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is he has never been in jail and the other is I don't know why...'"

The dinner was Twain-themed. As tasty as his speech was, the meal was tastier, a feast for those whose tongue for Twain went all the way. On the menu that evening:

Innocent Oysters Abroad.
Roughing It Soup.
Huckleberry Finn Fish.
Joan of Arc Filet of Beef.
Jumping Frog Terrapin.
Punch Brothers Punch.
Gilded Duck.
Hadleyburg Salad.
Life on the Mississippi Ice Cream.
Prince and the Pauper Cake.
Pudd'nhead Cheese.
White Elephant coffee.
Chateau Yquem Royals.
Pommery Brut.
Henkow Cognac.

Dishes served only in spirit included:

Double-Barrelled Detective Mystery Vegetable.

Connecticut Yankee Stew.

Mysterious Stranger Souvlaki.

Our compliments to the chef - and honoree.
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Image courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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