Mysterious Daguerreotype Of Brooklyn NYC c. 1850 Est. $20K-$30K

by Stephen J. Gertz

A haunting, whole-plate daguerreotype of a street tableau in Brooklyn, New York City, staged and photographed c. mid-1850s, is being offered by Swann Auction Galleries on Thursday, October 17, 2013 in its Fine Photographs and Photobooks sale. It is estimated to sell for $20,000 - $30,000.

In this striking photo, a very quiet, treeless street lined with buildings of various architectural styles is populated by two enigmatic women who seem to be engaged in an entre-nous exchange at a doorway on a porch, their faces obscured, both by the distance at which the photographer was positioned and by a parasol held by the woman at left. They may know each other; they may not. One may live or work in the building, the other may be a visiting friend, business patron, or who knows and their ambiguous interaction hints of mystery and an intriguing, if inscrutable, story that begs to be deciphered.

The photo was certainly posed and not a candid snapshot. At this point in their development daguerreotypes took up to twenty minutes to expose; the women are in sharp focus; they stood there like stones until the photographer told them otherwise; this was not Candid Camera.

The owner of this daguerreotype (8.5 x 6.5 inches) purchased it with the understanding that it depicted Brooklyn, one of New York City's five boroughs. Architectural historian Francis Morrone, author of An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn (2001), asserts that, based on fire laws of the period (which prohibited new wooden house construction), the fringed or scalloped valances which were fashionable when wooden houses were being built, and the appearance of the Greek Revival house, the daguerreotype likely depicts a scene in Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The image features three beautiful buildings bathed in sunlight, each of them rivals for our attention  asking the inevitable question the image raises and the viewer wonders: are they the real subject of the daguerreotype, or does the staged scene hint at lost moment in time? This is the central drama of the photo, what stirs the imagination and makes it so desirable to collectors.

The elaborately designed wood-frame home at left displays a brick base, two porches, a pointed roof, and an artful bargeboard, while the wood-frame house at far right is minimalist with a simple jigsaw-cut bargeboard along the underside of the top gable serving as the structure's only ornamentation. The sun, shining in from the upper left side of the image, casts delicate shadows on the wooden boards, and highlights the delicate work of the architectural style. The large modified Greek Revival building in the center has a flat brick front and brownstone trimmings around the door and windows. The small porch is decorated with two potted plants astride the stairs, each with delicate hand-colored touches of red and green.

This scarce and stunning daguerreotype - the only known copy - is reproduced in John Wood's The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration (1989), where he notes that the signage on the right and left buildings' sides are legible as the office of Dr. H.B. May, the shop of J. Wood (a butcher), and a builder whose sign can be partially read. The plate was in the collection of Julian Wolff. 



With its inclusion of an ambiguous narrative within what was plainly an architectural photograph, this daguerreotype suggests the mid-twentieth century shift in fashion photography to present the clothing within a visual story often having nothing at all to do with the clothes or models yet nonetheless drawing us into an arresting image not easily forgotten, the fashions brought to life within an artificial reality. Here, the mystery women in the doorway animate the buildings and transform them into compelling characters in a secret history.

The deft composition, masterful handling of detail, insertion of figures and injection of mystery into this remarkable piece indicates that it was made by a skilled, highly imaginative photographer, alas, unknown. 

For these reasons it must be considered amongst the great American urban architectural photographs of the nineteenth century.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Grushenka: The Story Behind A Rare Classic Erotic Book

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

It is an anonymously written erotic novel privately printed in 1933 in Dijon, France but it's not Fifty Shades of Grey Poupon.

It is “the story of a Russian serf girl compiled from contemporary documents in the Russian Police files and private archives of Russian Libraries” (title page) translated from the original Russian but it's not Serfer Girl by The Boyar Boys.

It is Grushenka - Three Times A Woman.

A promotional insert teasing the book is sometimes found in copies of this scarce volume in its first edition. It tells quite a story. It's a doozy:

"'A Russian Woman is Three Times A Woman' - Old Russian Proverb

   Announcing the arrival from Paris of the
                                     Second and Final Shipment of 150 Copies
                                                  
                                                                    of

                                           Three Times A Woman -

                                                        'Grushenka'

Publication: Published in Paris in January 1933. Printed in Dijon, France. Discovered in Russia and sponsored by a well-to-do American literary man residing in Paris.

Format: A beautiful example of modern European book making. A large book, 7x9 inches (more than 80,000 words). A type page of finest proportions and clarity. Cover completely decorated in bold modernistic mode.

Illustrations: Seven full page wash drawings in half-tone reproduction, which, in the modern manner, "bleed" off the page. The drawings are the work of a young Parisian Russian and no higher praise can be said of them than that they do justice to the text.

The Book: At last a book which answers the complaint that erotic books "are all alike." A unique contribution in that its literary qualities are of the first order, while its material and the stark truthfulness of its presentation, is beyond any book of its kind now available. (See excerpt from sponsor's foreword following).

Ordinary erotic literature, as we know it in Europe and America, finds no place in the Soviet scheme of things. Such pornographia as 'The Memoirs of Fanny Hill,' 'The Scented Garden,' 'The Autobiography of a Flea,' mere Sunday school tracts as compared with 'Grushenka,' are vigorously forbidden. Yet 'Grushenka,' than which I know nothing more pornographically obscene, while not officially sponsored by the Soviet authorities, is not seriously frowned upon. The reason for this, of course, is Grushenka's indubitable propaganda value. So authentic an exposé if the unspeakable abuses, the utter licentiousness of Czarist Russia cannot be ignored.

Nor can 'Grushenka' be ignored from a literary view point. Unlike any other book of its kind, we find here a genuine sense of character and its development. Not only is the serf girl Grushenka's mental-emotional growth recorded, but changes in her body from year to year are described with minute care. Sexual experiences and abuses are related as we know they must have happened, not as we might with they had happened, This astounding truthfulness, this sincerity, this non-romanticism is devastating. Add to it a narrative gift which never lets down and a rich background of the social mores of the time and we find ourselves face to face with literature.

'Grushenka' was called to my attention in Moscow among a small group of artist-intellectuals who took it upon themselves to provide me with those conveniences and convivialities which a man of my temperament finds necessary to matter what the political philosophy of the state in which he finds himself. My knowledge of Russian is rudimentary and it was not until I met Tania that I was able to get any real inking of the work. So intrigued was I by this taste that forthwith Tania and I joined in a labour of love to set 'Grushenka' into English. The experience was highly educational for both of us, I flatter myself. Six months later I returned to my Paris apartment with the English manuscript of 'Grushenka.'

My decision to publish 'Grushenka' was made when one of my old friends, a seafaring man of literary inclinations, undertook the delicate task of transporting the printed volumes into England and America. My professional publishing connections in both countries put me in contact with reliable sub-rosa channels of distribution.

What financial gain results from this venture I shall send on to Tania. Being who she is, an emancipated woman of Red Russia, she will give the money to a communal nursery or to a research worker in birth control. Both worthy causes.

Go forth then 'Grushenka' to your English speaking readers. May you be a brief for the U.S.S.R., an explanatory voice for Tania, in addition to literature. May your new audience find you as vivid and thrilling as I did in your translation.

                                                                                                   J.D.
Paris, January 2nd, 1933."

Grushenka wasn't printed in Dijon; the closest the printer got to Dijon was when he went to d'bathroom. It is certainly not based upon secret Russian police files, and it was definitely not translated from a 19th century Russian erotic novel.

Grushenka is, in fact, an American original-in-English pastishe published in New York City, and the anonymous writer and publisher are fascinating characters.

 According to the rumors, Grushenka was written by the famed B-movie producer-writer of the 1940’s classic films, Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, and The Body Snatcher.


An enormous amount has been written regarding the “Russian” origins of this erotic classic chock-a-block with prostitution, sadism and the knout, written, all agree, by someone  familiar with Russia but with with lapses in knowledge of Russian customs and folklore. The rumors are true; Val Lewton wrote it. How do we know for sure?

Lewton was born Vladimir Ivan Leventon in 1904 in the Russian port city of Yalta on the Crimea.  The family moved to Berlin to be close to his widowed mother’s sister, the silent screen actress, Alla Nazimova. To the U.S. in 1909. He spoke and wrote Russian. He began his career as writer of very low-paying detective, exotic adventure, sultry-woman-on-the-skids Depression pulp fiction, one of his eight books being The Sword of the Cossack (London: John Hamilton, 1932), a historical novel set in Russia. During this time he was desperate for money to support his wife and children, an ideal motivation to write quick-buck porn. He admits to writing anything that would exploit his writing talent. He knew Russia but left at an early age; the book is filled with utter nonsense regarding Russian mores and customs and many historical inaccuracies, much like The Sword of the Cossack, but possesses enough verisimilitude to suggest authenticity. Grushenka fits within Lewton's chosen theme for his novels; it's a sultry-serf-girl-on-the-skids tale. 


The circumstantial evidence for Lewton's authorship is very strong. The direct evidence nails it, a self-written list of credits compiled by Lewton in 1937 that appears at the end of Joel E. Siegal’s definitive biography, The Reality of Terror (NY: Viking, 1973). Under the subtitle, Pornographic Novels, he lists as his own one Yasmine (“this is said to be one of the most beautifully illustrated books ever published and retails for $75.”). There are, apparently, no copies of Yasmine extant; nobody seems to have ever seen one. All copies appear to have been destroyed by the police.

And there on Lewton's list, under Yasmine, is Grushenka.  Lewton wrote, “I edited the translation from the Russian. I have a beautiful picture of this book taken from the N.Y. Daily Mirror showing it being shoveled into the Police Department furnace.” Given Lewton's background and the fact that Grushenka is not a translation, this smacks of pride of authorship. There is no doubt. Lewton wrote it.

Who published it? According to sexual folklorist, G. Legman, who was intimately involved in the trade in clandestine erotica during the 1930s and 1940s, and the Kinsey Library, Percy Shostac was the publisher. Who he?

Percy Shostac (1892-1968) was a New York City actor, stage manager, poet, playwright, and novelist originally from the Mid-West.  "Percy Shostac could have lived in Chicago or San Francisco, and the content of his novel would have been much the same. But he lived in the vicinity of Tammany Hall and the benches of Union Square, New York, and therefore entitled his volume "14th Street." It is impossible to call it a novel and yet it is endowed with the imaginative richness associated with the novel form; neither is it completely an autobiography, except that the author has made unmistakable references to his own life. The conflict is represented by the clash between his Jewishness and his  outer  surroundings" (Review of 14th Street by Percy Shostac, Simon and Schuster, 1930, in the Jewish Criterion July 18, 1930).

"Poet Shostac has less to say about Manhattan's 14th St. than about himself. He writes this segment of autobiography in unrhymed, uneven lines that read well and easily. Not particularly quotable, never reaching a high poetic plane, never distinguishing between the vocabulary of poetry & prose, his novel in verse has considerable cumulative effect" (Time, July 7, 1930).

Shostac also wrote The World's Illusion, a dramatization of Jacob Wasserman's novel, a manuscript without date; Abelard and Heloise, a one-act play (1915), and The Strength of the Weak, a psychological melodrama in three acts (1919).

Active as a stage manager beginning in 1917, he managed The Captive (1926), a play that critics felt was a corrupting influence on feminine morals and thus won the attention of the authorities. Yet "by January 1927 The Captive was being praised for its enormous 'social value,' its effectiveness in 'educating' sexually impressionable young women. Far from glamorizing lesbian attachments, the play's defenders now argued, The Captive vividly warned against them… Stage manager Percy Shostac explained to the press that many girls in the audience has been sent in detachments from boarding schools and all-female colleges, and that Helen Menken [the star] had 'received several notes from women educators in the audience, deans of women's colleges and finishing schools, who said were already concerned with the necessity of impressing the girls in their charge with the dangers of a reprehensible attachment between two women.' The play, he argued, filled exactly that need" (Hamilton, When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment, p. 99).

Stage and screen actor Basil Rathbone was a friend of Shostac's. They performed together in the romantic comedy, Love Is Like That by S.N. Behrman and Kenyon Nicholson, which ran for twenty-seven performances on Broadway in 1927. Rathbone played Prince Vladimir Dubriski, and exiled Russian who is actually a valet with social ambitions. Shostac portrayed Grigori, who, it seems, was Prince Vladimir's valet.

Rathbone performed in the aforementioned The Captive, a drama in three acts adapted by Arthur Hornblow, Jr., from "La Prisonnière" by Edouard Bourdet which opened at the Empire Theatre, New York City, September 29, 1926, and ran for 160 performances. In his autobiography, In and Out of Character (1962), he wrote of The Captive and Shostac:

"And now to share with you the last act of this hideous betrayal, this most infamous example of the imposition of political censorship on a democratic society ever known in the history of responsible creative theater; this cold-blooded unscrupulous sabotage of an important contemporary work of art; this cheap political expedient to gain votes by humiliating and despoiling the right of public opinion to express and act upon its considered judgment as respected and respectable citizens.

"A few days after the closing of the play we were ordered to appear at a downtown court…Our predicament has now become a case célèbre. We were headline news in every newspaper…"

After recalling the heart-rending testimony of the play's ingenue, Ann Trevor, Rathbone continues:

"His honor was obviously touched by this genuine and most appealing outburst, which was followed immediately by a cold and most incisive statement of his case by our stage manager, Percy Shostac. 'Your honor,' he said, in effect, 'I will not betray the principles by which I endeavor ro live. This is not an evil play, it is not even a harmful play. It is a great play which is saying something extremely important to our present-day society.. Something they need to know about, recognize and act upon. I will under no circumstances desert this production of Monseiur Bourdet's The Captive, even if it should mean that I spend the rest of my life in prison!'

"Ann Trevor and Percy Shostac - two gallant 'little people' unafraid to stand up in defense of their considered judgments and convictions - worthy descendants of the forefathers of this great country."

(Rathbone, a fine actor, was strictly ham on paper, projecting to readers in the balcony).

Shostac had experience with sexually-themed drama and censorship. Why he began to clandestinely publish erotica is likely due to his sympathies and the same reason Lewton wrote Grushenka. It was the depths of the Depression and a man did what he had to do to earn a buck. If he seemed hypocritical, condemning a variety of female sexual behavior then later publishing illegal erotica celebrating female licentousness, he wasn't. He was merely offering an early version of "redeeming social value" to offset the titillation on stage. Sex sells, he knew how to spin, and, as the promo sheet for Grushenka proves, he was a gifted huckster and publicist.

Shostac drifted out of poetry, novels, the theater, and publishing. What next for the man who, after stage managing The Captive, in addition to Grushenka also clandestinely published the erotic novels The Abduction of Edith Martin (1930); The Imitation of Sappho (1930); Crimson Hairs (1934); The Prodigal Virgin (1935), and quite likely (but not certainly) any erotic novel in English from the 1930s with the false imprint, "Dijon, France"?

In 1939 Percy Shostac was a member of the WPA Federal Writer's Project. During the 1940s he was a consultant, publicist, and author for the American Social Hygiene Association of New York and Chicago, in 1944 writing Industry vs. VD.  His next appearance on the radar screen is in a story found in the Village Voice, Oct. 17, 1956. He has turned his hobby of fashioning "weird, gnarled tree roots" into lamp stands into a business with a shop on Grove Street in Greenwich Village.

The first edition of Grushenka was graced with seven illustrations by "Kyu," an artist who was not "a young Parisian Russian." The Kinsey Library surmises that "Kyu" was an alternate pseudonym for the better-known pseudonymous artist, Jacques Merde (!), né William Bernhardt, who illustrated some of Shostac's other sub-rosa publications. Stylistic comparison strongly suggests that Kyu and Jacques Merde/William Bernhardt were one and the same person.

Val Lewton, after his exploits into erotica, became David O. Selznick’s story editor in Hollywood.  In an interesting, little known aside, he wrote (uncredited) the renowned Richmond train station scene in Gone With The Wind where the extent of Confederate wounded and dead is dramatically revealed via an expensive crane-shot pull-back.

In a sequence in Vincent Minnelli’s film The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), the lead character, Jonathan, is depicted producing horror movies so low budget that suggestion, shadow, sound and suspense must be used in lieu of special make-up and film effects. That sequence in Jonathan's career is based upon Lewton’s experience and unlikely success at RKO from 1942-1946 with The Cat People, etc. The bad and the beautiful in bondage succinctly sums up Grushenka. 

"A Russian Woman is Three Times A Woman"  is a non-existent "Old Russian Proverb." However, "She's once, twice, three times a lady" is an old American proverb firmly attributed to Lionel Richie of The Commodores.

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Book Heisters & Gangbusters: The Notorious Rare Book Thieves of New York And Their Nemesis

by Stephen J. Gertz

There was Babyface Mahoney, who made the libraries of New England his playground; the Swede; Harry Gold, whose scouts were not Baden-Powell boys yet still tied the cops into knots; "Doctor" Harold Clarke, whose Ph.D was in larceny and logorrhea; the Southerner Dupree, who'd steal almost anything; the thief known only as Paul, a nimble lifter who could jump through a library window with the loot if need be; Ben Harris, the Dane who sold illegal erotica, was savvy, fearless, and knew the score. There was Jack Brocher, who hijacked Connecticut, tipped it over, and poured its rare books into New York; Oscar the fence Chudnowsky; the shadowy master thief known as Hilderwald, Hilderman, or Hilderbrand, a literary tourist on the wrong path who checked into the Library of Congress and checked out with rarities purloined as if they were hotel toiletries and towels; and more members of the crew, desperado biblioklepts all.

And then there was Charles Romm, who, with fire hydrant physique and the face and temperament of Al Capone, led this gang responsible for a five year tsunami of rare book thievery at Columbia University Library, Harvard Library, the New York Public Library, Boston Public Library, and almost every other public and private library in the Northeast, the many small town libraries easy pickin's. The books were scoured of obvious ID and then made their way to Book Row on New York City's Fourth Avenue, six long city blocks lined with the greatest concentration of secondhand book shops in the world. From Book Row the literary swag went up the food chain onto the shelves or into the back rooms of upscale rare and antiquarian booksellers in uptown Manhattan who weren't too picky about provenance, looked the other way, or were duped. The years 1926-1931 were open season for book hunters of dubious character stealing and/or dealing in hot rare books.

But G. William Bergquist, Special Investigator for the NYPL with a bloodhound nose and terrier disposition, was on their trail.

The beginning of the end for the outfit began with a copy of Poe's scarce Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). On Saturday, January, 10, 1931 Harry Gold sent the Southerner Dupree to the NYPL to steal the library's precious copy with the Swede and Paul as back-up in case Dupree, on his first caper, got the willies. That he did but managed to make a mad dash for the exit without slipping on the sweat flooding out of his pores and onto the floor; library staff were right behind him. But not right enough. An hour after the Southerner's close call  Al Aaraaf  was in Gold's hands.

As Travis McDade, author of The Book Thief: The True Crimes of Daniel Spiegelman, and curator of rare books at the University of Illinois College of Law writes in his new book, Thieves of Book Row: New York's Most Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It, Bergquist's pursuit of Al Aaraaf  (he was as anxious to retrieve it as he was to nail the perp) led to the unraveling of the Romm Gang. Significantly, the case spurred libraries across the country to beef up security, which, at the time, was, to put it delicately, in its infancy.

And book theft had been, until this episode, casually treated by the police and lightly prosecuted. Book thieves were considered to be mentally ill, at the mercy of an uncontrollable passion, the "gentle madness" that Nicholas A. Basbanes has written so well about. Book thieves were finally considered to be criminals and, in New York, accommodations at Sing-Sing now awaited the convicted.

As McDade makes clear in this exhaustively researched book - 185 pages of text with twenty-three pages of notes - book theft was nothing new. Its roots stretch back to the mid-nineteenth century when the first public libraries in the U.S. were established, and library theft has always attracted colorful characters. No less so were the rare and antiquarian booksellers who were actively or passively complicit in the traffic in stolen books. Those with a nose for trade history may be startled to see many familiar names from the past and learn that some of those, amongst the most respected dealers in the U.S., were not averse to acquiring books warm to the touch. The rare book trade has always been a capital-intensive, feast or famine business with even the most successful dealers often on the brink of disaster. It's a great passion but a tough way to earn a living. The temptation to acquire books at suspiciously low prices once loomed large and the quest for legitimate bargains remains an ongoing imperative. Idealists who enter the trade are soon disillusioned; purity is for Ivory soap. This is hard commerce.

Thieves of Book Row, published by Oxford University Press, is a scholastic book that wants to be a popular true crime narrative and, to a large extent, it succeeds. There is rough going at first as McDade tries to wrestle the wealth of material into submission and draw us in. The sins of academic writing are difficult to exorcise but McDade, who teaches a class at University of Illinois on Rare Books, Crime & Punishment, soon loosens up, hits his stride, and the story takes off with a delightful dose of wit, a broad splash of color, and rich details and anecdotes.

Example: Adolf Stager, owner, with his son, of the Cadmus Bookshop, routinely and curiously wore his hat and coat at all times while in the shop. Why? He was on disability insurance and not allowed to work so he maintained a full-time facade that he was simply visiting his son at the store in case the authorities dropped by to check on him.

Bandits, rascals and rogues; good guys, scholars, and strugglers; individualists, misfits, and the melancholy: the rare book trade's personnel department never has to recruit, we just show up. The feral bandits have been tamed, if not domesticated, since trade associations emerged in the mid-20th century and established codes of ethics, which even non-association members tend to follow; it's just good business. The fact that book theft is now considered a serious crime with serious consequences has tempered the temptation for stealer and receiving dealer alike. The overwhelming number of rare and antiquarian booksellers are on the square and perhaps the worst that can be said about a dealer's behavior reiterates Chico Marx's reply in A Day At The Races when Groucho asks if he can trust Harpo.

"Sure, he's honest," Chico says, "but you gotta watch him a little."

I love the trade and our cast of characters. And I loved this book, a chronicle of Booktown's  Depression-era mean streets when literary culture met organized crime.

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McDADE, Travis. Thieves of Book Row. New York's Notorious Rare Book Ring and the Man Who Stopped It. New York: Oxford University Press, (June) 2013. First edition. Octavo. xi, [1], 216 pp. Black cloth, gilt-lettered spine. Dust jacket. $27.95.

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Snap Judgements: New York's Photo League

by Alastair Johnston
 

The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936–1951
Yale University Press, edited by Mason Klein and Catherine Evans, 248 pp., with 150 duotones and 76 B&W images.

This book and touring exhibition presents a comprehensive look at a little-known and important American art organization of the mid-twentieth century. Formed in 1936, the Photo League of New York shut down 15 years later during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era. Their parent organization, the Film & Photo League, was formed in 1930 as part of FDR's New Deal to make documentary films. A number of Leftists and Jews were prominent in their ranks. Like the WPA before them these artists had an incredible empathy for their subjects, and believed in art in the service of progressive social activism. The Photo League, led by Paul Strand, Walter Rosenblum and Sid Grossman, broke away from the parent film unit after an unresolved fight over aesthetic versus political approaches to their work. There were some 400 members over the years, and today we recognize the big names of street photography among them: Lisette Model, Weegee, W. Eugene Smith, Berenice Abbott, Lou Stoumen, Aaron Siskind, Jerome Leibling, Dan Weiner, and many others who created a new aesthetic, both in terms of the composition and printing of their work, and in the subject matter.

Lisette Model, "Lower East Side, ca. 1940"

Lewis Hine was obviously a key figure in their formation, in fact he left his archives to the Photo League (and this was the beginning of a nightmare as one unscrupulous member -- Rosenblum -- started printing Hine's negatives and added a studio stamp to the back to make them appear to be vintage prints, as a marketing scam). Hine, like Jacob Riis, pioneered documentary portraits of the grim life of "the other half." Riis was the first to use flash photography to cast light on the seedy all-night dives or hobos' lairs under bridges. Hine snuck into factories to find children tending huge dangerous machines: his work had a major impact on child labor laws in the USA. His oeuvre gave the Photo League permission not to be squeamish and to bare all in their own work. Newly introduced hand-held 35 mm cameras -- also embraced by Paul Strand -- made spontaneous street photography possible and, despite any political agenda, the members were able to incorporate poetry and self-expression into their work.

Marvin E Newman, "Halloween, South Side, 1951"

I had always loved Helen Levitt until I found out she cheated: she had a spy camera that had a mirror in it so she would be facing one way and looking in the viewfinder, as if she were photographing the street, but in reality was taking a picture at 90 degrees of people on the stoop. To me it's important to engage the subject in the photo for a successful image. However there are other, unknown, photographers in here that catch those "Levitt" moments with aplomb and, presumably, without resorting to mirrors. Marvin E Newman's "Halloween, South Side, 1951," is a classic "Levitt" shot, and one that has not been widely published. Quite a few of the Photo League photographers, such as Arthur Leipzig, were interested in children's games. Similarly the caught-on-the-fly moments of Austrian Robert Frank are foreshadowed in the cauldron of the Photo League.

In the case of the WPA photographers, their government-backed mandate was to document the migration of farmers in the Dust Bowl: for the Photo League the poor inhabitants of Harlem in their backyard became the subject of a documentary study from 1936-40.

Vivian Cherry, "Game of Lynching, East Harlem, 1947"

"Game of Lynching," a series by Vivian Cherry (a former dancer who took up photography when she was injured), shows two little white boys holding the arms of an African American youth as part of a very different game. Cherry sent the images to McCall's who rejected them saying they were a little too real for publication and they did not think their readers could empathize or identify with the protagonists. But the rise of the picture press, such as Life, Look and PM magazines, was a great forum for these artists from the Depression through the Second World War and on to the burgeoning Civil Rights struggle. To bolster their ranks the Photo League also got Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon, three of the great unsung heros of the WPA, as members. (Because Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange are such giants, history has unfairly overlooked the many other talented artists who worked for Roy Stryker in the Farm Security Administration.)

Aaron Siskind, "The Wishing Tree, Harlem, 1937"

Aaron Siskind became a well-known teacher, and as a member of the Photo League he had the idea of the Harlem project: Ten photographers (Max Yavno and Morris Engel included) documented life in the poor black neighborhood of Manhattan and then staged exhibits around New York to show the results. Unfortunately, in Siskind's re-edited version of the project, the images tended to reinforce stereotypes of impoverishment.

Arthur Leipzig, "Ideal Laundry, 1946"

In 1951 the Photo League members were blacklisted for leftist leanings but had already made their mark in paving the way for street photographers. Soon MoMA and other important venues would accept street photography into their exhibitions. After the group was disbanded, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin turned to cinema and made the wonderful "Little Fugitive" which is available on DVD.

Jerome Leibling, "Butterfly Boy, New York, 1949"

The exhibit is on view through Jan 21 at the Jewish Museum in San Francisco then goes to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach through April 2013.
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Heartbreaking Marilyn Monroe Letter Estimated At $30,000-$50,000

by Stephen J. Gertz

On December 18, 2012, auction house Profiles in History is offering an extremely poignant, rich and revealing, aching and intriguing two-page letter signed by Marilyn Monroe. Undated but written c.1954-55 and composed in her own hand on Waldorf-Astoria stationary, it provides an intimate peek into the troubled soul of Hollywood's most enduring and legendary sex symbol. This extraordinary letter is estimated to sell  for $30,000-$50,000.

In 1954, Marilyn Monroe fled Hollywood for New York City to study at The Actors Studio, sub-leasing an apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria for the duration. There she was reintroduced to playwright Arthur Miller, whom she'd originally met in 1950, and they began to date. Her neighbor in New York, Brooklyn-born playwright, poet, and novelist Norman Rosten, to whom the letter is addressed, was a friend of Miller's; Rosten and his wife, Hedda, became close to Marilyn after Miller introduced them.

By the mid-1950s Monroe's use of alcohol and prescription drugs began to get out of control in concert with her struggle with chronic depression.

With its many cross-outs, corrections, and sloppy and confused handwriting it is not unreasonable to strongly suspect that Marilyn was intoxicated when she wrote the letter.

It reads in full:

Dear Norman,

It feels a little funny to be writing the name Norman since my own name is Norma and it feels like I’m writing my own name almost, However—

First, thanks for letting Sam [photographer and MM confidant Sam Shaw] and me visit you and Hedda last Saturday. It was nice. I enjoyed meeting your wife – she seemed so warm to me. Thanks the most for your book of poetry—with which I spent all Sunday morning in bed with. It touched me – I use to think if I had ever had a child I would have wanted only a son, but after reading - Songs for Patricia [Simon and Schuster, 1951] – I know I would have loved a little girl just as much but maybe the former feeling was only Freudian for something…anyway Frued [sic]

I use to write poetry sometimes but usually I was very depressed at those times and the few (about two) people said that it depressed them, in fact one cried but it was an old friend I’d known for years. So anyway thanks. And my best to Hedda & Patricia and you— 

Marilyn M.

Monroe's mention in the letter of her desire to bear a child was a tragically unfulfilled dream. After her marriage to Miller in 1956 she suffered a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy followed shortly thereafter while she was living in a farmhouse in Amagansett, New York. It was at this time, in 1957, that her abuse of drugs and alcohol accelerated: Rosten received a call one night that year from Monroe’s maid in the middle of the night. When Rosten rushed over, Monroe had overdosed and her stomach was being pumped.

This letter was professionally washed resulting in a slight bleeding of the ink, the inadvertent effect of which dramatically heightens the content. It's as if she used a fountain pen filled with black tears.

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Images courtesy of Profiles in History, with our thanks.
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Of related interest: Marilyn Monroe: Avid Reader & Book Collector.
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The Discovery of America and New York in 1892

by Stephen J. Gertz

For most visitors to Manhattan, both foreign and domestic, New York is the Shrine of the Good Time. This is only natural, for outsiders come to New York for the sole purpose of having a good time, and it is for their New York hosts to provide it. The visiting Englishman, or the visiting Californian, is convinced that New York is made up of millions of gay pixies, flittering about constantly in a sophisticated manner in search of a new thrill. - Robert Benchley

When John Smith, a naive new arrival to New York in 1882, explores the city's nightlife, exotic though unnerving and, ultimately, enervating adventures ensure. By the end of his journey into Gotham's underbelly, as recounted in a scarce volume, The Discovery of America and New York, he needs to lie down for five weeks. The fast lane during the Gilded Age was no place for a meek pony to rev horsepower it desired but didn't possess.

"The only True and Authentic Portrait & Signature of John Smith,
discoverer of America."

He attends a performance of The Black Crook, considered to be the first modern American book-musical (it featured a song, Oh, You Naughty, Naughty Men! perhaps inspiring young John Smith's escapades); experiences Madison Square Rooftop Garden, later the scene for Harry Thaw's murder of architect Stanford White over the alluring Evelyn Nesbit; a New York barroom; the Eden Musée (a toney wax museum and art center); a casino; etc. and so forth.

Note the "seal" of the NY Society for the Prevention of Vice stamp in red.

So forth, indeed, that he winds up passed-out drunk in a barrel after being mugged and beaten. Found by the police, he is, naturally, arrested. Idiocy-with-intent-to-commit-foolishness has always been frowned upon by the NYPD; it's on the books, a municipal code violation. They distain naifs who should know better. This is New York, after all, where newcomers have fifteen minutes to wise-up or else suffer the consequences.

Smith, "Discovered by one of the Natives."

Battered, bruised, and bereft of his innocence, he finds his way to Dr. D.M. Stimson's office, where he discovers the modern health care crisis in its infancy: he has to wait a long time to be seen. A VERY long time.

Little is known of illustrator H.W. McVickar. He was born in 1860, and flourished in his career 1880-1905 as an exponent of the Art Nouveau style before he appears to have fallen off a cliff and been forgotten. He is responsible for thirty-one works in seventy publications in three languages, including novels by Henry James (Daisy Miller; An International Episode), many other books, and Harper's and Life magazines.

The Discovery of America and New York was self-published by McVickar as a gift book to friends and his doctor, D.M. Stimson - yes, a real person, a surgeon of renown in the city.

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McVICKAR, H[enry (aka Harry)]. W[hitney]. The Discovery of America and New York: October 12, 1892 by a Young Man Who Had Been Five Weeks in Bed Named John Smith. [New York]: [by the author], 1892. First (only) edition, limited to an unknown but likely very small number of copies. Octavo. 62 pp. with  thirty-one pen and ink drawings, including faux titlepage, each predominately full page, most with watercolor highlighting, several in full color. Half-leather over marbled boards, with "Dr. D.M. Stimson" embossed in gilt to upper cover.

Unrecorded, with no copies noted by OCLC/KVK.
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Images courtesy of Brian Cassidy, Bookseller, with our thanks.
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The Fast Women of New York (Vintage 1869)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Society to-day in New York means everything and anything...The members of it are chiefly concerned in the important item of living, although some of them live at a fast dying rate. The rage of the hour with the masses is display, ostentation, dress and the gratification of all the animal desires. Toes are educated more than hands, and the tongue talks vastly more than the brain thinks. Polish, etiquette and accomplishment are of more value than honesty of purpose and a good common sense education. There are exceptions to this rule, as there are to all rules, but this is the way we look at the masses.

Society of to-day represents the highest perfection of our Anglo-Saxon civilization as developed under a republican form of government in the New World. While there is much in it which is worthy of all admiration, there is much which is crude, false, foolish, wicked and deserving of our censure. It is now content with nothing short of what money can purchase....As the love of money is the root of all evil, so society which is built on money has much in it which is evil...

Thus begins The Women of New York: Or the Under-World of the Great City. Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Saloon Girls, Pickpockets and Shoplifters, Artists' Female Models, Women-of-the-Town, Etc., Etc., Etc., a grand tome from 1869, a significant time in American culture when, weary of war, seeking pleasure, and greater personal freedoms, the average American city dweller's manners. mores, and values began to dramatically shift. The emergence of the working woman, freed from domestic chains, created great anxiety amongst religious leaders, moralists, and culturally conservative citizens. 

The Women of New York is just one of the many books that were published in the late 1860's-early 1870s that warned of a cultural Armageddon in the making. It, amongst these other volumes, constitutes nothing less than the origin of  the culture wars in the United States, now in their 151st year.

The Belle of Fashionable Society.

After a discussion of the good old days and an enumeration of the various types of society, the pseudonymous George Ellington gets down to business: the ladies of New York who exemplify the New Woman, to wit: whores and, due to their modern behavior, the nearly so if they're not careful. The shop girl - a new phenomenon - is just one step up from the streets.

At the Races - "Liquoring Up."

The book is divided into  eight sections: Women of Fashion; Women of Pleasure; Married Women; Wicked Women; Female Artistes (Ballet-Girls; Female Models; Actresses); Life in a Female Seminary; Other Women (i.e. physicians; "strong-willed women"); Female Institutions.  Married women do not escape Ellington's  indictment; the chapter titles to that part of the book tell the tale: Matrimonial Infelicities; Marriage à la  Mode; Married Intrigues in Middle Life; Married Liaisons; Separation and Divorce in New York; "Fast Women." There's no escaping the author's scorn; these women are wicked.

Fast Women at the Races.

But not as wicked as "Wicked Women," which include Female Astrologists; Female Clairvoyants; Female Adventurers; Female Pickpockets and Shoplifters.

A Stylish Mamma.

Beware the "fast woman."

"They indulge in all the 'manly sports' which it is possible for women to indulge in, and their philosophy or belief, if they have one, is to eat, drink, and be merry. They are of the world, worldly, and prefer to live and enjoy the present...

"The number of these fast women in New York is perfectly astounding to persons who really have a chance to know. There are, of course, a great many good women in New York who are not fast [slow women: "not so fast, buddy!"]...Fast women are not necessarily bad - they may be virtuous, they may scorn or pity the cyprian - but whatever they may be in that respect they are 'fast,' and lead an exceedingly rapid though short life."

One of the Few Good Mammas.

The above may be one of the few good mammas but I suspect Sylish Mamma is having a better time; "one of the few good mammas" could use a stiff drink to loosen-up; any stiffer in appearance and she might be confused with a caryatid.

The Queen of the "Underworld."

"Out of doors, on the streets of New York, under the light of the gas-lamps, the denizens of the under-world may be seen in even greater numbers than in the fine houses..." And so we are introduced to "Nymphs du Pave,"  a delightful euphemism for streetwalkers; the pavement-pro has never sounded so exotic.

A Female Gambling House on Broadway.

"Women of all classes of society in New York use stimulants and narcotics to a greater or lesser extent but the demi-monde in particular, above and beyond all others, are addicted to these unwholesome and life-destroying habits. If the women of fashion are compelled to use various kinds of opiates to induce sleep, how much more are the women of pleasure, whose life is one continued round of dissipation all the year through, and who never know what rest is...This practice is about as common as eating among them, and is indulged in by all classes of women-on-the-town, whether they be high or low.

"Hasheesh was the favorite drug with these women some years ago but it is no longer thought much of...Laudanum is a favorite drug with the demi-monde, and some of them carry its use to a fearful extent."

Female Models and the Artist at Work.

"To be a model female requires considerable good sense and qualities of the head and heart. To be a female model one can get along without any of these qualifications, so long as she possesses a fine, voluptuous form."

It should be clear by now that this book could have been written yesterday. The Culture Wars, modern greed, and the place of women in today's America can be traced in a very straight line back to this, and other, similar books of the era, a time when the new was outpacing the old at breakneck speed and the old had a bad case of the willies. Women were beginning to think and do for themselves.  Next thing you know they'll want to vote. Call the Riot Squad.

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ELLINGTON, George (pseud.). The Women of New York: Or the Under-World of the Great City. Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Saloon Girls, Pickpockets and Shoplifters, Artists' Female Models, Women-of-the-Town, Etc., Etc., Etc. With Numerous Engravings. New York: The New York Book Company, 1869. First edition. Tall octavo. 650 pp. Frontispiece, 43 full page engraved plates.

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Future Utopia In Brooklyn, 1992! (In Case You Missed It)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Brooklyn, 1992, a great place to live.

It is cleaner; you can eat off the sidewalks. It is more peaceful; on Sundays you can hear a pin drop. It is healthier, and generally better than ever before. A 2¢ plain, (seltzer, i.e. seltza!) presumably, still costs two cents. Mass electrification via solar power and mechanization have brought widespread prosperity, and the extremes of wealth and poverty have been shaved. The electric car is standard (though not a Prius in sight). Government and the economy have meshed as a cooperative commonwealth. All land is owned by the state; people lease the sites of their palatial  - yes, palatial - homes.; every house a McMansion. Men and women are fully equal. Religion and science have buried the hatchet and are now best buds; indeed science and religion are one. Color photography has finally arrived. Various super-duper gizmos have increased the breadth and efficiency of personal communications.  Contact has been been made with Mars. The borough is now part of the city of Columbia, formerly New York. War is a thing of the past. The whole scene is, as they say in Brooklyn, "Cherce."

Oh, and dogs now understand human speech and can respond with a code of staccato barks.

Big changes since 1893, when the above was predicted. Bigger than when Bohemia colonized the Williamsburg district, bigger than when its HQ (hip quotient) burst the thermometer and led to gentrification, bohemian exodus, and Starbucks.

 

Earth Revisited is one of the more unusual novels of Utopian literature, a genre that thrived during the latter part of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

In 1892 Herbert Atheron is a successful businessman with a wife and two children. Only fifty, he contracts a fatal disease; he is dying as the novel opens. He regrets his life of crass money-making and rues the loss of Teresa, a young woman he was in love with in youth but who had tragically died. He loses consciousness.

When he awakens, he is a twenty-seven year old named Harold Amesbury, a man who has been ill and delirious for the last three months, nursed by Helen, who brings him back to a semblance of mental balance and introduces him to the world, Brooklyn, one hundred years later, a place of "bewildering magnificence and beauty." 

Helen and Harold draw close but his obsession with the long-lost Teresa drives a wedge between them and she leaves him. He boards at a house owned by a medium who leads him on a spiritual journey through time and space to the now-evergreen Sahara where he meets up with Helen. They experience a spiritual mind-meld and learn that Helen is the reincarnation of Teresa. They marry, take the last exit to Brooklyn, watch a tree grow there, and live happily ever after.

Byron Alden Brooks (1845–1911) "was a native New Yorker, born in the small town of Theresa. He was educated at Wesleyan University. Brooks was a teacher, journalist, and inventor as well as the author of several other literary works. His first book was King Saul (1876). As an inventor, he produced improvements in typewriters and linotype machines; his most notable innovation was probably the first typewriter that could shift between upper- and lower-case letters" (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography).

Only one thing remains in Brooklyn 1992 as it was in 1892. Dogs cannot scoop up their own poop. And they call it utopia...
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BROOKS, Byron. Earth Revisited. Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1893. First edition. Octavo. 318, (4 publisher's catalog) pp. Publisher's blue cloth boards, lettered in gilt.

Bleiler, Science-Fiction the Early Years 277. Negley 149. Sargent, p.49.
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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books.

Read the entire text of Earth Revisited here.
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“Luscious” Lucius Beebe: Bon Vivant Book Man

“Lucius Beebe, who was larger than life, is dead. The famous author suffered a heart attack shortly after his ritual morning Turkish bath in his Hillsborough winter home yesterday” (obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 4, 1966).

"If anything is worth doing it is worth doing in style, and on your own terms, and nobody's Goddamned else's!" - Lucius Beebe.

“I admire most of all The Renaissance Man, and if it can be said without pretentiousness, I like to think of myself as one, at least in some small measure. Not a Michelangelo, mark you, but perhaps a poor man's Cellini or a road company Cosimo de' Medici ... the Renaissance Man did a number of things, many of them well, a few beautifully. He was no damned specialist.” - Lucius Beebe, as quoted by Herb Caen.

Yet Lucius Morris Beebe (1902 – 1966) was a specialist. His specialty was life.

He also specialized in a particular subject area that has many avid book collectors. He was a gentleman-scholar, a prolific writer of books that remain key references in thier field, and some that have become highly collectible, particularly those published by the legendary San Francisco bookman and giant in the antiquarian book trade, Warren R, Howell, of Howells Books, in beautifully designed limited editions with fine production values issued by Howell-North Press.

Lucius Beebe was born into the opulence and splendor of The Gilded Age by an extremely wealthy Boston mercantile and banking family. As an undergraduate at both Harvard and Yale, he was an outstanding student - and troublemaker of prodigious talent and dash. He had a roulette wheel and fully equipped bar in his dorm room. It was his custom, classmates recalled, to appear for class on Monday mornings in full evening dress, wearing a monocle and carrying a gold-headed cane.

He once attempted to t.p. J.P. Morgan's yacht from above, bombing it with rolls of toilet paper from an airplane he'd chartered just for the occasion.

In recognition and celebration of Beebe's many accomplishments, Harvard and Yale invited him to be expelled, an invitation beyond his control to decline.

When not pursuing hedonism with a vengeance, he earned distinction as an undergraduate poet and won his Master’s degree (finally) with a thesis on the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, published in 1928 in an edition of twenty-five copies. In 1931, he wrote a biography of the poet.

He joined the staff of the New York Herald-Tribune in 1929, and soon snapped Manhattan to full attention with his presence. Journalist Walter Gibbs noted the “outrageous majesty of his appearance,” and recalled witnessing the startling disjunction of the budding journalist covering a “negligible fire in a morning coat, and a tedious dinner of the New York Landscape Gardening society in top hat and tails.”

In 1934 he began a daily newspaper column that ran for ten years. This New York quickly became must-reading, avidly read by 1.5 million New Yorkers of all classes, who marveled at Beebe’s inordinate charm and dry wit (he once wrote, "Mrs. Graham Fair Vanderbilt’s butler is reported to have been dismissed for saying, ‘O.K., Madam ...'"), qualities that greatly mitigated his monumental snobbishness. He chronicled “cafe society,” a term he coined to describe the mere 500 people in the world who, by his standards, qualified. To be a member of Beebe’s cafe society you had to be rich and/or famous but far more to the point, you had to live an interesting, adventurous life with élan and panache.

Lucius Beebe, bon-vivant.

A typical evening for Beebe would begin at the opera, followed by expeditions to and through El Morocco, "21", the Colony, and the Stork Club. Afterward, he’d often stop into a Broadway coffee shop with friends - Noel Coward, for instance - for a bowl of chili. Only afterward would he write his column. He was, despite his decadent habits, a disciplined writer and work horse.

Lucius Beebe (right) at The Opera Club on opening night for the Metropolitan Opera, 1946.

His satorial splendor was legendary. He routinely sported custom-made suits from Savile Row, thick gold watch chains, and derby hats. He endured five kidney-stone operations - the result of his love of fine food, cigars, and distilled spirits - but was cavalier about them; they were simply a small price to pay for living the good life.

Lucius Beebe at ready for the San Fransico Opera,

here in the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel.
This photograph originally appeared in Holiday, the travel
magazine for the social set that Beebe regularly contributed to.

It should come as no surprise that Lucius Beebe wrote The Stork Club Bar Book (1946), a highly desirable (unsigned, fine copies in like dust jackets are currently fetching up to $450), essential volume for those besotted by rare cocktail recipe books, a spirited area of book collection; its price is the proof.

Famed columnist and radio broadcaster, Walter Winchell, called him “Luscious Lucius,” which may have been a veiled allusion to Beebe’s homosexuality as much as a commentary on his style. Beebe didn’t much care what anyone thought about it; he was one of the first gay men to be open about his relationships. He would respond to whispers with a sharp “go to hell.”

Given all of the above, his area of scholarship and literary legacy seem most unlikely. It may come as a shock to learn that "Luscious Lucius" Beebe was, and remains, the greatest writer on railroading that America has ever produced, his books fundamental to any serious collection on the subject.

Beebe, dressed down (but not out) taking photographs of trains.
He was America's premier historian, scholar and photographer
of America's passenger trains.

Beebe posing with his first private railroad car, The Gold Coast.

In 1940, Beebe visited Virginia City, Nevada, and fell in love with the historic mining town, often returning to visit. Two years earlier, he began his love affair with trains and railroads and published his first book on the subject. In 1949, tired of the social scene he created, he moved there and bought a newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise, to which Mark Twain had contributed, 1862-1868; the stories in Roughing It! first appeared in its pages.

Beebe moved into the town’s oldest, largest home, the opulent Piper mansion. He had two personal railroad cars, The Gold Coast and Virginia City, custom-made for himself and his personal and professional partner, Charles Clegg. They were the most lavish and expensively outfitted private railway cars in the United States, the period equivalent of today’s private jet. They were decorated in an over the top Venetian-Renaissance-Baroque style by a Hollywood set designer.

Lucius Beebe (r) and his partner, Charles Clegg, in the dining salon
of their private railroad car, The Virginia City.

The editorial policy of The Territorial Enterprise under Beebe’s stewardship was, as one reader characterized it, “pro-prostitution, pro-alcohol, pro-private-railroad cars-for-the-few and fearlessly anti-poor folks, anti-progress, anti-religion, anti-union, anti-diet, anti-vivisection and anti-prepared breakfast food.” When Virginia City went up in arms about a brothel located near a school, he resisted efforts to move the brothel, sloganeering, “Don’t move the girls; move the school.”

Lucius Beebe, the "Dude" of Virginia City, in his office at the Territorial Enterprise.

On having been a New York society columnist, he wrote: "I considered my function that of a connoisseur of the preposterous... I did have a fabulous time. I did drink more champagne and get to more dinner parties and general jollification than I would have in almost any other profession."

Lucius Beebe turned his back on it to ride the rails of his imagination into the West and a bygone era. When a friend complained that if Thomas E. Dewey was elected President it would set the country back 50 years, Beebe replied "And what was wrong with 1898?" Indeed, it was the Gilded Age, the height of railway travel and steam locomotive splendor.

Beebe had come home.

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Tomorrow: An Illustrated Checklist of the Railroading and Western Americana Books of Lucius Beebe, Bon Vivant.
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Thanks to Barbara Humphreys of Pawcatuck, CT for the suggestion.

Read A Paper Is Born: A History of the Territorial Enterprise by Lucius Beebe here.

The transcript of an oral history by famed rare book dealer and small press publisher, Warren R. Howell, can be read here.

Photo gallery courtesy of New York Social Diary, which has an excellent article about Beebe on its website.

The Lucius Beebe Memorial Library is located in Wakefield, MA. 

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