A View (from 1948) on Book Collecting in the 1920s

Publishers are often forgotten in comparison to the books they have published. Yet occasionally a publisher will write a memoir that gives a unique perspective on their books, or on their relationships with their authors, or even about books in general. I like these kind of books, which includes Author Hunting (1934) by Grant Richards, Wide Margins (1942) by George Palmer Putnam, and the initimable Chronicles of Barabbas (1935) by George H. Doran, among others.

I recently read another of these, The Mechanical Angel (1948), by Donald Friede. Friede (1901-1965) was unusually privileged. His father had a successful import and export business, and young Donald traveled around the world three times before he was fourteen. He had the dubious honor of being expelled successively from Harvard, Yale, and then Princeton, before the death of his father, which left the boy very wealthy. He worked desultorily in various jobs before landing in publishing in 1923. He worked a short while for Alfred A. Knopf, and then went to Boni and Liveright (1923-1928), before co-founding Covici-Friede (1928-1938) with the former Chicagoan Pascal Covici. His money had bought him into Boni and Liveright, and while he and Horace Liveright had many successes, they also had some real failures. It was a very interesting publishing house.

In 1948, at the age of 47, Friede published the autobiographical Mechanical Angel, subtitled “His Adventures and Enterprises in the Glittering 1920’s.” The book is oddly organized, and of mixed quality, but three chapters in particular are of especial interest. Two early chapters (“Boy Publisher” and “Angel with Clipped Wings”) center on his time in publishing, and are full of interesting details and anecdotes. In one later chapter (“Young Aesthete”) Friede discusses his book collecting in the 1920s, and it is from this chapter I’d like to share some extracts.

I collected all manner of first editions avidly. And it was not only because the mania for modern first editions was in full flower; I was on the inside and I enjoyed backing my judgment. I did pretty well at it too. I built up a really exciting library that at one time con­tained first editions of just about every important book published since the turn of the century.

Naturally I had among my books complete runs of first editions of Ronald Firbank and Norman Douglas and Aldous Huxley and A. E. Coppard and T. F. Powys and Arthur Machen and H. L. Mencken. No self-respecting collector of the twenties would have been without these books, or without the works of Carl Van Vechten and James Branch Cabell and D. H. Lawrence and Humbert Wolfe. And there were on my groaning shelves first-edition copies of Zuleika Dobson and The Way of All Flesh and Of Hu­man Bondage and the Spoon River Anthology. All of them were very definitely mint copies, and most of them had their original dust wrappers. And in every one of the thou­sands of books that lined my walls from ceiling to floor I had pasted my own bookplate, a reproduction of a cari­cature Covarrubias had made of me in 1924. I thought this the height of sophistication.

But I soon found that collecting first editions in the usual way was merely a matter of watching catalogues, ordering the books I wanted, and then paying for them. That began to pall after a while. It was shortly after I had blocked off one of the doors leading to my kitchen to make room for another series of bookcases that I pulled my first real coup.

I was in the Holliday Bookshop one day in 1924 when I happened to pick up an English edition of a slim volume of poetry by A. A. Milne. When We Were Very Young was the title of the book, and as I read it I became convinced that here was the most delightful book of children's verses since Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse, I bought all the copies Holliday would sell me, and then I went around to the other booksellers and bought up their copies too. I found that the English publishers had issued a special autographed edition limited to one hundred cop­ies, and I managed to pick up two copies from unsuspecting American dealers, who sold them to me at the regular price of twelve and a half dollars. And then I cabled to England and got three sets of all the issues of Punch in which these poems had originally appeared. After that I sat back and waited for the market to catch up to me.

It did. I had managed to assemble some twenty copies of the regular English first edition, for which I had paid two dollars apiece. I sold them individually and over a period of time at thirty-five dollars apiece. The limited edi­tions I sold for two hundred and seventy-five dollars each. Even the copies of Punch, tastefully cased, brought up to thirty dollars the set. And the copies of the American first edition, which I had bought just to see what would hap­pen, brought twice to three times their published price.

I may have lost my standing as an amateur aesthete by this move, but I didn't care. My next maneuver was in con­nection with the first two Hemingway books, two privately printed pamphlets in editions of about one hundred copies each. I managed to get five copies of one of them and four of the other one, and I paid the regular price of a dollar and a half apiece for them. Less than five years later I sold them for two hundred and fifty dollars apiece.

And so it went. I combined my interest in new writers I might be able to discover with the even more practical pursuit of securing copies of their earliest work before their more mature creations had made these juvenilia collector's items. I was wrong a great number of times. Whatever happened to Leroy Macleod or to Charles Malam or H. Phelps Putnam or Lancelot de Giberne Sieveking? And who today reads Humbert Wolfe and James Hanley and Stephen Hudson and Robert McAlmon? But I was right often enough to succeed in assembling the most exciting amateur's library I have ever seen. At one point it consisted of almost ten thousand items, including hundreds of fugi­tive pamphlets, a robust collection of erotica all bound in red morocco, uncounted stacks of catalogues, complete runs of the publications of all the great contemporary presses, every art-gallery announcement for almost fifteen years, and almost a thousand issues of the various little maga­zines that were published over that same period of time.

I sold about a third of this collection at a two-session auction at the Anderson Galleries in 1928, a little more than a year before the market crash. The fact that a copy of Will Durant's Story -of Philosophy brought twenty-one dollars is indicative of the prices I obtained for the really important books offered in that sale. And during the course of the next few years I sold my complete runs of Dreiser and James Stephens and Robinson Jeffers and T. S. Eliot and James Joyce and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and all the other complete collections I had managed to assemble, at prices that would seem fantastically high to­day. In 1935 when I sold out all my remaining first edi­tions my library was still important enough for me to be able to sell it to R. H. Macy and Company, who started a rare book shop with my collection as a base and issued a first catalogue that included such items as a signed copy of Elinor Wylie's Jennifer Lorn for fifteen dollars and ninety-seven cents, and a copy of Emperor Jones, illustrated by Alexander King, for six dollars and forty-nine cents.

And yet when I went through the complete list of my collection a short while ago, I could find less than a hun­dred books I would like to own today. The passion for pos­sessions, which was such an important part of the life of the young aesthete of the twenties, long ago became a thing of the past. It began to die with the crash, when we first became aware of the impermanence of everything we had thought of as tunelessly safe. It passed out of our lives com­pletely in the hard days of the depression. And after the uprooting of our lives in the war years it is hard to imagine any of us ever building our lives again around the importance of owning a mint copy of Richard Hughes's Lines Written on First Observing an Elephant Devoured by a Roc, a four-page pamphlet printed for the author by the Golden Cockerel Press in an edition of twenty-five copies, numbered and autographed by the author.

All of the authors named in the second paragraph are familiar to me, as I suspect they are for most readers interested in the time period. But what about the authors named in the seventh paragraph? Aside from Humbert Wolfe, who is also mentioned in the second paragraph---though he is familiar to me primarily as the author of a book review of E.R. Eddison's Mistress of Mistresses ("The Foam-Foot Star-Sparkling" from The Observer, 17 March 1935) that is reproduced in full facsimile on the rear dust-wrapper of the U.S. Dutton edition of the book---I know none of the others. 

If by the time Friede was writing in the mid-1940s they were all forgotten authors, their names have lapsed deeper into obscurity in the eight decades since.  Who knows, and can tell us about these writers?  Any champions out there of Leroy Macleod, Charles Malam,  H. Phelps Putnam, Lancelot de Giberne Sieveking, James Hanley, Stephen Hudson, or Robert McAlmon?  Did they publish anything worth reading today, or have they reached their deserved oblivion? Please enlighten us in the comments.