A LUMBERMAN BIBUOPHIL3: WILHEJLM V .^1^^ •'-'i*J'. 5>. \. frWi! ■uil' f- z 992 .W67 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 104 088 657 '^IFT'. Wi: V'^ %' iv^ '.iffp-l ^ v. ■miff' :¥ f courage, self-reliance, energy, and concen- tration that develops the great scientist as well as the great soldier ; it is essential to great art — every artist ought to be by nature a vagabond with a purpose ; it is essential to business — every business man should want the spirit of marching on. In Arizona Corporal .\yer wanted pioneer- ing when he set out with fifteen men under him to guard a mine from hostile Indians. At that mine one could have judged him by the needs of his inquiring mind^by his curiosity. One can judge any man, in fact, by his curiosity. He poked and pioneered about for something undiscovered until he struck upon I'rescott's ''Conquest of Mexico." He had to go all the way across the continent and half-wa\' back again to discover I'rescott's " Conquest of Mexico." When he got back to Harvard, he had read this history twice, and he was endeavoring, it is said, zcalouslv to find opportunity to read it fifty times. His father gave him a third-interest in a store, and from Harvard sent him into Chicago one day to buy dry goods. He returned with Prescott's " Conquest of Mexico." I was going down Lake Street." he ex- plained one evening to a friend (and this friend passed the story, but with Mr. .Vyer iticognito. on to The (Jutlook once before), " and 1 THE OUTLOOK came to a sijjn — 'Cobb & Pritchard.' The sign hung over a bookstore, and in the front window of the boolcstore I saw an edition of Prescott"s ' Mexico.' " He turned, with real love of books as books, to describe the edition while his auto leaped ahead — it was Lippincott's edition in three volumes. He went on : '• I asked the price. • Seventeen fifty,' said the tall proprietor. I said I would take one volume. He shook his head. He wouldn't come down, and I couldn't climb up. I handled the volumes, and my mind worked up to the price. I thought that I might buy them all and pay for one volume at a time. ' My name's Edward Ayer,' I told him. ' I've been in the service. I want that set. I haven't enough money to buy it. My father has given me a third interest in a dry goods store in Harvard^ I will come to Chicago every month to buy goods ; and, if you will let me have the first volume to take home with me, I will give you three and a half dollars, which is all I have. And I will pay you each month till I pay all the seventeen dollars and fifty cents.' He said : ' Young man, you take those three volumes home at once.' He was just a dear ! I didn't touch the earth except the high places on the way home." From that time, one learns, the young pioneer prospered, and his prospering was measured by the number of books he bought. He went on the road ; he set up as a con- tractor for railway ties, telegraph poles. He was prosperous forty years ago, when he had fifteen hundred volumes. He gives Prescott credit for inspiring and directing him to good books. He concluded to start at the beginning, and so read Gibbon's " Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and was greatly interested in Mohammed ; got especially interested in " The Conquest of Granada," and that got him to Columbus, and Columbus introduced him auspiciously to Ferdinand and Isabella, and they passed him on to Charles V, and Charles to Philip II, and Philip to the great wars, to England, the Armada, de Palma, and so on. He got interested in the literature of England ; then he managed to acquire Scott, Bulwer- Lytton, Charles Reade, the essayists, and the poets. He had many books, and he was ambitious to get more. This desirable citizen is a very modest citizen, even though a very enthusiastic one. He had to be taken on the wing, and he rose to wing very quickly when his first biographer hove in sight. " You are tcjo modest, Mr. Ayer," he is told; "you must remember that two modesties make an immodesty." He laughs, steadies his blue eyes, scratches his beard doubtfully. He insists that all he has done has been selfish ; he is tqld that he has a duty — to tell other men, especially young men, how to enrich their lives. " I'm just a business man," he insists. " I just go after these antiques and books because I love them. ... If a man doesn't leave a little for those who come after him that can educate, he's a pretty poor t>pe of man, indeed. ..." He lapses back to art again. It was pointed out that art, even with a large " T " and a small "a," is all very fine for glory's sake, but not of much consequence for anythinij else unless it has influence on mankind. He tries resolutely not to commit himself, and he can't get out of the moving automobile if he tries. "... I'm getting more out of it than Chicago. I tell you no man ever spent a portion of his time co-operating with histori- cal societies, museums, schools, and art insti- tutes that he didn't get ten times as much for himself as he gives liis city. I have not done much of any account, but I owe an enormous amount to the city of Chicago and to the splendid galaxy of citizens who maintain its orchestra, museums, and schools, and are making Chicago the student city of America." He insists that Chicago is the student city of America ; he insists that Chicago citizens, civically at least, are the most proud ; and, to illustrate, he explains that, in donations from ten dollars to ten thousand, they have raised fourteen hundred thousand dollars to build Orchestra Hall and to foster the Thomas Orchestra. Then he turns to describe, with all the pride of an eager patron, the great crescent of educational institutions stretching from Lake Forest University along Lake Michigan to the Field Museum — almost a score of them — that teach, in addition to the students the public schools teach, more than thirty-six thousand. His enthusiasm is infec- tious. One begins to understand, in fact, why in his office, looking out on the gray reach of the lake and on the great arc of the break- water that promises a vast playground espla- nade with a great museum at either end of it, looking down on Michigan Avenue with its slippery sluiceway of automobiles and its A LUMBERMAN BIBLIOPHILE pedestrians cross.ng to the Art Museum or Orchestra Hall, this timberman does busi- ness with such enthusiasm, even at seventy- three, when his office is directed by others than he. He carries into his work the en- thusiasm that he gains from contact with the city builders and from pioneering- wiih-a-pur- pose all over the world. He turns his pleas- ure to his profit. He uses the allurement of art and the antique to help his business as well as to help his community. Appreciation of art and the antique is a simple enough thing — one readily under- stands the joy in such appreciation. But few business men understand why any man with enthusiasm and liberal means should go rummaging the world after bits of art and " bunches of dusty antiquities." " These things are useful," Mr. Ayer says, " practically — just as useful as history. They call attention to historical time and place. They are of interest to others. They satisf\' a natural craving for beautiful things, and add to the enjoyment of others." He dwells on adding to the enjoyment of others. He has come to feel, in fact, what great men discover early in life and nearly all men suspect sometime in life — that help- ing others, helping one's community, is all that ultimately is worth while. So he keeps on pioneering, keeping ahead of the years. Every year, as regularly as F. Hopkinson Smith, he goes to Europe to paint and returns to America to write ; be- tween the first and fourteenth of February, with Mrs. Ayer, he crosses over, gets into his French automobile, and travels till the first of June, when he returns to America again. Always with Mrs. Ayer, he has thus gone abroad twenty-seven times. He has traveled in Africa and Europe during the last eleven years with his automobile more than sixty-five thousand miles, and in America ninety-seven thousand, in addition to more than a million miles by rail and water during his life. There is historical method in his meanderings. To illustrate, one year the Ayers went to Hippo, Algiers, and took up the long-lost trail of St. Augustine. They followed him from Hippo, where he was a wonderful child, to Carthage, where he misbehaved ; to Rome, where he taught and misbehaved still more ; at last to Milan, where St. Ambrose made a saint of him. In the same manner they have followed St. Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, William the Conqueror, and even old Sancho himself. From her meanderings Mrs. -Ayer has drawn material for a travel book on northern .Vfrica. She has also translated for Mr. .\yt.'r (some jcars since) Henevides's-' History of NewMcxico, "written ill 1630,and Millet's" Captivity "(1680). And Mr. Ayer has brought back precious stores for the Chicago museums and a Chicago library. He is merely trying to satisfy his ruling passion, he says, to leave for the children who follow a better chance. This pas- sion Prescott's '• Conquest of Mexico " im- planted in him — that and long days and nights under the open sk\-, operating frontier saw- mills, striking through frontier forests, climb- ing up and down frontier mountain-sides. He learned of the vast sources of nature, and now he wants museums to teach and testify of them, to show young men and old men how to enrich their lives by studying history and all its multiform expressions, not the least of which is art. " We all need beautiful things in our lives," he says ; " and what chance have our children to get all there is to be had from life if they are not ever taught what makes the soil that they walk on black ?" He thinks that all children, and all fathers and mothers of children, should not only love art, but should know some natural history- zoology, botany, anthropology, and geology. That is why during the seven years when he was the first President of the Field Museum of Natural History, and since as Chairman of the Administration Committee, he has devoted much of his time to the Museum. At its start he presented to the Museum his great collection of Indian paraphernalia that he had spent twenty years in getting together, and his ornithological library, consisting of four hundred and fifty volumes of colored plates of birds. He was Chairman of the Collection Committee before the Museum was founded, and since, during visits to Europe, he has purchased the entire Egyptian collection, most of the Etruscan collection, all of the original Italian bronze, and has selected all the reproduced Pompeian bronze. 'I"he guards see Mr. Ayer at the Museum three or four times each week when he is in Chicago. He has added much to the tremendous store of precious things packed in the vast storehouse that was the Fine Arts Building of the World's Fair and is the Field Museum of Natural History, which, before many months have passed, will find a home in an inspiring building on the lake front. He is one of the trustees of the Art THE OUTLOOK Institute. He has been a director of the Historical Societ)- for twenty years, President of the Archaeological Society, a member of the Missouri and Wisconsin Historical Societies, and of several clubs, not the least significant of which is the Chicago Commercial Club, which boasts its right to exist because of the city planning that it does. He was also a director and has been for twenty jears one of the advisers of the Newberry Library, which as a reference library is quite as well known as the Crerar Library is known as a scientific library. This lumberman explains enthusiastically while making the rounds of the Field Mu- seum : " One can know, after a trip through a museum like this, the social life of the American Indian as well as one can know the social life of an aunt after rummaging from her kitchen to her cupola. Come over here. Now look at these Peruvian pottery jars with portraits. Now don't you know that fellow ? Why, you've seen him down- town. His name is . He's one of the village wise men. And don't you know that scribe, and that fellow, and that ? I know them as well as if they went autoing with me yesterday. We're friends." He never wearies of things that are fine. When abroad the first time, in Florence, while Mrs. Ayer was suffering from typhoid, Mr. Ayer, in three months, went through the three art galleries just seventy-two times. One can- not put by the anomaly of this business man waxing with fine discernment and unmitigated enthusiasm over collections of Back China and Tibetan, over a collection of African jewels that he himself gathered, chatting easily all the while about the Dashir pyramids, about Egyptian bronzes, about the Etruscan col- lection, and the six hundred and fifty falls of meteorites — thirty to fifty more than are owned by any other museum in the world. Mr. Ayer has collected personally illuminated manuscripts, Korans, Persian manuscripts, laces, furniture, porcelains, lus- ters, pewters, embroider/ stuffs, Navajo, Mexican, Algerian, and Tunisian blankets, and much else. He pauses to explain what the N. W. Harris Fund of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is accomplishing, with its miniature museums traveling by auto from the central museum, for thousands of school-children. Then he leaps away to reminiscence about speckled trout in Western brooks, and points out the wonderful effects the museum has been able to get by using stippled glass to suggest water about mounted fish. He eulogizes Akeley, whom he desig- nates as the Michael Angelo of the animals, and he points out the accuracy of det^l with which this taxidermist represents the flexures of the animal muscles and the very outlines of die veins under the tight skins. He makes a college man feel, indeed, that whoever first said that a college education is necessary to finer appreciation and more accurate thinking must himself have been a college man. His mind and judgment, in fact, are fairly unerring. His friends call him " the natural- bom collector." He has gone into curio shops all over the world, and yet it is said that nowhere, not even in Egypt, which he knew so little of, has he been deceived. Never- theless, his whole training was started more than fifty years ago by no more than an accidental peep into Prescott's " Conquest of Mexico." He is asked how any young man can come to a love such as he has for art. " I should tell him," he said, " deliberately to go into the Art Institute an hour a week — make it a duty." •' And study ?" " No ; just look at the pictures and get familiar with them. He can't help learning to love them. ... If I had a boy, I should insist on his going to a natural history mu- seum, too." " And study .'" " Yes ; I should ask him to do some studj'- ing. You don't have to study pictures to learn to like them, but you must study geology, anthropology, botany, and history. Think what a man misses if he doesn't know some of those things 1" " And books ?" " He should get them, handle them ; he will learn to like them." He takes one to the Newberry Library at last. To this library a few years ago he gave his entire collection, and it is now being used extensively and is actually making his- tory, for from its manuscripts and records more than one historian, and numerous college students as well, have gathered in- formation never generally known before. In the two "Ayer rooms" one finds an immense number of interestbg things : 17,000 volumes of printed books and 4,000 separate manuscripts, some of them volumes ; thousands of printed maps ; 300 manuscripts; 2,625 portraits or drawings by artists in the field; 390 prints; 9,770 photographs, includ- MY IMMKJRANT NEIGHBOUS ing 8,000 of " The Pictorial History of the Philippines," in which a short history of each of the thirty-eight linguistic groups is given, and each photograph is described by Dean Worcester, the scientist member of the Philippine Commission for so many years ; ten volumes and nine single sheets of Portulana. There are 16 editions and different works of John Smith ; 22 editions of Hennepin ; 20 editions of Jonathan Carver ; 53 editions of Las Casas ; every early edition of Cham- plain ; every early edition of lAscarbot ; every early edition of Sagard ; about oJino volumes in the Indian lanj^uagcs. covering 220 tribes in America, 38 in the Philippines, 1 in the Sandwich Islands ; the finest set of Ptolemy known — 60 volumes, including 5 in manuscript ; one of the great collections of ()rtelius and Apianus ; and general geo- graphical atlases. His Jesuit Relations are very near the top, consisting of 38 out of the 41 Cremaisi in original editions ; the 26 Gil- mary Shea; the 8 O'Callaghan ; all of the Margry ; the Cleveland edition, over 70 volumes ; the Quebec edition ; and many manuscripts; also 10^ Mexican pictographs on maguey paper and leather. The library is rich also in early and first editions on all parts of North America, per- taining especially to Indian history, and has 351 titles of Captivities ; 1.260 of the 2,625 portraits ajid drawings are crayons by Bur- bank ; 400 are by VValdeck ; 50 by Carl Bodmer ; 250 are lead-pencil portraits by Catlin, with a short biography of each. At last one turns to a carefully tooled group of books — three of them — in red binding. Mr. .Aver smiled. He forgot for the min- ute to mention that he has had for two years two men copying manuscripts in far-away Seville and Jerez about the Spanish occupa- tion. He told affectionately how he took these three volumes to Binder Zaehnsdorf and said he wanted the best Crolieresque bindings for them that money could buy. " What's the joke ?" the famous P^nglishman asked. " It's No. 1 and 2 and 3 in my library,'' Mr. Ayer says he replied ; " it's Prescoti"s ' Conquest of Mexico.' It's the corner-stone of m>- life." #'-^- Mfa_, '^ ^^^x^^. 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