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 One hundred and twenty-two copies 
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THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW 
 YORK AND OTHER 
 PAPERS 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELL- 
 ERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM LORING ANDREWS 
 
 NEW YORK : ANNO DOMINI ONE THOU- 
 SAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE 
 
^3 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1895, 
 BY WILLIAM LORING ANDREWS 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 CT*HIS brief account of the old booksellers 
 J- of New York includes — with very 
 few exceptions — only those members of 
 the Fraternity who came within the cog- 
 nisance of the writer, and who now have 
 passed off the stage. Short as is the story, 
 it covers a period during which the old 
 book trade had its rise and became a per- 
 manently established business in this city. 
 
 These papers were prepared for and have 
 appeared in part, in the pages of " The 
 Bookman. ' ' They are now presented in book 
 form, with embellishments consisting of 
 head and tail pieces, initial letters and 
 three full-page copper plate engravings by 
 Mr. E. Davis French. 
 
LIST OF PLATES 
 
 I AN EAST VIEW OF TRINITY CHURCH, 
 
 NEW YORK. COPIED FROM THE ORIGINAL, IN THE NEW 
 YORK MAGAZINE, I79O. ENGRAVED BY E. D. FRENCH. 
 
 FRONTISPIECE 
 
 II NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK, 
 
 IN 1895. ENGRAVED BY E. D. FRENCH. FACING PAGE 3 
 
 III GOVERNMENT HOUSE, NEW YORK, 
 
 COPIED FROM THE ORIGINAL, IN THE NEW YORK MAGA- 
 ZINE, I795. ENGRAVED BY E. D. FRENCH. 
 
 FACING PAGE S3 
 
 IV 
 
 TITLE PAGE OF NATHANIEL AMES'S AL- 
 MANAC FOR 1760. 
 
 FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION. FACING PAGE 
 
" There's nothing hath enduring youth 
 Eternal newness, strength unfailing. 
 
 Except old books, old friends, old truth 
 That's ever battling — still prevailing." 
 
 I 
 
 WILLIAM GOWANS 
 
 N the opening chapter of the 
 Notes to Peabody's " Views in 
 New York and Its Environs," 
 published in 183 1, Theodore 
 B. Fay, co-editor of the New 
 York Mirror thus describes 
 the city of his indwelling, and depicts in 
 these grandiloquent terms the enviable 
 estate of his fellow townsmen and the 
 proud future which unveiled its glittering 
 vista before them : 
 
 " A vast city, with its bristling forest of 
 masts and spires, sending forth the hum of 
 more than 200,000 inhabitants. Freedom, 
 
 3 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 peace and plenty are in their dwellings, and 
 their destiny is as unclouded as the glorious 
 vault of Heaven, which stretches with all 
 its stars above their heads." 
 
 The Gothamite of the first half of the 
 19th century possessed implicit faith as well 
 as unbounded pride in his fair and thriving 
 city. A dabbler in statistics of this period, 
 who applied to his computations the plain 
 and simple "rule of three, "developed the 
 astounding fact that by the year 1900 New 
 York city should contain a population of over 
 5,000,000 souls. To be precise, 5,257,193. 
 He admits that wars, pestilences and politi- 
 cal convulsions, such as from time to time 
 befall all communities, might possibly inter- 
 fere with this steady arithmetical progres- 
 sion ; nevertheless, he is confident that by 
 the expiration of the time specified the pop- 
 ulation of New York will exceed that of any 
 other city on the face of the earth, Pekin 
 alone excepted. London would be left far 
 in the background. Four years after the 
 date of this prediction (December 16th, 1835), 
 the "Great Fire" swept with its besom of 
 destruction over the larger portion of the 
 business section of the city of New York, 
 and left it a mass of smoking ruins. Six 
 hundred and seventy-four houses, many of 
 
 4 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 them occupied by the largest shipping and 
 wholesale dry-goods merchants, were, with 
 most of their contents, burned to the ground. 
 Our prophet had not reckoned with the 
 demon of fire ; still, this widespread dis- 
 aster stayed only momentarily the onward 
 march of the metropolis. Phcenix-like, it 
 rose from its ashes, and, while it has not 
 attained the full measure of greatness ci- 
 phered out for it with such facility by the 
 optimist whom we have quoted, still we 
 venture to claim that the chief city of the 
 Western world has fairly fulfilled the rosy 
 promise of its youth. 
 
 In the year 1828 there came to this busy, 
 bustling, aspiring town, from the wilds of 
 Indiana, one William Gowans, in search of 
 fame and fortune. He was a youth of 
 twenty-five, a Scotchman by birth, and 
 whilom farmer and flat-boatman on the 
 Mississippi. His experience when "a youth 
 navigating the wild Ohio and the wilder 
 Mississippi " may be given best by the pen 
 picture drawn by himself. " Then there were 
 no byways for boats to escape the rugged 
 falls of the Ohio as there now are. All 
 
 Note. — The family emigrated to America from Lesmahagon, 
 Scotland, in 1821. They settled for a while in Philadelphia, and then 
 moved to Fredonia, Crawford County, Indiana, traveling by wagon 
 via Pittsburgh. 
 
 5 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 had to pass through the roaring straits of 
 Scylla and Charybdis. We had, therefore, to 
 plunge over unhesitatingly. Swifter than an 
 arrow from an Indian's bow, or thought, 
 or lightning, or the soul's departure from 
 the body. Not a house stood upon the 
 point of land formed by the junction of the 
 Ohio and Mississippi rivers, nor was the land 
 even under cultivation, but in its primitive, 
 wild, dreary solitude. I understand that it 
 is now the site of a large, busy city (Cairo). 
 Seventy miles below, on the west bank of 
 the Mississippi, stood the deserted village of 
 New Madrid, consisting of a few log houses, 
 apparently empty, and the surrounding 
 forest all dead, caused, as I learned, by an 
 earthquake a few years ago. The land at 
 this place sunk ten feet from the effects of 
 the shock, and no doubt the concussion 
 caused these monarchs of the forest to 
 wither and die. Fifty miles still further 
 down stood the now city of Memphis. The 
 captain of our sluggish-moving boat landed 
 at this place. I accompanied him up the 
 bank, the river being low at the time, for 
 the purpose of buying a supply of whis- 
 key. The town, I remember, consisted of 
 log houses inhabited by a very poor class of 
 people. After falling down below this town 
 
 6 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 about 50 miles, we met with no settlement 
 until we reached the vicinity of Walnut 
 Hill, now Vicksburgh, the distance being 
 about 600 miles. The only music in the 
 daytime which regaled our senses was the 
 puffing and distressed moaning of the 
 high-pressured steamers which occasionally 
 passed up and down the river, as the case 
 might be, and as an afterpiece, the wild 
 screaming of the numerous flocks of paro- 
 quets which travel along the bank of the 
 river after descending to a certain latitude; 
 and in the night, the wolfs wild howl, not 
 on Onolaska's shore, but the banks of the 
 gloomy and solitary Mississippi. The only 
 human beings we fell in with during this 
 descent, which took six weeks, were cer- 
 tain roving, half-civilized whites who had 
 pitched their tents at certain points for the 
 purpose of cutting and preparing fuel for the 
 steamboats passing up and down, and num- 
 bers of the native sons of the forest, who 
 could be seen every now and then paddling 
 their light canoes close in to the shore if 
 ascending, and on the contrary, in the cen- 
 tre of the river if downward bound. At 
 first these savage-faced, painted men some- 
 what alarmed me; but they frequently paid 
 us a visit by coming alongside and on board 
 7 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 of our own lazy craft. After becoming 
 somewhat familiar with these grim, black- 
 haired, half-naked fellow-beings, I began 
 rather to like them, and wished for their 
 frequent return to break up our monotony. 
 They left the impression upon me that they 
 were both generous and confiding. A party 
 came on board one day; one of them could 
 speak a little English. He informed us that 
 one of their number was condemned to 
 death for having murdered one of the tribe 
 when intoxicated. We urged him to make 
 his escape, as he appeared to be at liberty. 
 We even offered to take him with us in our 
 boat, but they all declared, as we could 
 understand them, that that would be of no 
 use, for in the event of his non-appearance 
 for execution on the day appointed, his wife 
 or one of his children would have to suffer 
 in his stead. The three great rivers which 
 discharge their heavy contents into the 
 Mississippi — the Arkansas, the Yazoo and 
 the Red rivers — at those points where they 
 lost themselves in the great father of waters, 
 were all solitary, heavy-timbered wilder- 
 nesses. Not a human being appeared to 
 have disturbed their native wild grandeur. 
 Now I understand that at each and all of 
 these points are busy towns, and likely to 
 
 8 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 become large cities. At this time, accord- 
 ing to his biographers, Abraham Lincoln 
 must have been a fellow-boatman with me 
 on these rivers, although I never saw him 
 to my knowledge." 
 
 For a twelvemonth after his arrival in 
 New York Mr. Gowans was engaged in a 
 variety of occupations — namely, that of gar- 
 dener, stevedore, stone-cutter, news-vender 
 and "super" in the old Bowery Theatre. 
 Evidently he was prepared to turn his hand 
 to any honest means of livelihood. But it 
 was not long before he entered on his vo- 
 cation, for in Longworth's Directory of New 
 York City, 1829 to 1830, we find the name 
 of William Gowan, bookstall, 119 Chat- 
 ham Street, house 750 Greenwich Street, 
 so by that time he was established, in 
 an humble way, in the business which was 
 to be his lifelong pursuit. Trade in sec- 
 ond-hand books, doubtless, was coy and 
 hard to win, and at the outset of his 
 career he was obliged to seek a market for 
 his merchandise by carrying it in a basket 
 to the doors of his customers. In one of 
 his rounds he chanced upon a benevolent 
 Quaker, named Blatchley, who, appar- 
 ently unsolicited, loaned him the sum of 
 twenty-five dollars. When some time 
 
 9 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 later the young man came to return the 
 money, the considerate old gentleman sug- 
 gested that he might have further need of 
 this special capital, and that he had better 
 keep it a little longer. His benefactor lived 
 to see him established in, and paid him 
 frequent visits at, his Nassau Street store. 
 
 Mr. Gowans informs us that it was largely 
 through the instrumentality of the father of 
 Thomas Cole, the artist, who was a book- 
 seller in a small way, that he himself 
 adopted the profession. He it was who 
 initiated him into the secrets of the second- 
 hand book trade, disclosing his manner and 
 mode of purchase, and the profit he made 
 upon his literary wares. 
 
 The bookstall at 1 19 Chatham Street was 
 simply a row of shelves, protected at night 
 and in the owner's absence during the day 
 on his book-selling peregrinations with 
 wooden shutters, an iron bar and a pad- 
 lock. It was shortly succeeded by a store 
 at 121 Chatham Street, corner of Pearl. In 
 1830 he occupied the " Arcade," between 
 John Street and Maiden Lane. 
 
 His business ventures must have been 
 attended with a moderate degree of suc- 
 cess, for in 1840-41 Mr. Gowans made a 
 visit to Europe, probably not so much on 
 10 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 pleasure bent as with an eye to business. 
 He did not find London as attractive as has 
 Mr. Elias Dexter, the old and well-known 
 print and picture dealer, who never has re- 
 turned to these shores since he left them, 
 twenty years or more ago, on a flying visit 
 to the British metropolis. In a letter from 
 London during his sojourn there Mr. Gow- 
 ans writes: "All my wanderings and all 
 that I have seen since I left New York have 
 had a tendency to raise America and its in- 
 stitutions in my estimation. I will feel 
 happier in America, should I ever be so for- 
 tunate as to return, than ever I have been 
 heretofore. America is the country for a 
 man making his way in the world. In this 
 country, so far as I can see, if you happen 
 to be born among the mud you must re- 
 main there." 
 
 On his return Mr. Gowans devoted his 
 attention for a time to the book auction 
 business, at a place called the Long Room, 
 at 169 Broadway, but soon resumed his 
 second-hand book trade, for in 1842 he 
 was established at 204 Broadway, opposite 
 St. Paul's Chapel, up-stairs. His subse- 
 quent locations, as given on the covers of 
 his catalogues, are as follows: 
 
 1844 — 63 Liberty Street, up-stairs. 
 11 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 1848—178 Fulton Street, opposite St. 
 Paul's Churchyard. 
 
 1856—81 to 85 Centre Street (Caxton 
 Building). 
 
 1863 — 115 Nassau Street. 
 
 He seems to have enjoyed the proximity 
 of the quiet graveyard of St. Paul's Chapel. 
 Perhaps he found it conducive to a quiet 
 and reflective turn of mind; or was it, on 
 the contrary, the noisy attractions of Scud- 
 der's American Museum that allured him ? 
 This popular place of amusement stood 
 within a stone's throw of his premises, on 
 the site of the old Herald Building. It 
 contained specimens of natural history and 
 cosmoramic views, to which the charms of 
 music and sundry " extraneous exhibitions " 
 were added to give variety to the enter- 
 tainment. The dulcet strains of the brass 
 band stationed upon the balcony in front 
 of this building — but hidden behind the flar- 
 ing posters which covered its front — on 
 pleasant afternoons, must have penetrated 
 to the inner recesses of Mr. Gowans's stores 
 on Fulton and Nassau Streets. These "al 
 fresco" instrumentalists were fair-weather 
 performers only, for Fitz-Greene Halleck 
 tells us, in his poem of "Fanny," that 
 "music ceases when it rains in Scudder's 
 
 12 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 balcony." Afterward, as Barnum's Museum, 
 this building became the home of the 
 Mermaid, the Woolly Horse and the Per- 
 petual Motion, and the same melodious 
 method of attracting the attention of the 
 passer-by was successfully practiced. 
 
 Mr. Gowans's store at 115 Nassau Street 
 extended through to Theatre Alley, a dis- 
 tance of over 100 feet. He occupied the 
 store floor, basement and sub-cellar, which 
 in time became crowded with books and 
 pamphlets from floor to ceiling. His stock 
 grew and never diminished. Books lay 
 everywhere in seemingly dire confusion, 
 piled upon tables and on the floor, like 
 Pelion upon Ossian, until they finally top- 
 pled over, and the few narrow alleys which 
 had originally been left between the rows 
 became well-nigh impassable. There was 
 no artificial light in the cellar, and the book- 
 hunter must fain grope his way — if permit- 
 ted — through the bewildering maze by the 
 light of a small tin sperm-oil lamp. The 
 freedom of Mr. Gowans's bookstore was 
 not presented to every passer-by. 
 
 There was a certain attempt at arrange- 
 ment and classification, but the owner of 
 this vast store of printed matter could have 
 had but an imperfect knowledge of what it 
 
 13 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 contained; although I fancy that few of the 
 real book rarietis that came into his pos- 
 session were overlooked, and I am quite 
 sure they were seldom undervalued by him. 
 His prices, when once fixed, were as unal- 
 terable as the laws of the Medes and Per- 
 sians. They were marked in plain figures 
 in the front of the book, and the cost price 
 in cipher at the bottom of the twenty-fifth 
 page. 
 
 I am told by Mr. E. W. Nash (Mr. Gow- 
 ans's clerk for twenty years), that at the 
 time of his employer's death the stock was 
 estimated at 300,000 bound volumes, be- 
 sides pamphlets innumerable. Eight tons 
 weight of these were sold by his executors 
 at four and one-quarter cents per pound. 
 A few years earlier he could have realized 
 ten cents per pound (including covers), and 
 could he have smuggled them into the 
 Southern Confederacy during the war he 
 would have reaped a fortune. 
 
 Although a large proportion of this mass 
 of books and pamphlets was of small inter- 
 est or value to the bibliophile, still one pos- 
 sessed of sufficient energy and persever- 
 ance, and with abundant leisure to delve 
 into these semi-subterranean stores, occa- 
 sionally might return with a handful of 
 
 14 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 treasure-trove. In a letter to the Journal 
 of Commerce, dated January 15th, 1886, 
 Dr. William C. Prime records a discovery 
 which he made in the cover of a book which 
 he had unearthed in this dusky depository: 
 " It was a small quarto volume, containing 
 two books bound in one, a work of Jerome 
 Gebuiller on the origin and ancestry of 
 Ferdinand, Emperor of the Holy Roman 
 Empire, printed at Haganau in 1530, and 
 an account of the siege of Vienna by the 
 Turks, under Suleiman, in 1529, printed at 
 Augsburg, 1530. The volume was bound 
 in paper boards covered with calfskin. 
 Inside one of these covers were found 
 the following sheets, which had been 
 pasted and pressed together to form the 
 binder's board, a common practice with 
 the 1 6th century binders: 
 
 First. — A sheet printed in a large and 
 beautiful black letter, four pages of Low 
 Dutch poetry. Second. — Two sheets from 
 a book, " Exposito Sacri Canonis," a small 
 16 mo. page, Roman type. Third. — Two 
 sheets from a small (16 mo.) Book of Hours, 
 black letter, late 15th or early 1 6th century. 
 Fourth. — The last sheet of a black letter 12 
 mo. book, religious, in Dutch, having one 
 full-page woodcut, the double eagle device 
 
 15 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 of the printer and the colophon of Voster- 
 man. Fifth. — Four pages or one sheet of 
 a neatly printed missal in red and black. 
 Sixth. — Two sheets of a black letter book 
 in Low Dutch — prose and poetry — with 
 colophon of Vosterman, no date or wood- 
 cut device. Seventh. — Two sheets from an 
 edition of Despauterius's Latin Grammar, 
 circa 1542. Eighth. — Some sheets of brown 
 paper." 
 
 An enterprising firm of booksellers in 
 this city placard their window in this entic- 
 ing fashion : "25,000 books at our price, 
 50,000 at your price, 100,000 at any price." 
 It was books in the last-named category of 
 which Mr. Gowans was the most liberal 
 purchaser. He, or his representative, was 
 in constant attendance at the auction room. 
 When the auctioneer could obtain no other 
 bid, the lot would be knocked down at a 
 nominal price to ' ' Mr. Chase, " Mr. Gowans's 
 commercial pseudonym. Thus he bought 
 extensively without making serious inroads 
 into his capital. 
 
 At these auction sales Mr. Gowans ap- 
 pears to have been addicted to a practice of 
 interrupting the auctioneer with questions 
 concerning the book that was passing under 
 the hammer. When the celebrated John 
 16 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Keese filled the "pulpit," Mr. Gowans 
 always found his match. A work entitled 
 "History of the Taters," was offered for 
 sale. 
 
 ' ' Is not that Tartars ? " asked Mr. Gowans. 
 
 "No; their wives were the tartars," was 
 the immediate reply. There are many 
 amusing anecdotes still in circulation that 
 illustrate the ready wit of this popular mem- 
 ber of the book auction firm of Cooley, 
 Keese & Co. People flocked to their even- 
 ing sales as they would to a play, and the 
 comedian Burton, it is said, regarded them 
 as no contemptible rival to his theatre in 
 Chambers Street. 
 
 A full list of Mr. Gowans's customers and 
 casual visitors would go far toward supply- 
 ing the material for a social register and a 
 roll-call of the men of letters of the day. 
 In it we find the names of John Howard 
 Payne, Fitz-Greene Halleck, MacDonald 
 Clark, Millard Fillmore, Rufus Choate, 
 Audubon, the ornithologist, William Cullen 
 Bryant, Dr. Bethune, Dr. William C. Prime, 
 John Carter Brown, Henry Ward Beecher, 
 Dr. S. S. Purple, Dr. Brandreth, of pill 
 fame, Hon. John Bigelow, Robert Balmano, 
 John Romeyn Broadhead, George Brinley, 
 William Allen Butler, George Bancroft, S. L. 
 
 17 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 M. Barlow, Fredericks. Cozzens, George W. 
 Childs, Alexander J. Cotheal, George Will- 
 iam Curtis, Judge Charles P. Daly, Evert A. 
 and George L. Duyckinck, David Dudley 
 Field, S. C. Goodrich (Peter Parley), James 
 A. Garfield (before the war), Washington 
 Irving, James Lenox, Daniel D. Lord, Benson 
 J. Lossing, Henry W. Longfellow, George 
 P. Morris, Bishop Mcllvane, Henry C. Mur- 
 phy, James Parton, Henry T. Tuckerman, 
 Richard Grant White, Gulian C. Verplanck, 
 General Dix, and so on. The list might be 
 extended indefinitely. 
 
 In one of the notes with which his cata- 
 logues are interspersed, and which bear the 
 singular nom de plume of " Western Memo- 
 rabilia," Mr. Gowans informs us that in 1847 
 he met the " venerable widow of Alexander 
 Hamilton, and took the opportunity of mak- 
 ing several inquiries of her regarding Wash- 
 ington, which met with ready and satisfac- 
 tory answers." He noted that her eyes 
 still possessed their youthful brilliancy, 
 although her other features showed all the 
 marks of extreme old age, as she was then 
 nearly one hundred years old. 
 
 Mr. Gowans states that he frequently came 
 in contact with John Howard Payne, and 
 that he impressed him as a melancholy, 
 18 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 despondent, heart-broken man. The last 
 time he saw the poet was on the eve of his 
 departure on his mission to the Barbary 
 States. He said he had had great difficulty 
 in procuring his appointment, and was com- 
 pelled to bear his own expenses in repairing 
 to his post of duty — the Government having 
 refused to defray them. Mr. Gowans fore- 
 told correctly, that notwithstanding all the 
 songs, dramas, newspaper and magazine 
 criticisms, and biographical sketches Payne 
 had written, posterity would know him 
 only by his single song of "Home, Sweet 
 Home." 
 
 MacDonald Clarke, "the mad poet," was 
 a daily visitor at Mr. Gowans's store for 
 more than twenty years. " He appeared," 
 says Mr. Gowans, "to have the simplicity of 
 a child, the innocence of the dove, but none 
 of the cunning of the serpent. By nature a 
 poet, but wanting cultivation sadly; nor 
 would he read Shakspeare or Milton, nor 
 any of the great poets, 'lest,' said he, 'I 
 should spoil my own originality.' " 
 
 From Mr. Audubon, the author of " The 
 Birds of America," Mr. Gowans received 
 the following account of his unfortunate 
 experience with his monumental work: " I 
 did not sell more than forty copies of my 
 
 19 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 work in England, Ireland, Scotland and 
 France, of which Louis Philippe took ten, 
 and offered to subscribe for a hundred if the 
 work was published in Paris." The follow- 
 ing subscribers received their copies, but 
 never paid for them: George IV., The 
 Duchess of Clarence, The Marquis of Lon- 
 donderry, The Princess of Hesse-Homburg; 
 an Irish Lord (whose name Audubon could 
 not give) took two, and paid for neither — 
 the same could be said of a wealthy citizen 
 of the United States. Audubon further 
 stated that he sold only seventy-five copies 
 of his book in America (twenty-six of 
 which were sold in New York and twenty- 
 four in Boston) ; that the work altogether 
 cost him twenty-seven thousand pounds 
 sterling, and that by it he lost twenty-five 
 thousand dollars. 
 
 When Edwin Forrest first appeared upon 
 the boards of the Bowery Theatre, Mr. 
 Gowans was connected with that institu- 
 tion in a minor capacity, and enjoyed the 
 opportunity of seeing him act nightly. In 
 1865, thirty-five years later, he saw the 
 tragedian again, in " Richelieu " and " Ham- 
 let," and declared, that as an actor he pleased 
 him better in 1830. "Nevertheless," he 
 states, "his popularity appeared undimin- 
 20 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 ished, and at all the performances the theatre 
 was literally crammed from roof to founda- 
 tion." 
 
 Shortly after the first arrival of Fanny 
 Kemble, Mr. Gowans witnessed her per- 
 formance at the Park Theatre, where im- 
 mense crowds flocked to see her, and de- 
 clared that she was " matchless as an actress, 
 and divine as a young and beautiful woman. " 
 Fifteen years later Mr. Gowans saw and 
 heard her again in the New York Tabernacle, 
 at Broadway and Worth Street, and found 
 that she had grown stout and unattractive. 
 
 Mr. Gov/ans devotes much space in his 
 " memorablia " to that singular character, 
 Eleazer Williams, the reputed lost Prince 
 of the House of Bourbon, son of Louis XVI., 
 who was said to have been committed to 
 the care of some unknown person, and by 
 him either carried or sent to America and 
 consigned to a certain tribe of Indians in the 
 western part of New York State, who 
 adopted him and brought him up in their 
 wild habits and customs. By some means 
 he obtained a good education, and after due 
 preparation was ordained by Bishop Ho- 
 bart, in 1826, and as a minister of the Epis- 
 copal Church passed the best part of his life 
 among the Indians. To Mr. Gowans he 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 appeared to have a striking resemblance to 
 Louis XVI. as represented by the engraved 
 portraits that he had seen. " Large, massy, 
 full face, aquiline nose, dark eyes, swarthy 
 complexion, heavy, corpulent frame, and he 
 spoke in slow, solemn tones." Dr. John 
 W. Francis, the well-known physician, and 
 a recognized authority on old New York 
 and New Yorkers, was acquainted with 
 Williams for half a century, and he also 
 thought he looked very like a Bourbon. 
 But there have been no less than thirty pre- 
 tenders who from time to time have posed 
 as the ill-fated Dauphin. Mr. Gowans once 
 asked Eleazer Williams his own views upon 
 this matter. His reply was that "ambi- 
 tion, worldly pride, vanity and notoriety 
 would seem to prompt his carnal mind to 
 adopt the view that he was the actual heir 
 to the French throne; but again," he said, 
 "Christian humility and a consciousness 
 of my position forbid me to entertain such 
 worldly and ambitious views. I therefore 
 have left the whole subject to those who 
 feel any interest in such discussions, to 
 make of it what they may." This is a 
 method of unburdening one's conscience 
 which recalls the story of the artless maid- 
 en who, having decided that her fine gowns 
 
 22 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 were leading her to perdition, generously 
 bestowed her entire wardrobe of ball-dresses 
 upon her dear sisters. 
 
 For eight months Mr. Gowans lived in 
 the same house with Edgar Allen Poe. He 
 tells us that he "saw much of and often 
 had an opportunity to converse with him," 
 and he testifies that he never saw him in 
 the least affected by liquor or knew him to 
 descend to any known vice, while he was 
 one of the most courteous, gentlemanly and 
 intelligent companions he had ever met 
 with. His wife he describes as of match- 
 less beauty and loveliness, and of a temper 
 and disposition of surpassing sweetness, 
 and he quotes these fond lines of Poe ad- 
 dressed to her: 
 
 " But our love it was stronger by far than the love 
 Of those who were older than we, 
 Of many far wiser than we ; 
 And neither the angels in Heaven above, 
 Nor the demons under the sea, 
 Can ever dissever my soul from the soul 
 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee." 
 
 In a note covering more than two pages 
 of his catalogue, Mr. Gowans claims to have 
 been instrumental in giving the New York 
 Herald its start in life. Dr. Benjamin Bran- 
 dreth, the renowned pill-maker, made Mr. 
 
 23 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Gowans an agent for the sale of his pills, 
 and wishing to give them as wide an 
 advertisement as possible, consulted him 
 as to the best paper for his purpose. Mr. 
 Gowans suggested the New York Herald, 
 which had lately begun its career. Dr. 
 Brandreth went to Mr. Bennett, made terms 
 with him for advertising, and for a long 
 time paid him a considerable sum weekly 
 for the use of his columns. 
 
 Mr. Gowans frequently met Fitz-Greene 
 Halleck, who was then keeping accounts in 
 the private real estate office of John Jacob 
 Astor, and only occasionally indulging his 
 poetic vein, because, as he is reported to 
 have said, being under the necessity of 
 earning a livelihood, he could not afford to 
 incur the adverse criticism aroused thereby. 
 He had already more reputation as a poet 
 than was good for him in the esteem of 
 men engaged in business pursuits. The 
 old New England theory that a genius must 
 necessarily be deficient in common sense, 
 and nigh worthless as a business man, is 
 not yet entirely abandoned in this commer- 
 cial community. Mr. Gowans covers more 
 than two pages with reminiscences of the 
 poet; but they contain little that is new of 
 interest in relation to one of the most grace- 
 
 24 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 ful writers of verse that ever made our city 
 his adopted home. 
 
 Another well-known character who fre- 
 quented the old book shop was that inde- 
 fatigable collector of books and " auld nick- 
 nackets, Rusty aim caps and jinglin' jack- 
 ets," John Allan. He haunted it daily. After 
 the sale of Mr. Allan's effects in May, 1864, 
 Mr. Gowans published a price list of the arti- 
 cles sold, with the names of the purchasers. 
 From his introduction to this pamphlet we 
 abstract the following paragraphs : 
 
 " I had the happiness, as well as the good 
 fortune, to have been intimately acquainted 
 with him (John Allan) for over twenty-five 
 years. During that time, and long before, 
 it was his steady, constant and persistent 
 aim to be adding to his unique collection 
 by all means within his reach. On many 
 of these occasions, after having secured a 
 new accession, he would come tripping 
 into my store, with a foot as noiseless as 
 that of Grimalkin, and spirits as buoyant 
 and joyful as a youth let loose from school. 
 * * * * * 
 
 " It would be out of place to enumerate 
 the principal articles, with a history of their 
 peculiarities, for that would take a vol- 
 ume much larger than the catalogue itself. 
 
 25 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 I will, however, mention the four which he 
 prided himself most in possessing, namely, 
 the folio containing the three hundred por- 
 traits of and views relating to Mary Queen 
 of Scots; George Withers's Book of Em- 
 blems ; Elliott's Indian version of the Bible, 
 and the Kilmarnock edition of the works of 
 Robert Burn-s. 
 
 ***** 
 
 "Inasmuch as no collection like that of 
 Mr. Allan's for intrinsic value and unparal- 
 leled rarity has heretofore been offered for 
 public competition in America, it will form 
 an epoch in the history of the sale of liter- 
 ary, artistic and antiquarian property in the 
 United States, and will in some measure 
 test the popular taste for collecting such 
 heir-looms." 
 
 The test proved eminently satisfactory. 
 The sale was an unqualified success, and 
 one that could not be repeated to-day. 
 Our book collectors have become too know- 
 ing and fastidious, and Mr. Allan's books 
 were not, as a rule, in superlative condition. 
 
 In an irregular fashion Mr. Gowans's cat- 
 alogues are thus interspersed with notes of 
 a more or less interesting character. They 
 are not, however, so voluminous as at 
 a first glance appears, as the same notes 
 26 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 are made to do service over and over 
 again. 
 
 Urbanity of manner was not one of Mr. 
 Gowans's prominent characteristics, but he 
 could be genial and communicative when 
 in the humor, and with those who had won 
 his esteem and confidence. He seems to 
 have entertained no feeling of rivalry to- 
 ward his brother bibliopoles. In one of his 
 notes he refers most pleasantly and in highly 
 complimentary terms to his neighboring 
 bookseller, Joseph Sabin, of whose knowl- 
 edge of books he justly entertained a high 
 opinion. 
 
 Mr. Gowans issued in all twenty-eight 
 catalogues, the first in 1842, and the last in 
 1870, the year of his death. The later ones 
 were carefully compiled and neatly printed 
 on good paper at the press of Joel Mun- 
 sell, the well-known Albany printer, in his 
 day one of the leading typographers of the 
 country. In 1833 Mr. Gowans added to his 
 other "literary business " that of publisher, 
 his first venture being " Phsedo ; or the 
 Immortality of the Soul," by Plato, trans- 
 lated from the Greek by Charles L. Stan- 
 ford. His second book was "The Phcenix," 
 a collection of old and rare fragments, viz. : 
 "Morals of Confucius," "Oracles of Zo- 
 
 27 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 roaster," etc. In addition to the foregoing 
 he published, at various periods from 1833 
 down to 1870, about thirty-five volumes, 
 including five historical reprints, which 
 were issued under the title of "Gowans's 
 Bibliotheca Americana." 
 
 Mr. Gowans married when in middle life, 
 a Miss Bradley, of New York, with whom 
 he lived happily for ten years. She died 
 leaving no children. His own death came 
 suddenly. He was stricken with apoplexy 
 while walking in the streets on Thanksgiv- 
 ing eve, 1870, and died at his home, No. 
 13 Second Street, on the following Sunday. 
 He was buried beside his wife in Woodlawn 
 Cemetery, where at the time of her death 
 he had purchased a plot. 
 
 The auction sale of the mass of printed 
 matter which had accumulated at 1 15 Nassau 
 Street began January 30, 1871. The cata- 
 logue was in sixteen parts, containing 2,476 
 pages. The sale netted about thirty-three 
 thousand dollars. The pecuniary result to 
 his heirs, a brother and his children living 
 in Kentucky, would have been still more 
 gratifying if more books and pamphlets had 
 been added to the eight tons which were 
 sold for paper stock. Many of the lots 
 brought less than the cost of cataloguing 
 28 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 them. The expenses connected with the 
 sale are said to have amounted to over 
 $15,000, or to thirty per cent, of the total 
 sum paid by the book-buying public for 
 this huge accumulation of paper and print- 
 er's ink. 
 
 strong advocate of total abstinence, and in 
 his younger days wrote and lectured upon 
 the subject of temperance. He practiced 
 what he preached — water pure and simple 
 was his exclusive beverage, and he es- 
 chewed tobacco in all its forms ; but in 
 point of mental activity he failed to exer- 
 cise a corresponding degree of moderation. 
 To the cares of a considerable business in 
 the importation and sale of books he added 
 the labors of a publisher, the drudgery 
 of compiling catalogues, and the arduous 
 
 11 
 
 JOSEPH SABIN 
 
 plpHEN the bookseller and bib- 
 m~ liographer, Joseph Sabin, 
 I succumbed to overwork, 
 I " Killed by a Dictionary" 
 i!) was suggested as his most 
 fitting epitaph. He was a 
 
 29 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 calling of a book auctioneer, and then took 
 upon his broad shoulders a literary burden 
 of indefinite proportions in his " Dictionary 
 of Books Relating to America." 
 
 This indefatigable worker in the twin 
 fields of bibliography and bibliopolism was 
 born in 1821 in Branston, Northampton- 
 shire, England, and at the age of fourteen 
 was apprenticed to Charles Richards, an 
 Oxford bookseller and stationer. Two 
 years after the completion of his seven 
 years' apprenticeship he married, and in 
 1848 emigrated to the United States, arriv- 
 ing in New York on July 3d. He estab- 
 lished himself at first in Philadelphia, and 
 purchased a farm of thirty acres at Chest- 
 nut Hill, which would have greatly enriched 
 his heirs if they had retained possession of 
 it until the present time. 
 
 In 1850 Mr. Sabin removed to New York, 
 and was connected for a time with the well- 
 known book auction firm of Cooley and 
 Keese, where he was principally employed 
 in preparing catalogues of the better class of 
 books. In the panic year of 1857 he re- 
 turned to Philadelphia and engaged in busi- 
 ness as an importer of fine books. At the 
 outbreak of the Civil War he lost many of 
 his customers, and again sought to retrieve 
 30 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 his fortunes in this city. He opened first a 
 book auction-house, and then a bookshop 
 in Canal Street. Again he returned to his 
 farm and began work upon his " Dictionary 
 of Books Relating to America from its Dis- 
 covery to the Present Time." A year or two 
 later found him once more in New York in 
 the employ of the Riverside Press publish- 
 ers, Hurd and Houghton. In 1864 he ven- 
 tured into busines on his own account, and 
 purchased for $9,000 the stock and good- 
 will of Michael Noonan, a genial and popu- 
 lar Irishman who had built up quite a 
 respectable business in second-hand and 
 new books. From No, 84 Mr. Sabin 
 removed to 64 Nassau Street, where he 
 continued in business until his death. Nas- 
 sau Street from John to Beekman was then 
 the " Rialto " of the old book trade, and the 
 place where book-hunters most did love to 
 congregate. 
 
 Mr. Sabin's sales in the ten years from 
 1864-74 aggregated over $1,000,000, and 
 during this period he supplied with some 
 of their choicest treasures many of the pub- 
 lic and private libraries then in course of 
 formation; among them those of Almon 
 W. Griswold and William Menzies, of New 
 York, and Henry C. Murphy and T. W. 
 
 31 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Field, of Brooklyn. The two most promi- 
 nent American collectors of the first half of 
 this century, John Carter Brown, of Provi- 
 dence, and James Lenox, of New York, 
 had nearly ceased their purchases when Mr. 
 Sabin came to New York, and he supplied 
 them with comparatively few books. Rare 
 Americana were Mr. Sabin's specialty, and 
 several of his customers were advantage- 
 ously influenced by him in turning their 
 attention in this direction. Many of the 
 books which these fortunate individuals 
 procured through him have become, so far 
 as booksellers are concerned, simply fondly 
 cherished memories. What book-hunter 
 dreams nowadays of finding in a book-stall 
 such nuggets as the first New York Direc- 
 tory, the first edition of Andre's "Cow 
 Chase," Symmes's "Late Fight at Pigg- 
 wacket," or a copy of Hariot's "Virginia," 
 the rare English De Bry, which was sold to 
 Mr. Kalbfleisch for $1,250, a long price in 
 those days, but a short one in this year of 
 grace 1895. Mr. Sabin published a facsimile 
 of this excessively rare book. 
 
 Rarities in the way of English literature 
 were by no means neglected by the biblio- 
 pole of 64 Nassau Street, although the pres- 
 ent fierce demand for first editions of early 
 32 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 English writers was still slumbering. The 
 set of five Waltons sold in this city within 
 a few months came, I believe, from Sabin's, 
 and the first alone brought more than two 
 and one-half times as much as was origi- 
 nally paid for the set. Several copies of the 
 first folio Shakespeare passed through Mr. 
 Sabin's hands, including that of Sir William 
 Tite ; and the early Chaucers, Miltons, Ben 
 Jonsons, Spensers, and Drydens, now 
 sought for with so much eagerness by 
 book collectors, were far from being strang- 
 ers to the shelves of his bookshop. 
 
 In those days there was on the part ot 
 book-buyers, both here and abroad, a tol- 
 erance of big books, which no longer pre- 
 vails to the same extent. The ' ' Musee Fran- 
 cais " and " Musee Royal," Robert's "Holy 
 Land," Boydell's Shakespeare, Hogarth's 
 works, and the whole long list of elephan- 
 tine folios were staple articles in the second- 
 hand bookshops. In "extra-illustrated" 
 books the same preference for folios and large 
 quartos was manifested, obviously because 
 they permitted the insertion of large prints, 
 and so widened the "extra illustrator's" 
 field of selection. Bibliomania in this form 
 may be said to have reached its culminating 
 point during the period of which we write. 
 
 33 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 An English dame of those days greatly dis- 
 tinguished herself by " extra illustrating" 
 the Old and New Testaments at a cost, we 
 were informed, of over ;£ 10,000, not in- 
 cluding the expense of the book-case, or 
 book-room, whichever it was, that was 
 found necessary to contain this monument 
 of enthusiastic Grangerism. 
 
 The sale by the founder of the house at 
 an early stage in its history of an "extra- 
 illustrated" Shakespeare for $3,000 is one of 
 the never-to-be-forgotten reminiscences of 
 Joseph Sabin and Sons. 
 
 The publications of Mr. Sabin, aside from 
 the Dictionary, were a monthly magazine 
 called the Bibliopolist : A Literary Register 
 and Repository of Notes and Queries, etc., 
 begun in 1869, and continued until April, 
 1877; "A Bibliography of Bibliography ; or, 
 a Handy Book about Books which Relate to 
 Books " ; and a series of American reprints, 
 ten of which were issued in quarto size and 
 seven in octavo ; large and small papers 
 were made of each. It was the day of pri- 
 vately printed books and 'Marge papers" 
 (not necessarily large books because they 
 were large papers), books which have been 
 aptly described as " mere rivulets of text in 
 a meadow of margin." A reprint, in three 
 
 34 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 volumes, of Garden's "Anecdotes of the 
 Revolution " published in three sizes — ordi- 
 nary paper, large paper, and what Mr. Sabin 
 dubbed ' ' blanket folio " — capped the climax 
 in these typographical absurdities, and 
 brought them into merited disfavor. They, 
 however, reappeared later disguised under 
 the name of editions de luxe. 
 
 The first important collection of books 
 catalogued by Mr. Sabin was that of the 
 comedian, W. E. Burton, in i860. In 1864 
 he catalogued the collection of the old 
 Scotch antiquarian, John Allan, of pleasant 
 memory. The title on the cover of this 
 catalogue was not composed by Mr. Sabin. 
 In his opinion it was awkwardly con- 
 structed, and, not being willing to father it, 
 he signed himself as " Compiler of this cata- 
 logue, the cover excepted. " 
 
 Among the one hundred and fifty or more 
 libraries which Mr. Sabin is said to have 
 catalogued was that of the Shakespearean 
 scholar, Richard Grant White, who re- 
 marked, as the result of his observations, 
 that if anybody thought that bibliography 
 was an easy subject he should serve an ap- 
 prenticeship under Joseph Sabin. 
 
 The book auction sales at which Mr. 
 Sabin officiated included some of the most 
 
 35 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 important that have occurred in this coun- 
 try. The last at which he presided was the 
 great Brinley sale. This was divided into 
 five parts, and the sale of the third part was 
 set for March, 1881, but was postponed on 
 account of Mr. Sabin's ill-health. His family 
 had already been informed by his physician 
 of the fatal character of his illness. On 
 April 4th Mr. Sabin began the sale, and 
 conducted it to a satisfactory conclusion. 
 On this occasion he had the pleasure and 
 high bibliopolistic distinction of selling the 
 only copy of the Mazarin Bible that has ever 
 been brought under the hammer on this 
 side of the Atlantic. The book was bought 
 by the late Hamilton Cole for $8,000, and 
 the sale created a sensation in the book- 
 buying world, which was revived when the 
 two volumes again appeared at auction in 
 the dispersion of the collection of Mr. 
 Brayton Ives, and were taken to Chicago 
 at a ransom of $14,800. 
 
 The preparation of the Dictionary was 
 begun about i860. The prospectus was 
 issued in December, 1866, and the first part 
 was published in 1867. It continued to 
 make its appearance in parts at irregular 
 intervals until the death of the author. It 
 was his "old man of the sea." Early 
 36 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 morning hours, the small hours of the night, 
 and stolen moments in cars and on ship- 
 board were devoted to it. At Mr. Sabin's 
 death eighty parts, describing over fifty- 
 eight thousand lots, had been issued, bring- 
 ing the work down in alphabetical order to 
 the letters Pa. The manuscript left unpub- 
 lished is now being revised by Mr. Wilber- 
 force Eames, of the Lenox Library, and 
 thirty-six additional parts have so far been 
 printed, completing the work as far as the 
 word Smith. In his process of revision 
 Mr. Eames occasionally must meet with 
 the handwriting of the founder of the insti- 
 tution he serves, as Mr. Lenox was espe- 
 cially interested in this particular work of 
 Mr. Sabin, and rendered him valuable as- 
 sistance by bringing him titles of rare books 
 in his own collection, which were unob- 
 tainable from any other source. 
 
 Mr. Sabin was a genuine lover of books 
 and a patient, painstaking student of bibli- 
 ography. He was a better bibliophile than 
 he was a merchant, and his customers 
 would often find him more eager to discuss 
 the bibliographical points of his literary 
 wares than to effect a sale of them. It is 
 not surprising that he should disrelish hav- 
 ing his dictum called in question, and that 
 
 37 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 he sometimes met an assumption of supe- 
 rior knowledge with a show of impatience. 
 A youth once brought him for sale a volume 
 of the Mexican Boundary Survey, published 
 by the United States Government. Mr. 
 Sabin told him that it was not perfect, but 
 should be in two volumes. The young 
 man insisted that the book was perfect until 
 Mr. Sabin closed the discussion by saying 
 jocosely, "Young man, if that work was 
 contained in one volume it would make a 
 book as thick as your head." 
 
 Thirty years ago the art of bookbinding 
 was not receiving in this country the atten- 
 tion now bestowed upon it. A step in ad- 
 vance is credited to Mr. Sabin, to wit, the 
 substitution of calf for the cheaper and less 
 durable sheepskin previously so extensively 
 employed by American binders. 
 
 Mr. Sabin died in the harness. Against 
 the advice of his physician, he undertook 
 the auction of the third part of the Brinley 
 Library, and his labors in connection with 
 it may have hastened his death, which oc- 
 curred at his Brooklyn home on Sunday, 
 June 5th, 1 88 1. His funeral services were 
 conducted by the Rev. Dr. Collyer, and he 
 was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery. 
 
 They say that there is no money in the 
 
 38 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 old book business; however that may be, 
 there is certainly in this, as in any other 
 honorable pursuit, something quite as much 
 to be coveted as financial success, and that 
 is the regard and good-will of one's busi- 
 ness associates. These Mr. Sabin enjoyed. 
 Mr. John Pyne, his near neighbor for many 
 years, said of Mr. Sabin at the time of his 
 death, that he was the acknowledged head 
 of his profession, and was loved and appre- 
 ciated by all who knew him ; and sums up a 
 pleasant tribute to the memory of his friend 
 in these words: "His love for rare books 
 passed into knowledge which he used for 
 the benefit of all who had the pleasure and 
 profit of knowing him." 
 
 Ill 
 
 JOHN BRADBURN AND OTHERS 
 
 MONG the Nassau Street 
 1 ' bookshops of olden time, " 
 whose alluring signs no 
 longer salute the eye of 
 the passing bibliophile, was 
 that of John Bradburn, who 
 came to this country in 1820 from County 
 Westmeath, Ireland, where he was born in 
 1805. He began his career as a vender of 
 
 39 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 second-hand books some ten years later 
 than William Gowans, and in the same 
 humble way. Armed with a basket filled 
 with books of travel and works on naviga- 
 tion he invaded the wharves and ships of 
 the city, and drove a thriving trade with 
 ships' captains and mates just home from a 
 cruise and with money burning holes 
 through their freshly lined pockets. 
 
 Mr. Bradburn's first place of business was 
 on the southeastern corner of Fulton and 
 Nassau Streets. In 1852 or 1853 ne re_ 
 moved to the northwestern corner of Ann 
 and Nassau Streets, where he remained until 
 he retired from active business in 1868. The 
 old book shops of his day were commonly 
 supplied with outside shelves and counters, 
 which were laden with books and pamph- 
 lets. Here loungers with literary tastes 
 congregated the livelong day, sipping 
 knowledge as the bee sips honey, and 
 forming a feature of New York City street 
 life which has passed almost entirely away. 
 
 Mr. Bradburn dealt largely in second- 
 hand law, theological and medical books, 
 and his shop was a veritable boon to impe- 
 cunious students of theological seminaries 
 and academies of medicine and to briefless 
 attorneys and counsellors at law. Books of 
 
 40 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 a less utilitarian character, but possessed of 
 more charms for the bibliophile, also found 
 their way to his shop ; and the patient 
 searcher for rarities might at any moment 
 stumble upon one tucked away among the 
 volumes clad in prosaic legal calf which 
 lined his shelves. 
 
 When first I knew this veteran of the old 
 book trade he was a pleasant-faced, elderly 
 man, with an air of prosperity and content- 
 ment about him, in puzzling contrast to the 
 surroundings of his dingy, contracted, but 
 typical old bookshop. The book business 
 prospered so well with Mr. Bradburn that 
 he was able to make investments in such 
 choice Manhattan real estate as Central Park 
 and Fifth Avenue lots, the ' ' unearned incre- 
 ment" of which in course of time made him 
 well-to-do. 
 
 There is not much ozone about old books, 
 nevertheless dealing in them appears to be 
 conducive to longevity. C. S. Francis, to 
 whom we have still to refer, died at the age 
 of eighty-five; and I have had lately the 
 gratification of sending Mr. Bradburn my 
 congratulations upon his attainment, on 
 April 5th, 1895, of his ninetieth birthday, in 
 good health and the full possession of his 
 faculties. 
 
 41 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 One of Mr. Bradburn's near neighbors 
 was John Pyne, a " man of many friends," 
 who, we are told, resembled Joseph Sabin in 
 this, that he never smoked tobacco or used 
 alcoholic liquors. Mr. Pyne removed from 
 Nassau Street to the corner of Broadway 
 and Astor Place. Not meeting with the 
 success he had anticipated, he returned to 
 his former stand, but found that many ot 
 his old customers had drifted away. He 
 finally abandoned the second-hand book 
 business and entered the Register's office of 
 the City of New York, where he remained 
 until his death, in 1894. 
 
 In Nassau Street, between Fulton and Ann 
 Streets, was the bookshop of T. H. Morrell, 
 at one time the rallying place for antiqua- 
 rians interested in old New York and Revo- 
 lutionary history. Mr. Morrell was more 
 conspicuous as an "extra illustrator" than 
 as a dealer in rare books, although he had 
 acquired a knowledge of and trafficked to a 
 considerable extent in the latter. His pro- 
 nounced penchant was for books on the 
 drama, New York City, and the American 
 Revolution. Although the books he "extra 
 illustrated " were for sale when completed — 
 unless executed to order — he lavished upon 
 
 42 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 them all the skill and taste of an experienced 
 and enthusiastic amateur. His knowledge 
 of the class of prints to which he confined 
 his attention was thorough, and he inserted 
 in his books the choicest and rarest that he 
 could procure. When necessary he had 
 them repaired and restored by George 
 Trent, that unequalled adept in the art of 
 cleaning, mending, and inlaying books and 
 prints, and then consigned the volumes to 
 the skillful hands of the binder, William 
 Matthews. 
 
 A lasting monument to Mr. Morrell's zeal 
 and industry is the copy of Dr. Francis's 
 "Old New York," which he illustrated and 
 extended to nine volumes. This book 
 finally came into the possession of Mr. J. H. 
 V. Arnold, and at his sale was purchased 
 by Joseph Sabin for Robert L. Stuart at a 
 cost of $230 per volume. It contains over 
 twenty-five hundred prints, water-color 
 drawings and autographs, and among the 
 latter are either letters or signatures of all 
 the mayors of New York up to the time 
 the book was completed. It is by far the 
 most extensively illustrated copy of any 
 book upon New York local history, and 
 will probably never be equalled, for there 
 are no prints which have become so scarce 
 
 43 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 as those which relate to old New York. 
 The lithographic plates in Valentine's 
 " Manual," which earlier collectors affected 
 to despise and hesitated to use, have be- 
 come Hobson's choice with the " extra 
 illustrator " of this fair city of Gotham of to- 
 day. 
 
 Mr. Morrell had always betrayed strong 
 dramatic proclivities, and he finally donned 
 the tragedian's garb. His formal entrance 
 to the stage was made in the character of 
 Cardinal Richelieu, and he selected Phila- 
 delphia as the scene of the first and, as I am 
 informed, last public exhibition of his his- 
 trionic ability. 
 
 A few steps further up Nassau Street (No. 
 140) brought the book-hunter on his ram- 
 bles to "Old Hollingsworth's," who after- 
 ward migrated to the east side of Broad- 
 way, near Great Jones Street. He dealt in 
 prints and old magazines; and although his 
 shop was a mere cubby-hole, it was well 
 for the book or print collector to make in it 
 occasionally a tentative cast of his drag-net. 
 
 Around the corner, in Fulton Street, was 
 the store of Timothy Reeve and Company, 
 who dealt exclusively in imported rare and 
 
 44 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 standard books, which they sold at retail 
 and to the trade generally throughout the 
 country. They relinquished business in 
 1866, and were succeeded by the present 
 firm of S. B. Luyster and Company. 
 
 Allan Ebbs was located on the west side 
 of Broadway, near Fulton Street. His spe- 
 cialty was high-class and handsomely bound 
 English books. In 1870, with his family, 
 he took passage for Europe, and was lost 
 on the " City of Boston." 
 
 C. S. Francis should have had an earlier 
 place in these sketches. He came to the 
 city in 1826 and opened a store at 189 
 Broadway, near Dey Street. From there 
 he removed to 252 Broadway, under the 
 famous old Peale's Museum. For many 
 years his store was the headquarters for 
 men of letters and lovers of books. His 
 brother, D. G. Francis, who succeeded him 
 in business, although advanced in years, 
 has only within the last few months relin- 
 quished the management of the oldest es- 
 tablished bookstore in this city. 
 
 Mr. C. S. Francis published the first 
 American edition of " Aurora Leigh" ; and 
 the writer has in his possession Mrs. Brown- 
 
 45 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 ing's note in relation to Mr. Francis's acqui- 
 sition of the copyright, which reads as fol- 
 lows : "Having received what I consider 
 to be sufficient remuneration for my poem 
 of 'Aurora Leigh ' from Mr. Francis, of New 
 York, it is my earnest desire that his right 
 in this and future editions of the same may 
 not be interfered with." This warning to 
 trespassers is prominently displayed in the 
 edition published by Mr. Francis in 1857. 
 
 C. B. Richardson, bookseller and pub- 
 lisher of the Historical Magazine, Pollard's 
 " History of the Rebellion," and a number 
 of Southern books, occupied with the old- 
 established firm of book auctioneers, Bangs, 
 Merwin and Company, a building at No. 
 594 Broadway, near Houston Street. Mr. 
 Richardson suffered a partial loss of his 
 stock in a conflagration on the 19th of Sep- 
 tember 1864, which at the same time de- 
 stroyed many rare volumes, the property of 
 Thomas Aspinwall, U. S. Consul to Lon- 
 don, the collector of many of the choice 
 books of the late S. L. M. Barlow. 
 
 Astor Place was for some time and until 
 quite recently a bookselling and publishing 
 centre. Here were established John Wiley 
 46 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 and Son, whose business consisted largely 
 of the importation of books bought to order 
 in Europe. Mr. Lenox obtained through 
 their agency his beautiful copy of the Maz- 
 arin Bible, the finest of the only two copies 
 of this monument of typography that have 
 ever been brought to this country. 
 
 The figure of " Old Cronin " bending be- 
 neath the weight of the ponderous folios 
 and quartos, which were his principal stock 
 in trade, has been for many years a famil- 
 iar spectacle in the down-town streets of 
 New York. I am told that he still lives 
 and plies his trade, although he has become 
 quite blind. Another original character in- 
 cidentally and spasmodically engaged in the 
 old book business was "Jimmy" Lawlor, 
 who kept an uninviting little shop at the 
 lower end of University Place. For a time 
 he enjoyed a virtual monopoly of a fruitful 
 source of book supply. He would pur- 
 chase by the cubic foot the contents of old 
 garrets, and bought many of his books by 
 the pound, together with the household 
 pots, kettles and pans. The valuable books 
 that occasionally turned up in these job lots 
 cost him next to nothing, and were cheap 
 to his customers if he charged a profit of 
 
 47 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 one thousand per cent. Acquisitions from 
 this source required careful collation on the 
 part of the buyer; still it was surprising 
 how much knowledge of books Mr. Lawlor 
 picked up in the course of his business 
 career. 
 
 Other dealers in second-hand books in New 
 York thirty to sixty years ago were M'Elrath 
 and Bangs, Calvan Blanchard, Samuel Ray- 
 ner, Charles B. Norton, and John Doyle, 
 whose signboard modestly declared his place 
 of business in Nassau Street to be "the 
 moral centre of the intellectual world." 
 
 The old bookshops of the metropolis be- 
 fore the Civil War were for the most part 
 small and unpretentious ; but good books 
 and rare ones were constantly to be found 
 in them by alert, persevering and intelligent 
 collectors, and in those days it did not, as 
 it unfortunately does now, require the bank 
 account of a millionaire to ride the hobby 
 of book collecting or indulge in the kindred 
 pursuit of the gentle art of angling. 
 
 Indulgence in fond recollections of by- 
 gone days is considered an infallible sign of 
 approaching senility, and we are assured 
 that the present days are a vast improve- 
 ment upon any that have preceded them. 
 4 8 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Doubtless they are — with exceptions — for 
 the book-hunter with a slender purse be- 
 yond all question has seen his best days in 
 this or any other land. Alike from the 
 Quay Voltaire, Piccadilly and Nassau Street, 
 
 " the fabled treasure flees, 
 
 Grown rarer with the fleeting years, 
 
 In rich men's shelves they take their ease." 
 
 — Aldine's Bodonis Elzevirs. 
 
 Nevertheless, according to Edmund 
 Gosse, there is a pleasure still attendant 
 upon the collector in his poverty — a happi- 
 ness he shares with gentle Elia (whom for 
 his bibliomania we love the more), namely, 
 "the exquisite pleasure of buying what he 
 knows he can't afford." 
 
 When the first of these sketches appeared 
 I was confronted with this query from an 
 old and respected member of the booksell- 
 ing fraternity: " What is the use of writing 
 about these men ? They were simply deal- 
 ers, and bought and sold books as so much 
 merchandise for profit, and that was all 
 there was to it." Not quite all, my good 
 friend. An old bookshop is a mental tonic 
 to one who merely whiles away an idle 
 hour therein. I am loath to believe that one 
 can pass his entire life among books, even 
 in the way of sordid trade, without imbib- 
 
 49 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 ing — it may be in only a superficial manner 
 — a modicum of the wit, wisdom and phi- 
 losophy they contain, and thereby becoming 
 a less commonplace fraction of the mass of 
 humanity. But this may be only a biblio- 
 maniac's fancy, liable to be shattered by the 
 first passing breath of common-sense criti- 
 cism. 
 
 50 
 
PART THE SECOND 
 
 THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK 
 
The longest age is but a winter's day : 
 Some break their fast, and then depart away ; 
 Others stay dinner and depart full fed ; 
 The longest age but sups and goes to bed. 
 
 From the ^Parnassiad of the Columbian Magazine. 
 
 THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK 
 
 might have been assumed 
 by Samuel Louden, book- 
 seller and proprietor of the 
 New York Packet, that four 
 years from the close of the 
 War of Independence was 
 too short a period of time in which to 
 expect the citizen of the new-born Ameri- 
 can Republic to repair his broken fortunes 
 and turn his thoughts from the din of battle 
 and the tented field to the gentle arts and 
 walks of peace. As the sequel proved, he 
 did forestall somewhat the domestic mar- 
 
 53 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 ket for such wares, when in 1787 he ven- 
 tured upon the publication of a literary 
 magazine in the city of New York. It was 
 patriotically christened the American, and 
 was placed under the editorship of that 
 American lexicographer and grammarian 
 whose name has so long been the school- 
 boy's household word, if not his terror, 
 Noah Webster. This pioneer of New York 
 magazines was ushered into being Decem- 
 ber, 1787, and in November, 1788, it quietly 
 passed away, bequeathing to the Common- 
 wealth an example of laudable though un- 
 successful endeavor, and an octavo volume 
 of 882 pages. 
 
 The American was without illustrations, 
 so that the mantle of leadership in the army 
 of New York illustrated periodicals, since 
 become so numerous a body, rests upon the 
 New York Magazine, the prospectus and 
 first number of which made its appearance 
 about a twelvemonth after the demise of its 
 short-lived predecessor. It was continued 
 for eight years without interruption, from 
 January, 1790 to 1797, when it also ceased 
 to exist, either from lack of patronage or for 
 other good and substantial reasons un- 
 known to the writer. 
 
 Magazines identical in scope and charac- 
 
 54 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 ter were established almost simultaneously 
 in the two principal cities of the Northern 
 States outside of the city of New York — the 
 Columbian in Philadelphia, and the Massa- 
 chusetts in Boston. The latter, as an illus- 
 trated magazine, was preceded by the Royal 
 American, founded in January, 1774, by 
 Isaiah Thomas. It was suspended at the 
 expiration of six months, and soon after 
 abandoned by him. Later it was revived 
 by Joseph Greenleaf, and continued under 
 his management until the beginning of the 
 War. It was the last periodical established 
 in Boston before the Revolution. It con- 
 tains engavings executed by the patriot, 
 artist, and silversmith, Paul Revere, includ- 
 ing the portraits of Samuel Adams and John 
 Hancock, which are, considering the pre- 
 Revolutionary origin of the prints and the 
 national fame of the engraver, the most in- 
 teresting, as they are the rarest of all exist- 
 ing specimens of early American engraved 
 portraits. 
 
 Copper-plate engravings were also used 
 in the Pennsylvania Magazine, published in 
 Philadelphia in 1775 and 1776, by Robert 
 Aitkin. They consist of maps, plans and 
 views, the most interesting of the latter 
 being "A Correct View of the Late Battle 
 
 55 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 at Charlestown, June 17th, 1775," published 
 in the number for September of that year. 
 
 It behooves the seeker of early American 
 prints to bear the titles of these four maga- 
 zines well in mind, although he will not run 
 chock-a-block against them in the first 
 bookshop he comes to, nor in the second. 
 The Philadelphia Magazine is not quite so 
 difficult to find as the other three. 
 
 The publishers of the New York Magazine 
 were Thomas and James Swords, of No. 44 
 Crown Street, known for many years as 
 publishers of books relating to the Episcopal 
 Church 
 
 They recite in their preface that the pro- 
 posed work will be printed with beautiful 
 new type cast by the ingenius Mr. Caslon, 
 on good American manufactured paper, that 
 it will consist of 64 pages, and be published 
 the first of each month. " Each number," 
 they add, "will contain one or more copper 
 plates representing some particular passage 
 in the work." 
 
 The price to subscribers was fixed at 
 eighteen shillings, payable upon the instal- 
 ment plan ; five shillings upon the delivery 
 of the first number; five on the delivery of 
 the sixth, and the remaining eight at the 
 expiration of the year. The generous prop- 
 56 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 osition was also made, that if on delivery 
 of the third number the work should not 
 appear to equal the expectation of any sub- 
 scriber, it would be at his option to discon- 
 tinue his subscription under forfeit of the 
 five shillings already paid. To non-sub- 
 scribers the price of each number was two 
 shillings. 
 
 The publishers appear to have launched 
 their literary craft with some mental mis. 
 givings, and in an address to the public they 
 humbly solicit the countenance and support 
 of the native and free-born Americans, 
 "whose characteristic has ever been to 
 foster and cultivate the arts, and to reward 
 honest industry by the bounty of a liberal 
 hand." In conclusion they state that if 
 "this appeal for support is merely sufficient 
 to defray expenses the magazine will live; 
 if it is inadequate it must DIE." 
 
 The magazine began its career with the 
 respectable number of 369 subscribers. The 
 list is headed by their Excellencies the Presi- 
 dent and Vice-President of the United States, 
 and in its columns appear the names of 
 New York's most prominent citizens, the 
 Jays, Duers, Bleeckers and De Peysters, 
 Richard Varick, Gabriel Eurman, Elias 
 Hicks and John Pintard. There are also a 
 
 57 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 goodly number of out-of-town subscribers, 
 among them Ralph Izard, of Charleston, 
 and the Van Rensselaers, of Albany, and 
 curiously, there are not a few names from 
 that — in those steamerless days — far-off land 
 of the blue noses, Nova Scotia. The New 
 York Magazine certainly began its career 
 under fairly promising auspices, and should 
 have enjoyed a longer period of usefulness. 
 
 The literary feast which the editors of the 
 New York Magazine spread before its read- 
 ers was sufficiently diversified to suit the 
 most catholic tastes. It embraced meteoro- 
 logical observations, historical sketches, 
 essays, travels, hints on gardening, short 
 stories, tales of adventure, Congressional 
 reports, foreign and domestic intelligence, 
 marriages and deaths. A large portion of 
 its space was devoted to poetical effusions, 
 and the editors appear to have made every 
 effort to foster the budding American muse, 
 and assist in its laborious ascent of Mount 
 Parnassus. 
 
 The stories are either of the highly sensa- 
 tional or sentimental order, and are gener- 
 ally pointed with a moral. All are clothed 
 in the stilted phraseology, ornate to the 
 point of grotesqueness, that flowed in such 
 full and turgid streams from the pens of 
 58 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 eighteenth-century story-tellers. The poetry 
 leans to the pathetic and lovelorn, and 
 is attuned to touch the tender sensibil- 
 ities of the members of the gentler sex 
 who were among the favored readers of 
 the only literary magazine of the day. 
 What a fluttering of maidens' hearts there 
 must have been when this sugar-coated 
 sonnet appeared in the department of " se- 
 lected poetry " : 
 
 THE BELLES OF NEW YORK 
 
 Charlotte hath charms to catch the roving eye, 
 And force the timid youth to heave a sigh ; 
 Maria, tripping lively through the streets, 
 Enraptures by her smiles the beaux she meets. 
 
 Sweet Nancy, how can any on thee gaze 
 And not in transport celebrate thy praise ? 
 In Wall Street oft I view that beaut'ous form 
 Which does my breast with soft emotions warm. 
 
 The Muse with pride and exultation tells 
 That fair Rebecca ranks among the Belles ; 
 All that behold her must admire her face, 
 And own each gesture is replete with grace. 
 
 Mary, a tribute surely now is due 
 To Hymen's fav'rite — and it is to you 
 When join'd in wedlock may you ever prove 
 The joys which spring from innocence and love. 
 
 59 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Fain would I mention, in this present ditty, 
 
 The num'rous fair ones that adorn our city ; 
 
 But this sweet talk would soon exhaust my rhyme — 
 
 Will therefore leave it to another time. 
 
 Aside from the record of marriages and 
 deaths and a few local items of some slight 
 historical importance, there is nothing in 
 the literature of the New York Magazine 
 that, if it had been totally destroyed, would 
 have proved a serious loss to posterity or to 
 the world of letters ; but in its pictorial fea- 
 tures we find matter of very considerable 
 value and interest. The publishers builded 
 better than they knew when they sum- 
 moned to their aid Anderson, the artist, and 
 Tiebout and Scoles, the copper-plate en- 
 gravers, and bid them depict for the pages 
 of their magazine the architectural beauties 
 of the city of New York. Unfortunately, 
 however, with these embellishments to 
 tempt the cupidity of the print collector, 
 they implanted the seeds of destruction in 
 their work. What has become of the 369 
 copies of the New York Magazine that we 
 know must have been printed ? is as unan- 
 swerable a query as is, " What becomes of 
 all the pins ?" Presumably an edition of at 
 least 500 copies was issued, and yet there 
 is at the present time in all probability not 
 60 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 half a dozen perfect copies in existence. 
 The one belonging to the New York His- 
 torical Society is perfect, and contains all 
 the plates, but it required years of cat-like 
 watchfulness of auction sales and patient 
 groping through booksellers' catalogues to 
 make it so. I doubt if all the descendants 
 of all the subscribers named in the prospec- 
 tus could muster among themselves a 
 perfect copy. Some old gray garret rat in 
 one of their ancestral homes might possibly 
 pilot us to the hiding-place of a few of its 
 sere and yellow leaves. 
 
 Illustrations in the New York Magazine 
 are as delightfully varied in character as are 
 its literary contents. Pictures of birds, 
 beasts and flowers are there to please and 
 instruct the embryo naturalist. Views in 
 foreign parts are presented in great variety. 
 By the magic wand of the artist we are 
 transported in open-eyed wonder from the 
 great Pagoda at Tanjore all the way to Kam- 
 schatka, stopping long enough en route to 
 catch glimpses of Mt. Etna in a violent state 
 of eruption, and to stand aghast at the sight 
 of a vessel with its shrieking, living freight, 
 on the point of being engulfed in the Mael- 
 strom of Norway. By way of fashion 
 plates we are furnished with pictures of the 
 
 61 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Esquimaux Indians, of Hudson's Bay, and 
 the dresses of women in the Isle of Nio, in 
 the Grecian Archipelago. 
 
 The titles of the illustrations to the stories 
 suggest their romantic and sentimental 
 character: "Her Sense had fled," "The 
 Cornish Lovers," "Edwin and Angelina," 
 " Alcanzar and Layda," "Despair, or the 
 History of Delia and Lorenzo," " The Death 
 of Adonis," and "The Babes in the 
 Woods." What a waste of the engraver's 
 time and skill ! Would that some good 
 fairy could have stood at his elbow and in- 
 duced him to give us instead of these cop- 
 per-plate platitudes more pictures of our 
 beloved city in those olden times. 
 
 If we omit the portrait of Isaiah, the 
 prophet, which we are hardly justified in 
 believing to be a veritable likeness, we are 
 furnished with only two "counterfeit pre- 
 sentments," those of the Revolutionary he- 
 roes, Generals Greene and Wayne. 
 
 Scattered through the pages of the maga- 
 zine are a number of views of places in dif- 
 ferent sections of the country, of which the 
 most important from an historical or topo- 
 graphical standpoint are the following: 
 
 "West Point from the North as it ap- 
 peared at the close of the War." 
 
 62 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 "The Palisades." 
 
 " Town of Kaatskill. Hudson River." 
 
 "Inside View of the New Theatre, Phil- 
 adelphia." (A picture of great interest to 
 the collectors of American dramatic illustra- 
 tions.) 
 
 "A View of the Town of Boston from 
 Breed's Hill in Charlestown, and another of 
 the Bridge over Charles River, Mass.," will 
 delight the eye of the Bostonian. When he 
 has secured these prints, the engravings of 
 a similar character that are to be found in 
 the Massachusetts Magazine, Paul Revere's 
 noted engraving of the Boston massacre, 
 and the print of Castle William* in the Har- 
 bor of Boston, he will have captured about 
 all the graphic memorials of this early pe- 
 riod in the history of his native city that 
 exist. 
 
 The local topographical illustrations which 
 give the magazine its unique value and im- 
 portance to the New York collector remain 
 to be noticed. They are, with one excep- 
 tion — that of Federal Hall — the only existing 
 pictures of the places they represent, made 
 at the period to which the magazine be- 
 longs, or, as far as I am aware, at any pre- 
 
 * Built by Colonel Romer, a. d. 1704, by order of the General 
 Assembly of the Province of Massachusetts. 
 
 63 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 vious epoch in the history of our city. 
 These engravings number ten in all, and 
 seven of them appear in the first volume. 
 Two views of the Monument and of the 
 Lighthouse at Sandy Hook are of minor im- 
 portance; the remaining eight subjects are 
 as follows: 
 
 "An East View of Trinity Church " (the 
 rebuilding of which had just been com- 
 pleted). 
 
 "A Perspective View of the Federal Edi- 
 fice in the City of New York" (then lately 
 reconstructed. As before noted, a contem- 
 porary picture of this building, on a larger 
 scale, is to be found in the Columbian Mag- 
 azine). 
 
 "A View of Columbia College in the City 
 of New York." 
 
 "A View of the Present Seat of his Ex- 
 cellency the Vice-President (John Adams) 
 of the United States." This is properly 
 styled a "rural view." It was the famous 
 Richmond Hill House, built by Abraham 
 Mortier, Paymaster General of the Royal 
 forces. It stood embowered in trees and 
 shrubbery near the banks of the North 
 River, at the southeast corner of Varick and 
 Charlton streets, on what was then the road 
 to Greenwich. It was occupied in the 
 6 4 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 summer of 1776 by General Washington as 
 a country residence, and afterward assumed 
 additional historical importance as the resi- 
 dence of Aaron Burr, at the time of his duel 
 with Hamilton. It was sold by Burr's cred- 
 itors, after his flight, to John Jacob Astor 
 for $25,000. 
 
 A View of Hell Gate is the last illustration 
 in Vol. I. With this plate the artist appears 
 to have exhausted for the time being this 
 valuable material for his pencil. No other 
 pictures of buildings in this city appear un- 
 til 1795, in Vol. V., when we are given a 
 view of Belvedere House, a building erected 
 on the banks of the East River, near Cor- 
 lear's Hook, in 1792, by thirty-three gentle- 
 men composing the Belvedere Club. 
 
 The January number of 1795 contains an 
 interesting engraving of the Government 
 House, so called because it was appropri- 
 ated to the use of the Governors of the 
 State, although originally intended as a 
 presidential residence when it was thought 
 that New York would be fixed upon as the 
 Capitol City of the country. This building 
 was erected on the spot where Fort George 
 formerly stood, fronting Broadway. The 
 view is taken from the northwest corner of 
 the Battery near the end of Greenwich 
 
 65 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 Street, and shows a part of the city and 
 some portion of the Battery. 
 
 In the same volume (October, 1795) we 
 have the last of these attractive pictures of 
 old New York. The series closes with a 
 view of St. Paul's Church, which displays, 
 in addition to the chapel, the lower portion 
 of the City Hall Park, then surrounded by 
 wooden palings. The spire of this vener- 
 able edifice still points heavenward, as it 
 did in the days when Anderson drew its 
 graceful outlines, but every other architec- 
 tural landmark depicted in the pages of the 
 New York Magazine has long since van- 
 ished as completely as the baseless fabric of 
 a dream. 
 
 With the exception of a few compara- 
 tively large engravings, such as the memo- 
 rial portrait of Washington standing on a 
 pedestal in front of Bowling Green (also en- 
 graved by Tiebout), that rara avis among 
 New York prints known as the Rip Van 
 Dam plate of the Middle Dutch Church, and 
 the "Federal Edifice" in the Columbian 
 Magazine, the old periodical before us sup- 
 plies all the engravings of New York in the 
 latter part of the last century that to the 
 best of my knowledge exist. These pen- 
 ciled records of the past are few and simple, 
 
 66 
 
THE FIRST ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE 
 
 but precious in the sight of every collector 
 of memorials of this goodly town of Man- 
 hattan, and in their modest, unpretentious 
 way they supply important links in the 
 chain of our topographical history. 
 
PART THE THIRD 
 
 THE EARLY AMERICAN 
 ALMANAC 
 
Au Agronomical DIARY,. 
 
 OR, AN 
 
 ALMANACK 
 
 For the Year of our Lord CHRIST 
 
 Containing, 
 The Sun's and 
 Moon's rifing 
 and fctting, '— 
 Eclipfes, — 
 TimeofHgh- 
 Water, — Lu- 
 nstions, — Af- 
 petfs, — Courts 
 Spring. Tides, 
 — Judgmentof 
 the Weather — 
 
 Being BISSEXTILE or LEAP YEAR.. 
 Calculated for the Meridian of BOSTON, New ENOtA^'Dy 
 Latitude 42 Degrees 25 Minutes North. 
 The Year of the Reign of King GEORGE the Second 
 begins the Twenty-fceond Day of June. 
 
 ZyTNATHANIEiTA MES. 
 
 MARS like a wild Infernal Fury, (talks, 
 And ma-ks his Steps in Blood where'er he walks ; 
 But Fe^ce would from her Native Heav'n defcend, 
 And Olive Branches to the Nations lend. 
 
 DO ST ON t in NEW-ENGLAND : 
 Printed and Sold by John Draper, in Cornhill ; Richard 
 Draper inNewbury-Street j Green &RussELL,and Edes 
 & Gill, in Queen-Street; and Thomas &John Fleet, 
 at the Heart and Crown in Cornhill. 
 
 Feafts and 
 Falls of the 
 Church of 
 England— 
 Quake 
 General 
 Meetings 
 Roads, — 
 Tables of 
 Loin &In 
 terefr, &c 
 
 Trjcc Tbret Shilling: per Dozen, and Set'tnCtyfers Cnglc. 
 
The world's a scene of changes and to be 
 Constant in nature were inconstancy, 
 For 'twere to break the laws herself has made, 
 Our substances themselves do fleet and fade ; 
 The most fixed Being still does move and fly 
 Swift as the wings of Time 'tis measured by." 
 
 Ames's Almanac, i j6o. 
 
 THE 
 
 y EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 i^^^JHE fi rst product of the printing- 
 press which Stephen Daye 
 H3 set up under the shadow of 
 Harvard College, before the 
 walls of that infant seat of 
 learning were fairly dry, was 
 a pamphlet, "The Freeman's Oath," to 
 which immediately succeeded an Almanac 
 for the Year of our Lord 1639. We surmise 
 the compiler thereof, one Mr. William 
 Pierce, to have been a weather-beaten old 
 salt, who having abandoned his seafaring 
 
 71 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 life and cast his moorings ashore for the re- 
 mainder of his days, was ready to turn his 
 nautical knowledge to practical account. 
 He modestly disclaims the academic title of 
 Philomath assumed by Almanac makers in 
 general, and subscribes himself simply 
 "Mariner." 
 
 The following year Daye covered his 
 name as a typographer with imperishable 
 glory by printing the first book ever issued 
 from a press in this part of America, "The 
 Psalms in Metre," or the "New England 
 Version of the Psalms," commonly known 
 as the " Bay Psalm Book," and to the bibli- 
 ophile as 
 
 " One of the books we read about 
 But very seldom see." 
 
 One or more Almanacs were issued an- 
 nually by Daye and by his successor, Samuel 
 Green, whose name is conspicuous in the 
 typographical annals of this country as the 
 printer of " Eliot's Indian Bible," that ex- 
 tremely useful book which it is said no man 
 living can read. Following in the wake of 
 these early Cambridge printers, every enter- 
 prising proprietor of a hand-press and font 
 of type during the seventeenth and eight- 
 eenth centuries felt it his bounden duty — or 
 72 
 
THE EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 found it to his pecuniary interest — to pro- 
 vide the community with a yearly Calendar. 
 Suspended behind the farmhouse kitchen- 
 door, this silent monitor of the passing 
 hours repeated from year to year its trust- 
 worthy predictions of returning seed-time 
 and harvest and its dubious prophecies ot 
 rain and sunshine, heat and cold, until, yel- 
 lowed with smoke, begrimed by constant 
 use and thumbed to bits, the last fragment 
 of a leaf fell fluttering to the ground. In 
 view of the extremely utilitarian role they 
 were called upon to play, it is not singular 
 that old Almanacs not things of rags and 
 tatters are difficult to find. 
 
 In those primitive days presumably few 
 books beside the Bible, the Psalm-book, the 
 Almanac, and now and then a printed ser- 
 mon of one of the reverend fathers of the 
 Church — Increase or Cotton Mather, Thomas 
 Shephard or Samuel Willard — found their 
 way over the rugged New England hills to 
 remote and scattered Puritan homes. In 
 the hard struggle for existence of pioneer 
 life, with its scant hours of leisure, they 
 doubtless sufficed for the intellectual re- 
 quirements of the inmates. We are in- 
 clined to believe that the Almanac occupied 
 a higher place in popular estimation than its 
 
 73 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 numerical strength (i to 4) in this primitive 
 family library would indicate. If the ques- 
 tion of dispensing with either the sermon 
 or the Almanac came to a vote in the do- 
 mestic circle, we would not rely with con- 
 fidence upon the staying powers of the 
 sermon, especially if it were one of those 
 highly impressive religious discourses which 
 the divines of Massachusetts did on occa- 
 sion preach of a quiet Sabbath day morning 
 to a youth in his teens, in the presence of 
 the congregation which during the coming 
 week was to escort the culprit to the 
 gallows, and under the blue sky of heaven 
 hang him for the crime of sheep-stealing. 
 
 The feast of fat things that the makers of 
 these harbingers of the new year strove to 
 provide for their readers is thus humorously 
 set forth by Dr. Franklin, in his Almanac 
 "Poor Richard Improved" for 1756: 
 
 " Courteous Reader: 
 
 "I suppose that my Almanack may be worth the 
 money that thou hast paid for it, hadst thou no other 
 advantage from it than to find the day of the Month, the 
 remarkable T>ays, the Changes of the Moon, the Sun and 
 Moon's Rising and Setting, and to foreknow the Tides 
 and the Weather ; these with other Astronomical Curi- 
 osities I have yearly and constantly prepared for Thy Use 
 and Entertainment during now near two revolutions ot 
 the Planet Jupiter. But I hope that this is not all the 
 
 74 
 
THE EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 Advantage that thou hast reaped ; for with a view to 
 the Improvement of thy Mind and thy Estate, I have 
 constantly interspers'd in every little vacancy, Moral 
 Hints, Wise Sayings, and Maxims of Thrift, tending to 
 impress the benefits arising from Honesty, Sobriety, In- 
 dustry and Frugality, which, if thou hast duly observed, 
 it is highly probable that thou art Wiser and Richer 
 many fold more than the Pence my Labours have cost 
 thee. Howbeit, I shall not therefore raise my Price be- 
 cause thou art better able to pay : but being thankful for 
 past Favours, I shall endeavour to make my little Book 
 more Worthy thy regard by adding to those Recipes 
 which were intended for the Cure of the Mind, some 
 valuable ones regarding the Health of the Body. They 
 are recommended by the Skillful and by successful Prac- 
 tice. I wish a blessing may attend the use of them, and 
 to thee all Happiness, being 
 
 Thy obliged Friend, 
 
 u R. Saunders." 
 
 The curious hodge-podge of scraps of 
 useful information, scintillations of native 
 wit, and "proverbial sentences which in- 
 culcate industry and frugality," as above 
 set forth, is embodied in twenty to thirty 
 small octavo or duodecimo pages, which 
 are all that most of these miniature com- 
 pendiums of knowledge contain. 
 
 The most important of these early Al- 
 manacs, from a literary point of view, are 
 the "Poor Richards," begun in 1732 by 
 Benjamin Franklin, and continued by him 
 and D. Hall for over a quarter of a century. 
 75 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 They contain the famous bon mots, reflec- 
 tions and maxims of the great Quaker Phi- 
 losopher, which gained wide circulation at 
 the time through the columns of the colo- 
 nial press and later were gathered together 
 in the shape of a discourse, entitled " Father 
 Abraham's Advice to his Neighbors," and 
 published as broadsides or in chap-book 
 form under the title of "Poor Richard's 
 Way to Wealth. " This ' ' discourse " passed 
 through numerous editions, and was trans- 
 lated into a score of tongues, including 
 modern Greek and Chinese. 
 
 Dr. Franklin informs us in his "Mem- 
 oirs " that he endeavored to make his Al- 
 manac both entertaining and useful, and it 
 accordingly came to be in such demand that 
 he reaped considerable profit from it, vend- 
 ing annually nearly 10,000 copies. 
 
 Commanding higher prices in the market 
 for rare old books than " Poor Richard," 
 but solely on account of the typographical 
 importance and greater scarcity of the im- 
 print, are the Almanacs made by Daniel 
 and Titus Leeds, the title-pages of which 
 bear the heraldic embellishment of their 
 family arms. Their Almanacs are better 
 known by the name of the publisher than 
 by that of the compilers. They were printed, 
 76 
 
THE EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 the first for the year 1686, by William Brad- 
 ford, near Philadelphia, and from the year 
 1694 until 1742 in New York by the same 
 printer. They are all of the utmost rarity. 
 
 The commingling in the column of the 
 Calendar of Bradford's Almanacs of weather 
 prophesies, wise saws, doggered verse, 
 and epigrammatical paragraphs on every 
 variety of subject, forms an amusing med- 
 ley, and reminds one of the by-play or 
 asides of the stage. We take as a sample 
 page the Calendar for January, 1738 — "A 
 turbid air and rough weather." ''Rain or 
 snow." "Fools play with edge tools." 
 "Snow." "This world is bad which 
 makes some mad." " If snow comes now 
 don't be angry." "Cloudy." " Snow, or 
 I'm mistaken." Interlarded between these 
 phrases are the Signs of the Zodiac, the Sun 
 and Moon's Risings and Settings, Eclipses, 
 Lunations, Time of High Water, Feasts and 
 Fasts of the Church, and the Dates of 
 Quaker meetings. Our friend Philomath 
 adopted a very clever ruse with his prog- 
 nostications. He strung them down the 
 column of his Almanac word by word and 
 left huge gaps between, so that with one 
 oracular sentence he contrived to cover a 
 full third of a month. It would be hard 
 
 77 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 lines indeed if he failed to hit the nail par- 
 tially on the head one day out of the ten or 
 a dozen he so ingeniously bracketed to- 
 gether. 
 
 Among the most interesting items in the 
 column of the Calendar of Bradford's Alma- 
 nac is one that fixes the date of the birth of 
 New York's first printer on May 20th, 1663, 
 and refutes the date on his tombstone of 
 1660. 
 
 Conspicuous among the disseminators of 
 this evanescent form of literature during the 
 last century were the Ames, father and son, 
 of Dedham, Mass., who issued Almanacs 
 consecutively for fifty years at the price of 
 ' ' three shillings per dozen and seven coppers 
 single." Isaiah Thomas, of Worcester, Isaac 
 Collins, of Trenton, and James Franklin, of 
 Newport, R. I., were Almanac makers. 
 Peter Stewart, of Philadelphia, published an 
 Almanac to which he gave, apparently in 
 imitation of Dr. Franklin, the patriarchal 
 title of " Father Abraham " ; Hugh Gaine, of 
 New York, was the printer of the well- 
 known and widely circulated " Hutchin's 
 Improved." T. and J. Fleet, of Boston, 
 issued for many years a " Pocket Almanac," 
 which differs from most others of the 
 period in that it is supplemented by a 
 78 
 
THE EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 11 Register of the Commonwealth," extend- 
 ing to sixty or seventy pages, while the 
 Almanac contains less than a dozen leaves. 
 This elongated tail of a Register wags the 
 little dog of an Ephemeris to which it is 
 appended most unmercifully. 
 
 All old Almanacs bear a close family 
 resemblance, which extends to the inferior 
 quality of the paper upon which they are 
 printed. After the title comes an address 
 to the "Kind" or "Courteous Reader." 
 Then appears the conventional, sprawl- 
 ing, disembowelled figure representing the 
 "Anatomy of Man's Body as Governed by 
 the Twelve Constellations," followed by an 
 Ephemeris of the Planets' places for certain 
 days in the month, and then the monthly 
 column of the Calendar begins with spaces 
 left at the top and sometimes at the sides, 
 devoted to reading matter. Frequently 
 only alternate pages are occupied by the 
 Calendar, and the intervening ones are filled 
 with the overflow of wit and wisdom from 
 the spaces, or " vacancies," as Franklin calls 
 them, in the Calendar itself. The pamphlet 
 closes with two or three pages containing 
 sundry items of local interest, tables of dis- 
 tances, rates of duties, and the like. In all 
 Almanacs up to the year 1752, the old style 
 
 79 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 of reckoning was observed, the year be- 
 ginning on Lady's Day, March 25th. 
 
 For the convenience of their patrons, the 
 editors of these astronomical diaries pro- 
 vided them with blank memorandum leaves, 
 many of which, covered with the common- 
 place entries of everyday life, still remain 
 intact and in place. Those who parted 
 with these little books often neglected, 
 either through ignorance or indifference, to 
 remove pages never intended for other eyes 
 than those of the original owners. This is 
 not a matter of surprise either to the biblio- 
 phile or the collector of antiquities. Many 
 a treasure which comes to their net uncov- 
 ers a dead, and to all appearances, discarded 
 past. In the backs of miniatures still lie 
 soft coils of braided hair, and the cover of 
 an old book, with its inscriptions and inter- 
 locked emblems and ciphers, is often a poem 
 in leather and gold, replete with romantic 
 interest and full of sad suggestions. 
 
 The weather predictions of Philomath, it 
 seems, were more to be relied upon if taken 
 by contraries than literally, if the following 
 story has any foundation in fact, although, 
 to be as honest as the story-teller in the 
 " Legend of Sleepy Hollow," I don't believe 
 one half of it myself. 
 
 80 
 
THE EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 A noted Almanac maker, wending his 
 way through the country, halted at a 
 farmhouse, and after watering his horse 
 gathered up the reins to proceed on his 
 journey, when he was informed by the 
 attendant that if he went on he would 
 certainly get wet. Glancing at the sky, 
 in which he was unable to discern a cloud 
 the size of a man's hand, he declared that 
 he could see no indication of an approach- 
 ing storm, and would take his chances. In 
 about an hour the clouds gathered and the 
 rain fell. Impressed with this remarkable 
 fulfilment of the prophecy he had rejected, 
 our traveler retraced his steps to the farm- 
 house, and offered the wiseacre a half dollar 
 for the secret of his ability to so correctly 
 forecast the weather. " Nothing easier," 
 said he. " We have that old fool's (here he 
 mentioned the name of the man in the 
 wagon) Almanac in the house. For to- 
 day it foretold fine weather and very dry. 
 So I knew it would surely rain before 
 night." 
 
 The line upon line and precept upon 
 precept of these little waifs of books is 
 quaint, old-fashioned literature, but quite 
 as profitable reading now as it was a cen- 
 tury ago. We have a sample of its quality 
 
 81 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 in the following extracts from " Poor Rich- 
 ard " and " Hutchin's Improved " : 
 
 " I never saw an oft-removed tree, 
 Nor yet an oft-removed family, 
 That throve so well as those that settled be." 
 
 " For age and want save what you may, 
 No morning sun lasts a whole day." 
 
 ' 1 Avoid going to law, for the quarreling dog hath a 
 tattered skin. It is better to suffer loss than to run to 
 courts, for the play is not worth the candle." 
 
 ' ' It is better to go to bed supperless than to rise in 
 debt." 
 
 " Idleness is the key of beggary." 
 
 " For the want of a nail the shoe is lost, for the want 
 of a shoe the horse is lost, for the want of a horse the 
 rider is lost." 
 
 " Prayer and provender hinder no journey." 
 
 " He who looks not before, finds himself behind." 
 
 u A penny saved is two pence clear, 
 A pin a day's a groat a year." 
 
 " Cunning differs from wisdom as twilight from open 
 day." 
 
 "It is remarkable that death increases our veneration 
 for the good, and extenuates our hatred of the bad." 
 
 " Too much of one thing is good for nothing, so we 
 will finish this subject." 
 
 We will accept this timely suggestion 
 from John Nathan Hutchins — Philom. — and 
 conclude this article with an ' 'extempore 
 sermon," which was published by the 
 
 82 
 
THE EARLY AMERICAN ALMANAC 
 
 same wise counsellor and guide of his fel- 
 low-men for the edification of the readers of 
 his Almanac for the year of Grace 1793. If 
 not a perfect model of pulpit oratory, it 
 cannot be denied that it possesses the twin 
 merits of succinctness and brevity: 
 
 AN Extempore SERMON, 
 Preached at the request of two Scholars — by a 
 LOVER OF ALE, 
 Out of a Hollow Tree. 
 
 Beloved : 
 
 Let me crave your attention ; for I am a little man, 
 come at a short warning, to a thin congregation — in an 
 unworthy pulpit. 
 
 And now, beloved, my text is malt ; which I cannot 
 divide into sentences, because it has none ; nor into 
 words, it being but one ; nor into syllables, because it is 
 but a monosyllable ; therefore, I must divide it into let- 
 ters, MALT. M, my beloved, is moral ; A is allegor- 
 ical ; L is literal ; and T theological. 
 
 The moral is set forward to teach drunkards their 
 duty ; wherefore my first use shall be exhortation : M, 
 my masters ; A, all of you ; L, leave off ; T, tippling. 
 The allegorical is when one thing is spoken of, and 
 another is meant ; now the thing spoken of is bare malt : 
 M, my masters ; A, all of you ; L, listen ; T, to my 
 text. But the thing meant is strong beer ; which you 
 rustics make : M, meat ; A, apparel ; L, liberty, and T, 
 treasure. The literal is according to the letters : M, 
 much ; A, ale ; L, little ; T, thrift. The theological is 
 according to the effects it works — first, in this world ; 
 
 83 
 
THE OLD BOOKSELLERS OF NEW YORK 
 
 secondly, in the world to come. Its effects in this world 
 are : In some, M, murder ; in others, A, adultery ; in 
 some, L, looseness of life ; in others, T, treason. Its 
 effects in the world to come are : M, misery; A, anguish : 
 L, languishing, and T, torment. Now to conclude : 
 
 Say well and do well, both end with a letter, 
 Say well is good, but do well is better. 
 
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