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The remainder of the west side of the foyer is occupied by a sectional
bookcase seven shelves high, reaching almost to the ceiling. It contains
part of my collection of artistically avant-garde and politically
radical American publishers between 1890 and 1930, though its contents will
soon change, for I am now (late 2008) in the process of giving that
collection to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Because
the whole collection amounts to over ten thousand volumes, I have never been
able to house all of it in my apartment—especially since I wanted to
devote most of the space to my other large collection (books illustrating
the history of bibliography, book collecting, and textual criticism), which
is the one I need to have at hand to refer to. In the five years since I
began my donations to Yale, most of the books have come from the Indiana house, where the bulk of the
publisher-imprint collection has been stored in the basement and the
upstairs room that had been my aunt Audra's. The
small part that I shelved in New York consists of
the publishers of the 1890s and a group of New
York (especially Greenwich Village) publishers of the 1910s and
1920s whose output was small. This latter group is what is presently housed
in the tall foyer bookcase.
There are the publications of Frank Shay, for
example, who brought out several pamphlets of plays that had been performed
by the Provincetown Players and the Washington
Square Players, including early work by Eugene
O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. A less well-known
series, on the same shelf, is the "Flying Stag Plays for the Little
Theater," published by Egmont Arens in attractive pamphlet editions with
cover illustrations by notable artists. Harry
Kemp's
The Prodigal Son (1918), for instance, bears a
front-cover drawing by William Gropper, one
of the Masses-Liberator artists. (A piece of
his later hung by my desk at
the Guggenheim Foundation, for he
had held a Fellowship in 1937.) The books published by Nicholas L. Brown and by Lieber & Lewis featured English
translations of European (especially Russian and French) writers. The
Sunwise Turn was a bookshop that published a few titles, most famously
Pins for Wings (1920), the second of Witter Bynner's spoofs of imagism and other poetic
movements.
Among Laurence Gomme's publications, distinctive
for their use of Frederic Goudy's Kennerley type,
are two 1917 books, Eight Harvard Poets, which
includes E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos, and The Newark Anniversary
Poems, which includes Ezra Pound. (Mitchell Kennerley, for whom the type was designed,
is another of the publishers I collect and was the founder in 1907 of the
Little Bookshop Around the Corner, on 29th Street just east of Fifth Avenue,
which Gomme managed for a while and then owned.) Gomme was later the first
president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (founded in 1949) and was a member of the Grolier Club
for over a quarter-century. I went to visit him at his Scarsdale home
in October 1964 and took with me one of his books— Clement Wood's Glad of Earth (1917)—for him to sign; he
obliged by writing "To / Thomas Tanselle / who
flatters the publisher / by liking this volume." He also gave me several of
the later, scarcer items that he published or designed. At that time I did
not yet know Mary Hyde well and was not aware of
another of Gomme's roles: he was the cataloguer in 1945 of the R. B. Adam collection ofJohnsoniana, which (through his efforts as agent) was purchased
by the Hydes three years later.
One subset of these small New York publishers
comprises those primarily known for their publication of "little" magazines.
I have a shelf of Emma Goldman's anarchist periodical Mother Earth, plus some of the separate pamphlets and
hard-cover books she brought out with the Mother Earth Publishing
Association imprint, such as Petr Kropotkin's
Modern Science and Anarchism (1908) and Mikhail
Bakunin's God and the State (1916). Guido Bruno is
represented by several serials, including Bruno's
Weekly (1915–16) and the Chap Books
(famous for the illustrations of Clara Tice and
for the November 1915 pamphlet, Djuna Barnes's
The Book of Repulsive Women). There are also runs of
Margaret Anderson's
The Little Review(1914—29), Bobby Edwards's
The Quill (1922—24), and Samuel Roth's
Two Worlds and Two Worlds
Monthly (1925—27). My long runs of the most illustrious of
the radical magazines, The Masses (1911–17)
and The Liberator(1918–24), are housed
elsewhere because of their size and are represented in this bookcase only by
some of the very scarce "Liberator Pamphlets," such as John Reed's
The Sisson Documents (1918) and Max Eastman's
Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial
(1918). Some equally scarce pamphlets in "Pearson's 25,¢ Library," from the
Frank Harris period of
Pearson's Magazine, are here (such as Harris's
Stories of Jesus the Christ of 1919, with a
contribution by Bernard Shaw), along with books
from the Pagan Publishing Company, publisher of
The
Pagan (1916–17).
I have not named here every one of the small publishers in the bookcase, but
perhaps enough to suggest why I regard these seven shelves as a distillation
of the collection as a whole, since the interests manifested by these
publishers are largely those of the other publishers I collect. I see these
books many times every day, as I pass through the foyer, and I am thus
constantly reminded of what I have put together—and, indeed, of the
process of assembling it, for I can remember where I found many of the
books. I can see myself buying Mary Carolyn
Davies's
The Slave with Two Faces (Arens, 1918) at Max
Hunley's shop in Beverly Hills;
Albert Adès and Albert
Josipovici's
Goha the Fool (Lieber & Lewis, 1923) at Maggie
DuPriest's shop in Coral
Gables; Ernest Dowson's
Dilemmas (Gomme, 1914) at the Reifsneiders' Park Book
Shop in Washington; a presentation copy of John Jay Chapman's
Cupid & Psyche (Gomme, 1916) at Dauber & Pine
on lower Fifth Avenue; and Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre (Mother Earth, 1914)
at the Safari Bookshop in San Diego. When the
books in this bookcase go to Yale, they will be replaced by parts of my
books-about-books collection now stored on closet shelves and
floors. Scenes of buying books will continue to enter my mind when I am in
the foyer, but they will be different scenes.
