18
Another concentrated period of Newberry work began
a few years after the first, in the summer of 1965, when the Northwestern-Newberry
Melville Edition got under way; and my memories of
that time are released by the object standing in front of the Young drawing:
a small Japanese-made clock set into the flat side of a
five-inch semicircular column of black Kilkenny marble. This clock
had belonged to Rick Johnson, a Newberry staff member who was officially the liaison between the
library and the edition and who became a close friend of mine. Rick bought
the clock on one of the trips he later took to Ireland with his companion Dick
Seidel, and Dick
gave it to me after Rick's death from lung cancer in October 1998, at the
age of fifty-nine. Visits to Ireland had a
special meaning for Rick because his mother was descended from the Colleses
(Rick's full name was Richard Colles Johnson), a distinguished Irish Protestant family
that over four centuries and in three countries (Ireland, England, and America) made significant contributions to
publishing, medicine, cartography, copyright law, and musicology. William Colles, for example, was a publisher whose
name appeared on the Dublin editions of many major writers in the last third
of the eighteenth century; and Christopher Colles
was the author of the first American road atlas (1789). Rick assembled
portraits, books, and manuscripts that documented the Colles history, and
after his death Dick prepared the collection for the Newberry.
I spent extended periods at the Newberry in the
summers of 1965 and 1966 and in the spring and summer of 1967 (generally
staying at the Pearson Hotel, later razed to make way for Water Tower
Place). Rick was an ideal colleague, for he fully understood the
bibliographical requirements of an edition like the Melville and was ready
to purchase for the library the multiple copies that we needed of Melville's
nineteenth-century editions. Indeed, he was one of that small group
of people I mentioned earlier whose views on all bibliographical matters I
completely agreed with. Another link between us was that we were both Yale
graduates (six years apart) who knew the Yale library
thoroughly—though I did not at that time know that my collection
would go to the Yale Collection of American Literature, where he had held a
job as an undergraduate (assisting Donald Gallup)
and had developed his interest in working with books. After our day's work
at the Newberry, we often spent the evenings
together in the bars and restaurants (ranging all the way from Biggs to Papa
Milano) of the Near North Side. (We also had
many lunches with members of the Newberry and
Melville staffs, and I have fond memories— probably shared by few
others-of Rickett's, a family-run
restaurant on Clark Street a few steps north of the Newberry, where one of the seasonal specialties was stewed
rhubarb, prepared exactly as my mother had done with our back-yard
rhubarb.)
During this period I was picking up large quantities of Little Blue Books,
the widely distributed
five-by-three-and-a-half-inch
pamphlets (published by Emanuel
Haldeman-Julius) that brought good literature, as well as
radical and freethinking works, to a vast audience for some forty years
(1910s to 1950s). Rick became interested, and he and I catalogued and
analyzed my collection together, usually working at the kitchen table in his
apartment near the Newberry at 27 East Bellevue
Place (a building now demolished for so-called luxury apartments
because of its proximity to the Lake Michigan Gold Coast). Both our names
were on the long article that resulted, published in the First Quarter 1970
number of the
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. (This article was
recently—in 2005—reprinted in the journal of the Haldeman-Julius Collectors Club, the
existence of which shows how much more interest in the Little Blue Books
there is today than there was when we worked on the article forty years
ago.)
Even after these concentrated periods at the Newberry in the 1960s, I drove down to Chicago from Madison frequently,
spending weekends (beginning on Thursdays) at the Newberry for work on Melville and other projects. Rick and I
continued to spend many evenings together—joined by Dick, after Rick
moved to Dick's Briar Place apartment, about three miles north of the
library. But Rick's role in my life was not entirely social, as our Haldeman-Julius work indicates. Rick kept my
various research interests in mind, and he continually directed me to
relevant sources; whenever, to the end of his life, he came across something
he thought would be useful to me, he sent me notes about it. And he came
across a great deal, for he constantly read dealers' catalogues and many
journals, and he followed up on questions raised by them, or other staff
members, or scholars' inquiries. Slips of paper with his handwriting still
come to the surface as I use my files. In writing a tribute to him for the
Spring 1999 number of The Book Collector, I pointed
out that he had "the intellectual curiosity and indefatigable persistence
characteristic of first-rate scholars." Since he published little,
his scholarship manifested itself largely in his enrichment of the
Newberry's collections and in "the innumerable details in many scholarly
works (notably the Melville edition) that bear silent testimony to his
insight" (as I put it in 1999). My own writings are a prime example: they
contain hundreds of references and connections that came from him.
