7
When you look to the left of the east-wall closet door in the foyer,
you see three framed advertisements from the late 1890s for the Ault &
Wiborg Printing Ink Company of Cincinnati, two of
them between the closet door and the north wall and the other on the north
wall just east of the front door of the apartment. A fourth stands on the
floor in the dining alcove. These small posters (about eleven by eight and a
half inches), intended to display different colors of printing ink, were
designed by Will Bradley, who has received
considerable attention as a designer and printer of the American fin de siècle. I have not tried to collect him
comprehensively, but I have his periodical Bradley His
Book (1896–97) and a few of the small books he printed at
his Wayside Press in Springfield, Massachusetts,
as well as the books with his binding designs that were brought out by the
publishers I do collect, such as Stone &
Kimball of Chicago (for whom he did the
celebrated binding for Edmund Gosse's In Russet and
Silver, 1894). Although he is usually thought of in connection with
the 1890s, the geometrically stylized figures of dancers in his work for
Ault & Wiborg look forward to Art Deco.
The one on the north wall, showing the colors "Bronze Brown" and "Green
Lake," and the one in the dining area, showing (more simply) "Blue" and
"Brown," were bought unframed in July 1975 at the Old Book Shop on Sutter
Street in San Francisco (a shop that always
rewarded my visits), and I had them framed, with large colored mats, by
Limbert's, my home-town framer
(responsible for the framing of most of my
turn-of-the-century publishers' posters). The other two
Bradley items, one displaying "Bronze Blue"
and "Brilliant Lake [red]" and the other "Brown" and "Olive" (this one has
the same design as the blue and brown one) were already framed (with colored
mats to complement the colors in the posters) when I found them at the
Inscribulus Bookshop in Baltimore in September 1983.
I stopped in at this shop (along with others in Baltimore) several times
during the years when Bill and Nina Matheson lived there, in a large fifth-floor
walk-up apartment at 529 North Charles Street, one block south of
Mount Vernon Place. (They always needed spacious quarters to house all their
books, wines, and phonograph records and still allow for open, uncluttered,
serene areas punctuated with vases of cut flowers.) Bill, whose death on
June 17, 2004, came far too early, had been Chief of the Rare Book and
Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress; Nina, whom I still see on her visits to New
York for the opera, was the director
of the Welch
Medical Library at Johns Hopkins. I first met Bill
at meetings of the Bibliographical Society of America in the 1960s and became well acquainted with him in the
early 1970s, after he had moved to the Library of Congress in 1971 and I was
doing research there. Bill was a shy and gentle
man, and we hit it off at once, as Nina and I also
did when I later met her. I had frequent lunches with Bill whenever I was in Washington, and
the three of us had dinner at their house (then in Washington, at 338 M Street, SW), where I was treated to Nina's wonderful cooking and some of the wines from
their fine cellar. Many dinners in restaurants also occurred over the years,
not only in Washington (where they of course knew the restaurant scene
thoroughly) but also in New York and once (as I
recall) in San Francisco. Bill's generous interest in supporting my work is epitomized by
the afternoon he spent taking me to the suburban warehouse that held the
copyright deposits not retained for cataloguing by the Library of Congress,
so that we could look for the 1909 pamphlet Sherwood
Anderson wrote for his family's paint company in Elyria, Ohio (
An Idea to Establish a Commercial Democracy). I had
discovered an entry for this unknown publication in the copyright records;
and although we were not able to find the piece, I remain grateful to Bill for the opportunity to search for it.
Both Bill and Nina had an
extraordinary knowledge of twentieth-century books and amassed
remarkable collections, which (along with their large assemblage of books
about books) became the stock for the book business they conducted in
retirement. We went on many book-hunting expeditions together, and
among their bookseller-friends whom I met was the novelist Larry McMurtry. Although I did not really get to
know him, I found his shop, Booked Up, the most exciting one in Washington. In his recent memoir, Books (2008), McMurtry calls Bill "a consummate bookman." (McMurtry's memoir, by the way, will delight anyone who, like me,
made the rounds of bookshops all over the country in the 1960s and 1970s. I
also applaud his statement that he regards the formation of his own library
as one of his "most notable achievements," for a point I have insisted on
myself is that building a collection is an activity of creative research,
just as writing a scholarly book is.)
An essay of Bill's called "What Book Collecting Is
All About" perfectly reflects the depth of understanding of bibliographical
and bibliophilic pursuits that he had (and that Nina also has). I have always been pleased to believe that I may
have played some role in bringing that essay about. When in 1976–77 I
was trying to help Jean Peters form the table of
contents of her admirable anthology Book Collecting: A
Modern Guide, we both knew that Bill's inclusion was essential; and
as the volume finally shaped up, his piece was the opening one and formed
the ideal introduction. My own contribution came last, and I think of our
book-end positions
as symbolizing our conversations,
which encapsulated the book world. He was one of only four or five people
with whom I have felt a complete convergence of opinions on bookish matters.
Although I have warm recollections of several of the authors in Jean's book, Bill is the
person I think of whenever I see that book on my shelves.
