Books Have Their Fates (review)

The life stories of some thirty books—not only their production and publication but also their passage from hand to hand, their particular readers, their unique circumstances—are at the heart of Books Have Their Fates, the latest volume from well-known literary scholars and book dealers Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern. Each chapter is devoted to the story of an individual volume, and though many titles will be familiar to scholars and collectors, some unusual and rare items are apt to surprise even devoted bibliophiles. The "fates" of the volumes considered are only part of the story, as the authors not only record the histories of various fascinating books but also chronicle their own lives, their years of book dealing, scholarship, and friendship.

The books discussed, some of which are "protagonist[s] of high adventure" (2), are often linked with the authors' family stories, childhood memories, and scholarly research. Take, for example, the chapter entitled "Louisa May Alcott and a Harlem News Stand." In it, Stern, who is renowned as an Alcott scholar, recounts the story of her first copy of Little Women. The copy, "an unimportant Little, Brown reprint" (159), was given to Stern when she was eight years old, a gift from an English teacher who frequented the newsstand where Stern worked collecting pennies for papers. Readers of Rostenberg's and Stern's many books may recall the story of Stern's discovery of Alcott's pseudonymously written "sensation stories with . . . themes of violence, revenge, and sexual power struggles" (160). Alcott's writing experience served, of course, as the basis of "Jo March's other life—her double literary life—the life she led in secret as prolific producer of clandestine sensation stories" (158). The "recovery of the secret and unacknowledged Alcott narratives," Stern tells us, "probably had their beginning the day, so many decades ago, when a little girl stood at a news stand in Harlem and sold papers to an English Teacher who carried a copy of Little Women under her arm" (161).

The history of another book, a specially bound copy of La Historia della Citta di Parma, published in 1591, includes a time in the possession of Leona Rostenberg's one-time employer, the "extremely knowledgeable and extremely irascible . . . rare book dealer Herbert Reichner," to whom Rostenberg served as "speechless secretary" (50). Years later, when Rostenberg and Stern acquired the book themselves, they traced its path to Reichner's collection, then to their own: "The treasure bound for George Carew, bequeathed to a Stafford, passed on to Archbishop Laud, acquired by the Third Earl of Sunderland, moved to the Marlborough estate at Blenheim, gazed at perhaps by baby Winston Churchill, placed under the hammer, purchased and sold by Bernard Quaritch, given a transitory term with the Warrens of New York, surviving the shoe blacking of Herbert Reichner, placed again under the hammer, and settling finally with Leona Rostenberg" (53).

Whether recounting the discovery of possible Shakespeare sources, a forged volume of Shelley's sonnets, or the unearthing of a rare edition of Descartes's Passions of the Soul bound together with a forgettable volume, the authors retell their "expectant looking and grateful finding—the thrill of search and seize—not to mention the pleasure of directing books to their compatible destinations" (74). Throughout Books Have Their Fates, the authors return to the question, "by what long and circuitous route . . . had this enticing book become ours?" (51), and in response to this question, they have told the stories of many remarkable books. In addition, they have written an appealing memoir of scholarship, bibliographic detective work, and the book trade.