Old Books, Rare Friends
Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Louisa May Alcott once wrote that she had taken her pen for a bridegroom. Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, friends and business partners for fifty years, have in many ways taken up their pens and passion for literature much in the same way. The "Holmes & Watson" of the rare book business, Rostenberg and Stern are renowned for unlocking the hidden secret of Louisa May Alcott's life when they discovered her pseudonym, A.M. Barnard, along with her anonymously published "blood and thunder" stories on subjects like transvestitism, hashish smoking, and feminism.
Old Books, Rare Friends describes their mutual passion for books and literary sleuthing as they take us on their earliest European book buying jaunts. Using what they call Finger-spitzengefühl, the art of evaluating antiquarian books by handling, experience, and instinct, we are treated to some of their greatest discoveries amid the mildewed basements of London's booksellers after the Blitz. We experience the thrill of finding one of the earliest known books printed in America between 1617-1619 by the Pilgrim Press and learn about the influential role of publisher-printers from the fifteenth century.
Like a precious gem, Old Books, Rare Friends is a book to treasure about the companionship of two rare friends and their shared passion for old books.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fifty years is a long time to be friends, let alone business partners, and this joint memoir by Stern and Rostenberg--legends in the antiquarian book scene for most of those years as well as prolific authors--is a treat for rare-book lovers. Devotion to the printed page began young for both. Rostenberg remembers as a child "sniffing the musty odor of books, a smell that was somehow warm and comforting." The authors met at the Hebrew Technical School for Girls in Manhattan and have stayed together ever since. (It is a measure of our age that they feel compelled to assert that speculations about a lesbian relationship are "a misconception.") They started their business in Rostenberg's family home in the Bronx but acquired their stock from dealers around the world. Stern's best-known discovery, made while she was working on her biography of Louisa May Alcott, was of Alcott's pseudonymous and racy writing for 19th-century tabloids. Her find resulted in several published collections of previously unknown Alcott stories. Rostenberg and Stern, now 84 and 87, respectively, here chronicle the thrill and intrigue of book collecting, trails pursued and trophies secured. They have also shared the rewards of friendship, mutual support and delight in each other's company.
