What the Widow Nolen Left Behind, Part 2

 

W. W. Nolen, 1910
(Harvard University Archives)

From his third-floor window, William Whiting Nolen watched the twentieth century arrive at Harvard University. Perhaps his dogs sat at his feet. Perhaps he rose from his chair and crossed the room to pour more whiskey into his glass.

W. W. Nolen was as necessary to Progressive-era Harvard as the Johnston Gate on Peabody Street. The comparison is apt because Nolen, too, offered entrée to the university.

In 1891, 30-year old Nolen opened his tutoring business, through which thousands of students would pass. Thanks to his formula of filched notes and exams combined with lectures distilled to the minimum of essential facts, he could almost guarantee a young man admission and graduation from Harvard.

“He hands it to you in one exquisite, highly concentrated pill of information,” said a grateful recipient.

By 1910, getting tutored by Nolen had become a rite of passage for so many Harvard students that he expanded his operation and kept raking it in—$20,000 annually, it was rumored. At the time of his death in 1923, Nolen employed more than 50 tutors. Arguably, he launched the multi-million dollar tutoring industry.

He was also an obsessive antiquarian.

Visitors to Nolen’s apartment might have noticed that he accumulated books, art, and furniture. They probably did not realize that the books and prints were old and rare, and the furnishings, including valuable clocks, had been created by early American cabinetmakers and horologists whose names are still invoked with reverence.   

The habit of collecting went back to Nolen’s Philadelphia boyhood when he started a stamp collection. The family lived in a brick house at 714 Pine Street, built in 1800. The inhabitants included father Charles, importer of oils (olive, cod liver, and castor), mother Abby, and aunts Kate, Sophia, and Caroline.

W. W. Nolen was an only child. When his father died in 1908, he became the beneficiary of a $5,000 insurance policy and inherited railroad and electric company stock, a houseful of mahogany furniture, profuse china and glass, and a white agateware bedpan.

Around that time, Nolen began to attend auctions regularly. His interests ranged widely: announcements of Napoleon’s death, sheet music, chintz panels woven with battle scenes, ladies’ fans, ship models . . .  

 

Among Nolen’s greatest treasures were George Washington’s silver camp cup, William Penn’s chair, Paul Revere’s dressing case, and his own stamp collection.

Unsurprisingly, the Nolen estate, appraised at $286,804, contained so much stuff that the deceased’s possessions were auctioned in four parts. Anderson Galleries in New York City handled the sales:

-Early American and Anglo-American Furniture and Objects of Art (1,037 objects),

-Washingtoniana and a Most Important Collection of Early American Silver, American Furniture of the 17^th, 19^th, and 19^th Centuries (902 objects),

-18^th and 19^th Century American Furniture, Blue and White Staffordshire, Lustre Ware, Wedgwood, Lowestoft (516 objects),

-Rare American Lithographs, largely Currier & Ives (983 prints)  

Nolen’s 10,000-volume library was auctioned in Boston, December 5-8, 1923, a week without rain or snow. Had he still been alive, Nolen would have undertaken his daily walk along the Charles in a light coat and hat.

Perhaps in contrition, Nolen left his Lincolniana to Harvard.

Putting aside the documents and objets associated with famous people, Nolen’s possessions would not now reap the profits they garnered in 1923. Today it is a challenge to give away old silver, china, and crystal, and “brown furniture” is consigned to the attic.

That’s why Nolen’s estate came to auction at a perfect moment.

The furniture manufacturing industry had started in Grand Rapids, MI and High Point, NC during the 1880s. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was flourishing and many Americans preferred to fill their homes with new things.

Yet while manufactured décor became fashionable, a passion for Americana surged through the nation during the 1920s. Many wealthy collectors—both aristocrats and newly minted millionaires—pounced on the very antiques that Nolen acquired over the years.   

Thus Nolen’s collections were dispersed among the generations he helped through Harvard.

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2024/04/what-widow-nolen-left-behind.html

Charles Lowell Woodward, Book Peddler

 

If you were searching for something to read in colonial America, you might have picked up Gulliver’s Travels, Poor Richard’s Almanack or, of course, the Bible. 

But soon enough, the rising book trade along the East Coast would have increased your options exponentially. By the mid-eighteenth century, shops flourished in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, with titles in history, theology, science, and travel in greatest demand. 

The American bookseller had a notorious persona: gruff, tough and fiercely competitive. Many were rude without being malevolent, but occasionally one might sabotage another with a false accusation of fraud—passing along reproductions of ancient texts—or avoiding customs taxes with fake receipts.

By the 1890s, these sellers were a dying breed. Among the few remaining bookmen of the nineteenth century who retained his scowl and his integrity until the end, Charles Lowell Woodward closed the door upon this life on September 17, 1903.

His passion for books went back to his childhood in rural Maine, inculcated by his father Caleb, an abolitionist and jack-of-all-trades, whom he revered. But Charles didn’t want to hang around the farm. He had the urge for going, as Tom Rush sang.

At the age of 20, he took off for California, delirious with gold fever. He sailed around Cape Horn and found work at the Poverty Hill Mines near the Yuba River, about 100 miles northwest of Sacramento. While building a well, he fell into it and broke his ankle. This put an end to his mining career and he headed back east. 

Ankle problems prevented Charles from serving in the Civil War, so he joined the New England Society, a charitable organization that was old even then, and helped care for hospitalized soldiers and their families. 

When the war was over, Charles answered the call of the Pennsylvania oil fields but a flood left him homeless with two trunks of possessions. One was packed with books.

He landed in New York City at the age of 32.

Nassau Street bookshops, 1895*
(E.D. French)

There, while working as an agent for Bradstreet’s, Charles began to haunt the old bookshops that were clustered downtown along the narrow streets. In the morning, up went the striped awnings. The sellers hauled wooden bins full of prints and maps onto the sidewalks and rearranged their window displays.

Some of the stores were windowless and light entered only through the front door, if it happened to be open. Dingy and dusty, the air inside nearly as congested as the sky above the industrial waterfront, the shops nonetheless attracted plenty of luminaries.

Perusing the shelves, you might spy former President Ulysses S. Grant, the actor Edwin Booth or the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, not to mention Tammany pols, capitalists, and Bohemians. Swiftly obsessed, Charles joined the ranks of the collectors. Americana and Mormonism were his particular interests.

In 1875, Charles finally possessed enough books and savings to open his own bookshop, located in a dark room at the rear of the second floor of 78 Nassau Street. He kept the store tidy and broom-swept and took the unusual step of shelving the most valuable books with the titles facing inward. Thus, he maintained absolute control over who handled them.

Charles Lowell Woodward took pride in the tongue-in-cheek
advertisements that he placed in Publishers Weekly and trade journals.

Charles disdained presumptuous customers. His “rough and often repelling exterior fairly bristled with hatred of humbug, cant, and pretense,” wrote one of his colleagues.

He found genealogical research especially contemptible. Customers in search of family trees were handed the “donkey catalogue,” a list of books related to ancestral lineage, its cover decorated with a picture of a donkey. 

But Charles had a special fondness for certain clients, including the librarian and historian George H. Moore, once dubbed “Clio’s high-priest.” (In Greek mythology, Clio was the muse of history.) Moore worked for many years at the New-York Historical Society and the Lenox Library, a precursor to the NYPL. He had the habit of dropping by 78 Nassau Street during the early evening. After Charles locked up around 9 o’clock, the two men would sit on a bench in City Hall Park and talk far into the night. 

Oh, to hide in the shrubbery near the fountain and eavesdrop on their discussions!

City Hall at night, 1900

In 1902, Charles was hit by a wagon that came barreling down Nassau Street, and his health began to decline. One of his daughters—perhaps Polly or Daisy—started to help around the shop. But it was clear that the business could not continue after his death and he made the decision to sell his stock and close the store.

After World War I, new construction invaded Nassau and the other old streets. Park Avenue South, eight blocks between Union Square and Astor Place, became Manhattan’s “Book Row.” Further on, that neighborhood would have its own obituary.  

Advertisement, New York Times, November 1903

 *from Booksellers of Old New York and other papers by William Loring Andrews (1895).

 

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/11/charles-lowell-woodward-book-peddler.html

The Prints

The Stuyvesant Pear Tree (lithograph, 1861)
(New-York Historical Society)

In 1867 an old pear tree, planted 200 years earlier by a Dutch settler on a Manhattan street corner, met its demise. The tree had been decaying for some time but a collision between two carriages killed it with one blow. More than a few New Yorkers grieved. The loss of the tree became yet another reminder that vestiges of the nation’s Colonial Era were slipping away.  

The most valuable image of the Stuyvesant tree, a lithograph, had been created for the 1861 edition of a long, boring book called the Manual of the Corporation for the City of New York. These manuals contained statistics, rules, minutes, and endless lists of city officials and buildings, livened slightly with maps and pictures. A clerk named Valentine published the books annually between 1842 and 1866.

About 50 years after the last volume was issued, a Scottish immigrant, Henry Collins Brown, decided to revive the Valentine’s Manuals, as they were known. He would change the formula with lots of color illustrations and folklore. He thought he saw an opening: while guidebooks and memoirs of Old New York were readily available, few combined information with local history in an entertaining way.

Between 1916 and 1928, Brown produced eight new manuals. Alas, while the New York Times took notice, the books did not sell.  Yet his endeavor remains interesting for just one reason: The Prints. These were copperplate engravings and lithographs of the city dating back well over 150 years. 

At the time of World War I, most of these “views” belonged to libraries and collectors. Brown scrambled, pleaded, and occasionally dissembled to gain permission to reproduce the images in his manuals.  In order to copy the lithograph of the pear tree, for example, Brown had to beg the librarian of the New-York Historical Society, which owned the original.

Currier & Ives hand-colored lithograph, Central Park in Winter
circa 1873
 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Making things worse for Brown, the prints started to surge in value during the late nineteenth century, so they became even less accessible. This is what happened:

In the 1890s, a greater appreciation of American traditions, lore, and art emerged among the general public. Some historians believe it originated at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where millions of Americans visited an old New England farmhouse and viewed American art and furnishings.

The antiques business evolved quickly. Cabinetmakers who were experienced in fixing older pieces leaped to become dealers. And some of those dealers began to comb the New England countryside, knocking on the doors of farmhouses, occasionally under false pretenses, hoping to be invited in, buying many a rare item for a song.

Inevitably, the Americana obsession encompassed The Prints. The market became highly competitive. Among the most important collectors, the blue-blooded Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes occasionally bumped heads with Henry Collins Brown as the latter sought permission to use various images.

Phelps Stokes, who had an epiphany about early American prints while dining at the home of a friend, once wrote:

Can there be anyone so callous, and so lacking in romance, as not to feel a thrill of emotion before such contemporary pictures as Paul Revere’s Landing of the British Troops at Boston in 1768, the inauguration of Washington in the loggia of the old Federal Hall, or the engagement between the Merrimac and the Monitor? 

As interest surged, one saw these headlines more often: 

PRINT BRINGS $1,450

RARE OLD PRINTS SOLD

 RARE OLD PRINTS ARE BRINGING FANCY PRICES

A COLLECTION OF CURRIER & IVES PRINTS TO BE SOLD BY AUCTION THURSDAY EVENING

PRINT COLLECTION SOLD

While many collections were sold, others were donated. For example, Phelps Stokes gave his collection to the New York Public Library during the 1920s. Several other major collections were given to museums around this time.*  

Originally, the New York market for prints was centered in downtown Manhattan. The first print dealers were booksellers who opened shops after the Civil War in the area near City Hall.  They also sold newspapers and stationery.

Over time, some dealers shifted from books to prints. Such was the case with Joseph Sabin, an English immigrant who arrived in 1848. He became a widely recognized expert in rare books and prints.      

In 1912, the New York Times noted:

Since a few men started gathering old maps and views, over forty years ago, the number of collectors has rapidly increased, and things that could be found in the old shops twenty-five years ago or so for $5 or $10 are now quoted in the hundreds. 

Today, the prints march on.  

In John Singer Sargent's 1897 portrait,
I.N. Phelps Stokes stands behind his wife Edith.
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

*The Pennsylvania Historical Society and the Chicago Historical Society, among historical organizations in American cities, also acquired print collections that tended to be localized.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2017/08/the-prints.html