Bibliophemera

A Rudolf Flesch letter to a bookseller  (high readability score!) Rudolf Flesch (1911-1986), a writer, readability expert, and proponent of the Plain English Movement, collected books on language, English, and writing. So it comes as no surprise that a letter he wrote to a New York bookseller in 1948 included an order for a book on language and a request for more books on the subject, particularly rare books. Flesch, an Austrian immigrant who fled to America ahead of Hitler's invasion in the 1930s, had earned a law degree in Vienna, but in his new country, his scholarly pursuits turned to Library Science (Ph.D. from Columbia University), reading, and writing about the English language. In 1955, he wrote the classic,  Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About it , which advocated phonics for teaching students how to read. The book was a best-seller. Parents loved it, educators not so much. Today, more than 60 years later, cognitive neuroscientists still advoc...

A few years ago, I acquired a cache of old letters written to Schulte's Book Store in New York City during the 1940s to 1960s. Most of the letters were from authors, artists, and collectors of varying degrees of note, such as authors  Rose Wilder Lane   and  Stefan Lorant , and woodcut illustrator  J.J. Lankes . These are just three I've written about from the two-dozen-plus letters in the collection.  I've been hoping to add a store catalogue to the collection to gain more insight into Schulte's stock and anything else about the business it might offer. Now I have one--Catalogue 81. There is no date, but an online search of the phone number (Stuyvesant 2550) turns up a few Schulte references dating from 1918 to 1924. So this catalogue is probably circa 1920s, a few decades before the correspondence mentioned above. But it does reveal on the cover some information that clearly shows Schulte's was a well-established book store long before the correspo...

From that wonderful cache of Schulte's Bookstore correspondence I obtained a few years ago, I've plucked another interesting letter to showcase here. This one was written to Schulte's in 1944 by the renowned woodcut illustrator  Julius John (J.J.) Lankes  (1884-1960) , whose illustrations I featured in a recent post about Robert Frost . Mr. Lankes wrote the New York bookseller from his Hilton Village, Virginia home in August of 1944 seeking a particular title: Hillier's Treatment of Manic Depressive Psychosis .  He also expressed an interest in other titles the bookseller might have on the same subject. He signed off his book request with another request about how to answer him--specifically, by letter, but if the response were by post card, Schulte's should do so without reference to the subject.  Who's privacy was Lankes trying to protect? His own? A family member's? At the time this letter was written, Lankes was working for the  National A...

In the letter below, Stefan Lorant ordered five books in 1949 from a book store in New York. Was there anything significant about that? Before I investigated the purchase further, I wanted to know something about the buyer, Stefan Lorant. In a nutshell, Stefan Lorant (1901-1997) was a Hungarian-American author, editor, photographer, filmmaker, and pioneering photojournalist. An article about Lorant, found online at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh site refers to him as the first major editor of modern photojournalism. Michael Hallett, in the title of his biography on Lorant (Scarecrow Press, 2005), anoints him the Godfather of Photojournalism . One of the first things I learned about this native Hungarian is that about 1919, Franz Kafka helped him get a job as a violinist in a Czechoslovakian movie house at age 19. Not bad for starters.  It got even better and I became intrigued with the letter writer and what led him to this business correspondence with a booksell...

Rose Wilder Lane was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House on the Prairie fame. She was also a widely published journalist and author, who traveled from humble "Little House" beginnings to destinations around the world that her pioneering ancestors could never have imagined. Mr. Pesky was a bookseller with Schulte's Book Store on Fourth Avenue in New York. During the 1960s, the last years of their lives, Mrs. Lane bought an interesting variety of books from Mr. Pesky and developed a friendship with her bookseller and his wife. I have a small sampling of their correspondence during these years that sheds light on Rose's reading interests as well as her relationship with the bookseller, Mr. Pesky. Columbia University has in its archives the records for Schulte's Book Store for the years 1918 to 1959. From the brief biography at the archives' site, I learned that Theodore E. Schulte started the business in 1917. Store m...