Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

deceiving such astute old gentlemen bibliophiles as David
G. Francis, under the Mercantile Library in Astor Place,
or such eager young experts as George Richmond, then a
clerk in Miller's store near Ninth Street. Eugene's purchases were insignificant at that time; a case, he would
have explained in other words, of the champagne appetite
and the beer pocket-book. Yet book-buying is a ruling
passion strong even in debt.
I am not sure whether the bibliomaniac tours of the
Chicago Dibdin ever extended to old Joseph Sabin's in
lower Nassau Street, the headquarters of Americana and
the finest place in the world for rummaging. Most certainly Field might have found in the bottoms of Sabin's
barrels of outcasts things he hungered for and things for
which he could afford to pay. Those blessed old New
York book cellars and book basements in the days of fortynine cents instead of forty-nine dollars! Leggat's in
Temple Place and then in Chambers Street, where Frank
Thoms was a bright youngster, knowing every volume
in the immense collection up-stairs and down; Bonaventure under the Astor House; Scribner & Welford's rich
store of archaic importations shelved opposite Astor Place,
with Ernest Dressel North stationed close by the front
door; nobody could write now of the dozens of them better
than Christopher Morley, and he is too young.
Dearest of all to me, perhaps, was the aforesaid Sabin's
because I fished one day out of one of his numerous barrels
and bought for heaven knows how little the first and only
volume of Longhi's "Teorica della Calcografia," Milan,
1830, a technical tome so scarce that Senator Sumner,
amateur of portrait engravings, had related that he sought
it vainly in the British Museum and everywhere else

until a copy did emerge from the Library of Congress at
Washington. I knew the Astor Library had it not; so
fancy my joy at its discovery in that respectable barrel.
At that time it was my ambition to write or compile a