In addition to the sale of the personal collection there will be one or two sales later this year or next of his bookseller’s stock, solid material whose sale will turn down the lights on his formal bookselling business. The particulars of these sales have yet to be confirmed.
What we have on April 10th is the crème.
Mr. Nebenzahl’s career reaches back to the end of World War II. Two, in 1929 and eighteen in 1945, he slept through the worst of the depression and was too young for combat in Europe. He served state side for two years in the Marines, continued his education and emerged in the mid 1950’s with an interest and eye for great printed material. Today, looking back it’s clear “it was an incredible time and almost easy.” Ten years later, with prices rising, demand increasing, and supply shrinking Ken, as his friends call him, next pursued the emerging field of maps as collectibles separate from the books they often came from. He would pioneer in this field, midwifing a category that caught fire to become his primary business into the 1980s. His second auction will probably focus on maps.
Through the years the Nebenzahls raised 3 daughters, while maintaining a shop in Chicago on Michigan Avenue up until 1989. He developed a sterling reputation, issuing a long series of catalogues, selling exceptional material and establishing life-long relationships with many of the field’s important figures. Richard Lan of Martayan Lan, the New York map dealer, when asked about him recently offered “Ken Nebenzahl was one of the shrewdest and best connected dealers of his generation.”
Bernard Rosenthal, a member of the ABAA since 1955, past president and emeritus member since 2001, his contemporary and at 92, still going to the office in Oakland, California offered “Ken and I are among the last dealers with an uninterrupted view of the field from the end of WWII to the present. You did research, built relationships, issued catalogues with honest descriptions, and paid your bills on time.”
He did and continues to do well.
