Introduction to <i>The Old Booksellers of New York and other papers</i>
- by Bruce E. McKinney
Nassau Street, New York showing the bookshops of Burnbaum, Bradburn and Sabin.
Joseph Sabin
Joseph Sabin was born in England in 1821 and immigrated to Philadelphia in the United States in 1848 after completing an apprenticeship with Charles Richards, an Oxford bookseller. In 1850 he moved to New York and took employment as a cataloguer with the bookdealers Cooley and Keese. By the early 1860s he opened a book auction and then a bookshop and by 1864 was established and already at work on the lasting monument that bears his name: “Dictionary of Books Relating to America from its Discovery to the Present Time” or as everyone calls it: Sabin. In time he moved to 64 Nassau Street and maintained his business there for the balance of his career.
Mr. Andrews reports that Sabin’s sales for the period 1864 to 1874 totaled more than a million dollars and that he too was an important source of material for the great collectors of the day. And while “Americana” was his strength he also sold Shakespeare’s first folios as well as “early Chaucers, Miltons, Ben Jonsons, Spensers and Drydens.”
He also published the Bibliopolist: A Literary Register and repository of Notes and Queries, etc. that was begun in 1869 and continued to be published until 1877.
John Bradburn and Others
In this third section on New York book dealers Mr. Andrews first deals in some detail with John Bradburn who followed Mr. Gowans into the trade some ten years later, around 1840, and then continues on to describe other dealers to whose names he attaches memories and distinction.
Mr. Bradburn early on sold books to captains and sailors on the New York docks, an apparently more literary audience than those of us who remember On The Waterfront were led to believe, particularly as his specialties were law, theology and medical books. In the early 1850s he set up shop at the corner of Ann and Nassau Streets and continued there until he retired in 1868. As he earned income he traded it for building lots near Central Park and Fifth Avenue, the equivalent of trading copies of daily newspapers for Columbus Letters and evidence that he was very smart and capable of earning money both directly and indirectly from books.
Next, where first Mr. Andrews throws bouquets he now throws single roses to a group of dealers that he wishes to remember if not so much write about. They are T. H. Morrell, Timothy Reeve, Allan Ebbs, C. S. Francis, C. B. Richardson, John Wiley and Son, Jimmy Lawlor, M’Elrath and Bangs, Calvan Blanchard, Samuel Rayner, Charles B. Norton, and John Doyle. If the first two sections are substantial pieces of a potential bibliographical puzzle this final section provides only casual and circumstantial detail that may intrigue but won’t enlighten.
