Nicholas B. Scheetz Collection of Manuscripts

Nicholas Breier Scheetz (1952-2016) was a noted bibliophile and book collector, and held the role of Manuscripts Librarian at Georgetown University between 1978 and 2015. He began collecting during his own undergraduate days at Georgetown, and amassed a personal collection of more than 22,000 books and manuscripts ranging from the 9th through the 21st centuries. The foci of his personal collecting were 19th and 20th century American and English literature; the libraries of distinguished individuals such as DeWitt Clinton; medieval manuscripts; as well as first editions, fine bindings, and signed, dedication, inscribed and association copies. He visited bookshops, dealers and collectors all over the world, and filled a three-story townhouse in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. with his treasures.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Scheetz was educated by Jesuits both at the Seattle Preparatory School and Georgetown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a double major in English and History. As Manuscripts Librarian at his alma mater, Scheetz was personally responsible for securing many important collections, including papers related to extraordinary authors such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, and to diplomats and other members of the scholarly community. He also lectured widely on manuscripts and published “Special Collections at Georgetown” (1996).

Scheetz enjoyed membership in numerous clubs, including the Grolier Club of New York, which presented exhibitions on his Rubaiyat/Edward FitzGerald, and, William Everson collections; the Club of Odd Volumes in Boston; the Metropolitan Club of Washington, D.C., and the Rainier Club of Seattle. He served on the collections committee of the Preservation Society of Newport County and was a former board member of the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, as well as a member of the Clambake Club of Newport, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, and the Newport Reading Room.

Following his retirement from Georgetown, Scheetz and his wife Diana Pearson moved permanently to their Newport, Rhode Island home. Scheetz passed away in Newport on October 29, 2016.

BOOKISH PURSUITS By Nicholas B. Scheetz

Delivered at The Literary Society, Saturday, 12 January 2007 The Metropolitan Club, 1700 I Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen of The Literary Society, Honored Guests. Years ago when I attended my first Literary Society evening, held at the Sulgrave Club, I was charmed to listen to a fine essay by the late Miss Connie Mellon, entitled I believe, “Postcards from Abroad”, a paper about celebrated individuals she had known. I thought of Miss Mellon as I was writing this paper, which only goes to show that our essays at times are not just for the moment, to be read one Saturday and then forgotten, but rather they can swirl in our collective memories to provide inspiration later on. Miss Mellon has inspired me from the past and I am very grateful to that dear lady, whom we miss, and I tip my spiritual hat to her shade, in gratitude.

In the Spring of 1973 at the Vassar College Book Sale, then held annually in Washington, D.C., I bought a slim volume which I have always considered to be my first rare book purchase. I had bought books for college, but this I bought, not for a text to read, but for the book itself, as a physical object. In the many ensuing years of collecting I lost sight of this youthful acquisition, and it took a move of biblical proportions to bring it to light again. Some members may recall that three years ago this month, in this same club, in this very room. I hosted and read a paper, on apologia for my absence, entitled “A Thankful Chase” about the six-year restoration of my 18th century house in Newport. Rhode Island. Those who kindly attended might like to know the project is complete, and because of the successful outcome, I was one of four individuals honored in September with the 1st annual Doris Duke Historic Preservation Award. The award, designed by glass artist Steven Easton, was presented at a gala party at Doris Duke’s exquisite Newport estate called Rough Point; and friends and family, from Seattle to New York, came for the attendant jollification. Happily that awards ceremony was held on a Friday, so I could also give a party the following night at my house. Everything at 40 Division Street was ready, even the kitchen worked, as the caterer told me later. But there was a catch - the emperor had no clothes, my lovely Newport library had no books! I was in despair! Was there time to move them? For any collector moving books from old shelves to new is always exhilarating, but its is also somewhat bittersweet, for in the book’s packing one remembers its acquisition, and in doing so, one recalls past moments in ones life. Handling many books multiples this feeling exponentially, and a collector can drown in such memories. But with the aid of an excellent mover I was saved from any impending flood, and over this past summer I was able to shift a significant part of my Washington library to Newport. In doing so I found the lost book of my youth: C. Lowes Dickinson’s "A Modern Symposium", a 1934 reprint of the first edition of 1904. The reason I bought it was the association: on the front flyleaf was the signature of the noted American cultural historian, Lewis Mumford, with “London 1953” written under his signature. It was an unexpected delight to hold the small book again, and as I gazed lovingly at the page carrying the inscription, I noted in amazement another signature at the top of the same page, a signature that had been meaningless to me years before. There, in brown ink, was the autograph of “M.R.D. Foot / The College / Winchester.” Could it be, I said to myself? Was it the same, I asked? Running to fetch a current “Who’s Who” I looked up Foot. And there on the printed page it told me that the prominent historian, M.R.D. Foot born in 1919, had indeed been a scholar at Winchester before going up to New College, Oxford. I had just seen a recent essay by the man on the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and so with some temerity, I made up my mind to write him. There were questions I felt the book was begging of me: did Foot know Mumford? In 1953 Dr. Foot was a don at Oxford, so had the American ever visited him there? Did he gift the book to Mumford on that occasion? I wrote him immediately and tried to apologize for my intrusion with the cant phrase: “Please don’t think me presumptuous in writing, but I find the provenance of books fascinating, and this is a wonderful example of transatlantic associations.” Oh, deathless prose!

Last June to my great joy I received an answer concerning this seemingly insignificant matter. Writing to me on Waterloo Day (June 18th) Professor Foot had this to say:

“Thank you for your letter of the 7th. Forgive delayed response - I have been in hospital. I fear it won’t be of much interest.”

“At Winchester I was taught history by the great H.E. Walker, who had been a pupil of Lowes Dickinson’s at Cambridge before the great war, and took us through his “International Anarchy.” I therefore bought “A Modern Symposium” - which, I confess, I had forgotten I ever possessed, though I can authenticate my flyleaf signature as 1937. I must have sold it; winnowing books; and Mumford in turn must have bought it from a second-hand bookseller, probably in the Charing Cross Road.”

“If I ever get to Washington, I much hope to take up your closing offer. My wife Mirjam, the bibliographer, visits it now and again, and believing she may have met you, there or at Charlottesville sends her regards.

“Every good wish from / Yours, Michael Foot.”

How extraordinary, on many different levels. One, that Professor Foot had even responded. Two, that he could illuminate why he had the book and the connection between his tutor H.E. Walker and historian G. Lowes Dickinson Ill, the huge surprise that Professor Foot was married to none other than a famous lady, Mirjam Foot, a great authority on English book-bindings and bibliography. I was simply bowled over by this news: I felt this was a prime example of what a collector once observed: “I knew I had distinguished books under my roof, but I didn’t know they were so well connected’. The Dickinson volume was indeed well connected.

This is a small tale of that first small rare book, and in the years following 1973, I have built a large collection. But let me move on to discuss other events in a life much tilled with books.

Following my graduation from Georgetown in 1974 I found myself in digs in the Dupont Circle area of town, in a dilapidated old brick mansion at 1717 P Street which was cut into several apartments, and the uppermost region was occupied by the manager, who was also the spiritual leader of the Washington Buddhist community. This attic was their temple, with a highly polished floor where meditations took place. I lived on the first floor in what had once been the house’s breakfast room, with lovely handmade green tiles surrounding the fireplace, the room’s one architectural feature. Engaged in a few graduate courses in Celtic studies by day, and the direction of plays by night. I had much free time in the afternoons.

And soon I made a great discovery. Through one of my English professors at Georgetown, John C. Hirsh, an excellent mentor, I began to experience the bibliophilic magic of the Park Reifschneider Bookshop, just off the Circle. It was in a tall town house next door to an identical house owned by the seer, Jeanne Dixon, and in short order it would became a second home to me, as I browsed for hours among the thousands of used books on its shelves. The shop had originally been in New York on Park Avenue, but had moved after the war down to Washington. Old Mrs. Reifschneider, who was mostly blind and sat mostly in a wheelchair behind the desk, had her apartment on the 3rd floor, but held forth whenever she was downstairs like the grande dame of books she was. In short order I began buying her stock, in particular presentation copies of the 19th century, all with the same interesting provenance, inscriptions all addressed to the same man. What I only started to understand was that Mr. and Mrs. Reifschneider had made one great coup in their bookselling lives: they had purchased in the early 1940s the vast library at Forest Glen, Maryland, of the 19th century collector, Jahu Dewitt Miller, and had been living off it ever since.

Miller, who always signed his name on a volume’s rear interior board, was born in 1852 and died in 1911. As a Chautauqua lyceum lecturer he traveled throughout the country, always collecting books wherever he went. He gave what were called “popular lectures”. Among their titles are “The Uses of Ugliness”, “The Stranger at Our Gates”. “Our Country’s Possibilities and Perils”, “The Self-Sufficiency of the Republic”, and “The Reveries of a Bachelor”. That last would also go under the name of “Love, Courtship, and Marriage”. Later I would learn much more about him and some 500 volumes from his fascinating collection are now in my own library, and several boxes of research about him.

A few of Miller’s particular collecting interests have become my own, and over the years I began to research the members of his bookish circle, who at the time were some of the most interesting figures in America. Besides Miller, it included the poet of childhood who lived in Chicago, Eugene Field, author of the memorable poem “Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod” and the delightful “The Love Affairs of a Bibliornaniac”; Francis Wilson, the great comic actor, collector and founder of Actor’s Equity, who lived at The Orchard in New Rochelle, New York; Paul Lemperly, the noted literary collector of Cleveland and one of the originators of the Rowfant Club; Frank E. Hopkins, a printer of talent, who had once been the best pressman of Theodore De Vinne’s empire; and Leon H. Vincent a Boston man-of-letters, who wrote a thinly disguised book about Miller during the latter’s lifetime: “The Bibliotaph and Other Essays.” In 1912, after Miller’s death, Vincent would also publish a short biography of the collector. But Miller is also immortalized in Eugene Field’s book-swapping poem, “To Dewitt Miller”, published in 1905 in a posthumous volume of Field’s verse. This will give you a sense of their camaraderie:

Dear Miller, You and I despise The cad who gathers books to sell ‘em, Be they but sixteen-mos in cloth Or stately folios garbed in vellum.

But when one fellow has a prize Another bibliophile is needing, Why, then, a satisfactory trade Is quite a laudable proceeding.

There’s precedent in Bristol’s case The great collector - preacher-farmer; And in the case of that divine Who shrives the soul of PD. Armour.

When from their sapient, saintly lips The words of wisdom are not dropping, They turn to trade that is to say, When they’re not preaching they are swapping!

So to the flock it doth appear That this a most conspicuous fact is: That which these godly pastors do Must surely be a proper practice.

Now, here’s a pretty prize, indeed, On which De Vinne’s art is lavished; Harkee! the bonny, dainty thing Is simply waiting to be ravished!

And you have that for which I pine As you should pine for this fair creature: Come, now, suppose we made a trade - You take this gem, and send the Beecher!

Surely, these graceful, tender songs (In samite garb with lots of gilt on) Are more to you than those dull tomes Her pastor gave to Lizzie Tilton!

The historians among you might recognize in this a reference to the greatest scandal in America of the 19th century, when the famous religious preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, the premiere rock star of his time, seduced Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of his friend and fellow preacher, Theodore Tilton. Books have been written about the affair and the ensuing law case, and apparently Miller owned volumes Rev. Beecher had given to Mrs. Tilton, perhaps after their friendship had taken a forbidden turn. These books contain what is called in the trade an “appropriate association”.

It would take several chapters in a memoir to fully discuss the Park Reifschneider Bookshop and Dewitt Miller. He was what is called in the trade a “Grangerizer”, someone who tips in original letters, photos, prints, and ephemera, to make an ordinary copy of a book something extra-ordinary. But Miller had a different angle: the letters he would tip in, always, somehow, related to the book. From Miller, who died some 40 years before I was born, I acquired an abiding interest in an English writer, Edward FitzGerald, the translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a friend of Tennyson, Thackeray, and Carlyle. FitzGerald fascinated Miller mightily. For instance, I began to find at Park Reifschneider volumes of FitzGerald’s printed correspondence, published in the 1890s, with original letters tipped-in, relating to certain passages, from such noted figures as the man-of-letters Sir Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton (who was the first American to write about FitzGerald), John Loder (FitzGerald’s bookseller), and others who had known old Fitz. Indeed in one volume Miller has blind FrederickTennyson, brother of the poet and friend of FitzGerald, sign his name. This was the beginning of my own extensive FitzGerald collection, gathered over the years since then from dealers and auction houses in England and America. Members who venture to New York might like to know it will be exhibited at The Grolier Club in 2009, the 150th anniversary of the printing of the rare first edition of “The Rubaiyat.”

But apart from his own grangerizing of books, Miller did also have a nose for rarities. I shall only mention one I bought from Mrs. Reifschneider. This is a set of books called “The Doctor.” The four volumes were in original cloth, missing the third volume, alas, and no author’s name appeared on the title pages. There was an armorial bookplate in the first volume, but with no name. But what drew me to the set were the hundreds of interlinear translations made in a small neat hand of the foreign language passages in the books’ text. Sometimes a foreign language poem would be translated into English twice, into different meters. I didn’t know who did this, but I did know learning when I saw it. Despite the missing Volume Three, I bought the set and took them back to my bed-setter to examine them further. Soon I realized that this long anonymous idiosyncratic work was by none other than the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the bookplate was done for him by the famed Thomas Bewick. Moreover, the hundreds of annotations in it were Southey’s own. Even today it is still one of my most cherished books.

In 1976 I moved from Dupont Circle to Georgetown, to 1234 31st Street, an apartment on the second floor facing the street. In the Spring of that year I traveled with my Professor of Celtic at Catholic University, Robert T. Meyer, to do the Trinity Term at Oxford, at Jesus College, founded for Welsh students. Dr. Meyer, a noted Celticist and comparative philologist, was asked every other Trinity term to come and lecture at the ancient university. He was also a bibliophile of Herculean appetites, with a large Victorian house in Harper’s Ferry, absolutely filled to the brim with books. The interior of rooms were arranged like a public library, with book stacks not only against the walls, but also running across the rooms. How he and Mrs. Meyer managed was always a mystery and the fact that no bookcase ever came crashing down and killing one of them was miraculous. Dr. Meyer, short, rumpled, and always wearing tennis shoes, was a true character, and a bit of a Leprechaun, with a faint Irish lilt to his voice. Though you might think him Irish, Dr. Meyer grew up in a German farming community outside Cleveland, and would often say to me with assurance: “Scheetz! All the greatest Celticists were German. There was Turneysen, Porkorny, and Kuno Meyer.” He inferred but quite never stated that his name too should join the list! But in Oxford my bookish horizon was greatly expanded by this dear man, and there I had an epiphany of sorts: I discovered an English bookshop with origins going back to 1835, J. Thornton & Son on the Broad, across the street from Cardinal Newman’s Trinity College.

Dr. Meyer had done business with Thornton’s for many years and knew the owner, “Young Mr. Thornton”, who was in his 70s, as well as the gentlemanly Mr. Wild, the buyer for the shop. A few years before my arrival the noted bookseller, David Low, published his charming memoirs, “With All Faults”, with a fine description of the shop at the time. Let me quote:

“Today the sense of the past is left to J. Thornton and Son, University Booksellers, at 11 Broad Street, and how naturally they sustain it. The shop window not laid out -justfull of books. The narrow old shop shelved from floor to ceiling, with two twisting staircases up the three floors with the sixteen rooms above unchaperoned most of the time, a real act of faith in these days. The staff in the traditional bookshop’s years of service: Mr. Wild, the manager, always asked for in affection and trust by visiting librarians, collectors, and booksellers. Elderly gentlemen scribbling endless memos in odd corners. At the back of the shop, in the raised counting house window, two ladies perched side by side. It would have been no surprise to see them wearing the elbow to wrist glace leather protectors of the Dickensian counting house clerk... Alongside the counting house, Mr. Jack Thornton slides on and of his high stool, keeping the wheels oiled, just as he must do with his bicycle, because he would never dream of running the motor-car which keeps on destroying his Oxford. He is “Mr. Jack” to the older ones in the firm, “Young Mr. Thornton” to the older customers and friends, for Mr. Thornton (senior), died about five years ago, aged over 90, and in the shop to the end. From “Young Mr. Thornton” came the story told him by his grandfather, of how he used to sit with his father (great grandfather Thornton) in the door of their shop in the High watching the drovers bringing the cattle and sheep up that cobbled street on their way to market The Thornton bookshop had been started by this great-grandfather in 1835 in the High, between All Souls and the Queen’s College. No wonder that Mr. John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, made Mr. Jack promise never to alter anything at J. Thornton and Son, University Booksellers.”

This is exactly as I found the shop that Trinity Term in 1976. And while I was very grateful to Dr. Meyer that I could attend lectures on Old Welsh with Sir Idris Foster, and on Icelandic with Dr. Ursala Dronke, still the lure of Thornton’s was often more than I could bear. For generations the staff of Thornton’s had been piling pamphlets under a curving back staircase against the wall, and for hour upon hour that term I went through, item by item, those leaning stacks, each four feet tall. Of course, many of them were academic offprints, but almost always they would include an interesting cover letter and in many cases one might put together enough of this type of correspondence to constitute a person’s papers. Alas, poet A.E. Housman never inscribed his offprints, but I did find a good number of his. And from these piles came the beginnings of my collection of Oxford printed ephemera, especially Newdigate Prize Poems, an annual Oxford award going back to the early 19th century. Oscar Wilde and Matthew Arnold were both winners and their Newdigates constitute their first publication. What the Park Reifschneider Bookshop was to me in Washington, Thornton’s became in Oxford. I haunted the place and then the day came when Dr. Meyer located me upstairs in the place and whispered: “Quick, Scheetz, Mr. Thornton wants to show us a treasure.” I followed Dr. Meyer to one of the usually closed offices on the second floor where we found “Young Mr. Thornton” peering into a filing cabinet drawer. He looked up and said “Mr. Scheetz, Dr. Meyer tells me you are interested in medieval manuscripts. I really don’t carry that sort of thing, but I have this.” He pulled out a small Book of Hours, 15th century, rebacked, but perhaps in its original leather boards, with no miniatures but with beautifully worked decorated initials in blues and reds. It was of a size to fit easily into a medieval pocket or satchel. I made appreciative, purring noises and eventually Mr. Thornton said I could have it for 150 pounds. I told him I would bring the money that afternoon if he would hold it for me. He agreed and as he was putting it back in the drawer. I noticed a number of other manuscripts, with Oriental bindings, possibly texts in Arabic. I regret I didn’t inquire about them, but my wallet was already becoming depleted by this British academic adventure.

Such was my delight in Oxford, and the affection for the friends I made there, that I would often return on summer vacations for the rest of the ‘70s and the first years of the ‘70s. I would stay at 54 St. John Street, a B&B well run by Miss Tong, where Dr. Meyer and I had resided during that Trinity Term. Thornton’s would go on for a few more years as I had known it, and Mr. Wild would always show me new libraries that had just come in, first stored in a rear carriage house. This is where I bought with abandon from the library of Hugh Trevor-Roper at the time when the historian left Oxford to become Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge. He heavily annotated his books and it was among them that I found a paperback of LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Trevor-Roper’s autograph key to the true identities of the fictional spy characters. This is also where I discovered some books that had belonged to J.R.R. Tolkien, whose son Christopher had sold them to Thornton’s merely as texts. Thornton’s being an old fashioned shop, never priced more for the signatures of the mighty. Too, I was there when the library of my old professor, Sir Idris Foster, came in as he had retired and had gone back to live in Wales. But as Thornton’s waned and then finally was sold to a Dutch dealer, a shop down near the Oxford train-station opened and that became a source of great things. Named after its owner, Robin Waterfield, Waterfield’s was the largest of the Oxford bookshops for a decade, and had amongst its stock a tremendous amount of Oxford University pamphlet material, including the lucky acquisition of the printer’s file copies from the Oxford University Press.

On one of these successive visits I met at a Bodleian Library reception one of Oxford’s most noted figures, John Sparrow, the great wit, poet, author, barrister, and longtime Warden of All Souls College. Despite my beard (he frowned on bearded youth which he wrote famously about in the essay “Are Students Revolting?”) John would become a good friend and a wonderful bookish mentor as he possessed one of the finest private libraries in Oxford, if not in all of England. He had been collecting books while still a lad at Winchester and his second book came out when he was only 20, an edition of Poems of Henry V, published by the Nonesuch Press. It is a great pity that the recent biography on him discusses many facets of John’s remarkable life and career, except for the one crucial aspect that gave him the greatest joy in life, his book collection. When I knew him he was already in retirement living on the expansive first floor of an 18th century house in Iffley, not far from Oxford, with his noted collection beautifully arranged. Behind his residence was the home of Mrs. Graham Greene, whom I also came later to know. Over the years of our friendship, John’s fine mind was becoming eventually clouded. Perhaps the last time I saw him (we were having lunch at a restaurant along the Thames). I asked him if he was working on anything, perhaps a poem. He mentioned he was and wished to get my judgment in a matter. He then recited the short poem:

"I’m accustomed to my dentures To my deafness I’m resigned I can cope with my bifocals But, oh dear, I miss my mind."

Then he asked me: “Now this is what I want to know. Am I accustomed to dentures, or am I resigned?” I said I thought one was never accustomed to deafness, but only resigned to it, but one could possibly become accustomed to dentures, and the poem was correct as it stood. He said that too was his feeling. I then pulled out a postcard from my pocket and asked him to write down the poem for my collection of Sparrowiana. He graciously did, in his elegant hand, and only regret I didn’t do an exhibition about him in 2004, as that was the year of his centennial.

But the 1976 move to Georgetown and 31st Street also sparked two other important bookish events in my life. One was meeting the A.C. Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelite collector, John S. Mayfield of Bethesda, who would become one of my closest friends until his death in 1983. And his widow, Edith, became like an older sister and a fixture in my life throughout the remainder of her life. But John had more wit than almost anyone I had ever met. His wit wasn’t of the Oxford brand, but rather the homespun Texas variety, with a captivating drawl. His charm too was un-surpassing and if it wasn’t growing late just now I would delve into him more, and tell you about his humorous writings, his memorable sayings, and his unique collecting interests.

The other seminal event of 1976 was becoming familiar with a bookshop down the street from my apartment. Literary Society rules might prohibit mentioning in an essay the business affairs of a member, but without any intent of giving offense, I must say that buying in the shop, “Booked Up”, would become my greatest Washington bookish adventure. It also was one of the most interesting for one of the two owners was the superb novelist Larry McMurtry, who was then as active and skilled bookdealer as I have ever known. His happy choice to become a bookdealer is mirrored by what another famous novelist, Graham Greene, wrote on the subject. Greene observed:

“Secondhand booksellers are among the mostfriendly and the most eccentric of all the characters I have known. If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen. There is the musty smell of books, and there’s the sense of the treasure hunt...To enter properly this magic world of chance and adventure one has to be either a collector or a bookseller. I would have preferred to be a bookseller, but the opportunity escaped me in the war.”

Larry also made publicly known his admiration for booksellers. In the dedication to the recent “The Berrybender Narratives” he writes: “The Berrybender Narratives are dedicated to the secondhand booksellers of the Western world, who have done so much, over a fifty-year stretch, to help me to an education.”

But let me end on a Graham Greene note reflecting on the times we live in. At the conclusion of his introduction to David Low’s “With All Faults”, Greene writes:

"I wish David Low had included an obituary of deaths by bombs or builders.Gone for example is the secondhand books hop I loved in Westboume Grove and gone the little bookshop on the triangular site opposite King’s Cross Station where I bought "The Adventures" and "The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes" in their first editions for what seemed then the exorbitant price of £5. That is the sad side of book-hunting; far more shops disappear than new shops open. Even Brighton is not what it was."

I believe that is true and even Washington is not what it was.

Once again I thank you for listening to me.