Philadelphia: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1991.

Edwin Wolf 2nd died on 20 February 1991 at the age of seventy-nine. Mr. Wolf began his long association with the Library Company in 1952, when the Directors hired him as a consultant to survey the collections and advise them about the future direction of the institution. Mr. Wolf's report concluded that the Library Company's rare book collection was of enormous significance, and he recommended that the Library Company become a scholarly research library with special emphasis on the history and culture of America to 1880. The report became the virtual blueprint for the renaissance of the Library Company over the coming decades that Mr. Wolf orchestrated. By the time he retired as Librarian in 1984 the Library Company was recognized as one of the nation's premier independent research libraries.

The Library Company has chosen to publish on this occasion a booklet that will bring a smile of recognition to those who read it. The 1987 autobiographical sketch, published here for the first time, is written in the characteristic Wolf style. It ranges over his early years, work at the Rosenbach company, wartime experiences, the Library Company, civic affairs, service to the Jewish community, and scholarly contributions to the fields of early American history and bibliography. (A brief Afterword carries the story from 1987 to his death.) The bibliography published here is based on a typescript that Mr. Wolf kept up to date, and is therefore, we believe, complete. It ranges from clothbound tomes to articles of a single page; even the less important of his publications tell us much about his diverse interests and the variety of publications which sought his views.

Mr. Wolf has been described more than once as the consummate bookman, and he was a widely respected scholar and an elegant prose stylist as well. This keepsake testifies to the truth of those assertions on all counts.

John C. Van Horne

Librarian

April 1991

It was up a ladder on the top level of the Library Company's north-wing stacks, with a dim bulb lighting my way, that I came of age. How many persons in a cloud of accumulated dust take down a copy of the Williamsburg printing of Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America, and open it to find the author's autograph emendations. It was spine-tingling to discover an inscription by Meriwether Lewis in a copy of Le Page du Pratz's History of Louisiana and realize that the volume had been taken by the explorer across the continent. What an exciting career opened for me!

My progression up the rungs of that ladder had not been by orthodox steps, no magna cum laude degree from an Ivy League university, no doctorate working under one of the great men of American historiography. In 1930 at the age of eighteen I returned to Philadelphia, where I had grown up, from three years of polishing at Bedales School in England. It was a remarkable school providing, in the best sense, a liberal education. I was taught how to write correctly and colourfully; the “u” is purposeful. “The past participle of get is got; gotten is an Americanism, Wolf,” I was told. A facility to write has stood me in good stead.

College at that point was out of the question. By American standards I had too much education. We had already read Juvenal; my wife-to-be came upon Juvenal in her senior year at Bryn Mawr. Hence, at the nudging and through the influence of my lawyer father, who thought his friend and client Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach's rare-book establishment offered one of the most glamorous futures a youth could find, I went to work in the fall of 1930 for the premier antiquarian bookman in the world-at $25 a week. That was good pay then, and more than I was worth.

I was put under the acerbic and somewhat eccentric care of Miss E. Millicent Sowerby-she of later Jefferson library fame-to learn the art and mystery of bibliographical description and rare-book cataloguing. What a wealth, what a variety of treasures I handled, collated, scrutinized, marveled at, and sometimes read. They ranged from a twelfth-century manuscript with carved and painted oak covers to a presentation copy of James Stephens's Crock of Gold, from Shakespeare quartos to the manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Franklin sent to Frederick of Prussia seeking his recognition of the infant United States. Much too soon I was given the responsibility of compiling a full-dress catalogue of the European Manuscripts presented to the Free Library of Philadelphia by the widow of the collector John Frederick Lewis. It was sink or swim. The elegant volume, designed by Richard Ellis, was more prepossessing typographically than the text was scholarly. I was peacock-proud when it appeared in 1937. In my maturity I look upon it with a jaundiced eye as an overambitious product of my immaturity. It wasn't all bad; it wasn't all good either.

For over two decades I worked in the shadow of Dr. Rosenbach, the boy in the back room who wrote descriptions of books for prospective buyers and who wrote, edited, and saw through the press the firm's printed catalogues. The Doctor was not enthusiastic about publications by his staff which did not primarily redound to the credit of Rosenbach. However, while I worked at Rosenbach's I was able to see in print a number of articles in half a dozen learned journals on such subjects as Wolfe's copy of Gray's Elegy, press corrections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century quartos, bibliographical problems of the first Edinburgh edition of Burns's Poems and Franklin's Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces, an exercise in textual criticism, Fragonard's plates for the Contes et Nouvelles of La Fontaine, Gravelot as a designer of engraved portrait frames, the 1706 charter of the City of Philadelphia, and more.

Occasionally, I was, happily, dragooned at the behest of the collector Lessing Rosenwald-what Lessing sought of the Doctor, Lessing got-to work on special projects of prime interest to him. Elizabeth Mongan, Rosenwald's curator, and I in 1939 brought together and wrote the catalogue of an eye-opening exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of works of William Blake from American collections, pre-eminent among which, needless to say, was that of Lessing Rosenwald. This led me to a friendship and later collaboration with Geoffrey Keynes which resulted in William Blake's Illuminated Books published by the Grolier Club in 1953. Betty Mongan and I again worked together in 1940 on a catalogue and exhibition at the Free Library of Philadelphia of “The First Printers and Their Books,” a formidable gathering of incunables, all from the Rosenwald collection. My last publication at the instance of Rosenwald was in 1947 for the Library of Congress, a fifty-page introduction to a facsimile of a xylographic Doctrina Christiana printed in Manila in 1593, then believed to be the first book printed in the Philippines. I mention these varied projects merely to give some idea of the wide range of the research I was doing. At the same time I worked on the Rosenbach catalogues which described thousands of rare books in literature and history, thousands of letters and documents by poets and presidents, soldiers and statesmen. My apprenticeship was a rich one.

There was a break in my rare-book career from 1943 to 1945 while I served in the army. It was something of a surprise to me to find in my armored-force basic training that my promotions came with rapidity, first to private first class and then to corporal. I had the ability to learn, which was, or should be, the ultimate goal of a liberal education, and it didn't make any difference if the subject was the firing and dismantling of a fifty-calibre machine-gun, which I was picked to teach after a few weeks. This becomes relevant because over a good many years I have used it as an example of the value of educability per se, what I consider to be the essence of humanism.

To return to Corporal Wolf. I was providentially pulled out of a light tank—it having been discovered that I had some familiarity with the French language—to study German at the University of Missouri in Columbia under the Army Specialized Training Program. What a great experiment in teaching methods that was; in six months I could speak German. Then I was whisked off to the army intelligence school at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, where the officers-in-training were the castoffs of anti-aircraft units no longer needed in the United States and the enlisted men were the likes of Kissinger and Wolf. My German wasn't so good as his, so I was sent overseas in the autumn of 1944, promoted to staff sergeant, as a French Military Intelligence Interpreter. The military being what it was—and, alas, apparently what it is—there was no official need for French-speaking personnel as the American troops crossed France. It was only when the almost successful German incursion into Luxembourg and Belgium, known as the Bulge, took place in December 1944 that a counter-intelligence screen along the Meuse River was deemed essential. I was sent to be a part of that screen at Namur to stop the Nazis from infiltrating behind our lines. The heroics of how I won the Battle of the Bulge, a grossly exaggerated version of history, at first entertained my young children, and then bored them.

I continue because I find the printed reminiscences of many of my academic contemporaries skimp what many of my other friends recurrently and reiteratively tell of their macho days on land and sea in Europe and Asia. From Namur, the Germans having been pushed back, I was yanked on the army marionette string to a village in Normandy to be taught the German order of battle, what divisions were where and how effective they were. A handbook was provided, but it was expected to be memorized. Why I could never understand. The book was being outdated as the course went on. From there I was posted as a German Order of Battle Specialist to the intelligence section of the 35th Infantry Division, at the time engaged in reducing to dust the defenses of an industrial city on the Ruhr. With hardly a fire-fight the division went across Germany to the Elbe. I actually saw that historic boundary. As all historians know, although the American army could easily have moved on eastward, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and Chairman Stalin agreed at Yalta in February 1945 that it should not.

Once again the puppet's string was pulled. “Where were you the past month or so?” someone in a Paris headquarters asked. I was supposed to be in Fulda, metamorphosed into a Special Agent in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. Off I went. The job was finding and turning in those Nazis who fell into a mandatory arrest category. It wasn't hard work. I had time to spare, so I looked into the fate of Gulda's Gutenberg Bible on vellum and the magnificent twelfth-century illuminated manuscripts from the era when Fulda was the center of German Catholicism. A wing of the library had been hit by a bomb, but the librarian informed me that perspicaciously the greatest treasures had long been removed and scattered about the countryside in the care of village vicars. I decided that, war being over, the precious volumes would be safer in a bank vault until the Stadtbibliothek was reorganized. The itch to handle great books no true bookman can resist. The librarian supplied me with a list of the books and where they had been hidden, and I brought them back—a load of cartons in my jeep—from the outlying area to the Reichsbank in town. Imagine, a vicar turning over a Gutenberg Bible to an unknown uniformed soldier. Of course, I had introduced myself as a member of the America Gestapo, which is what the CIC was known as. In 1982 when I visited several German libraries as the guest of the Deutsche Forschungs Gesellschaft, I went to Fulda and saw in exhibition cases what I had rounded up for safekeeping. A reporter for the local newspaper in an article hailed me as “Der `Retter' der Gutenberg-Bibel.”

After a period of relaxation during which I reacquainted myself with my wife and three children, I returned at the beginning of 1946 to the Rosenbach establishment, considerably more self-assured than when I had left. While I had been away, the store had been moved from its forty-year location on Walnut Street to an elegant Victorian brownstone house across Locust Street from St. Mark's neo-Gothic Episcopal church. The furniture and objets-d'art business that had occupied Dr. Rosenbach's older brother Philip, and in which I had been involved will-nilly by him, had been liquidated. With Mr. Philip increasingly concerning himself with the book business as Dr. Rosenbach began physically to fail, I took up where I had left off. I again put out the firm's catalogues, notably specialized ones on Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Burns, and the three-part History of America in Documents.

I was still separated from the excitement of sales and the glamor of social life that made Rosenbach's house on East 57th Street a focus of the rare-book world. To be sure, I had met most of the new collectors, Frank Hogan, Donald Hyde and his wife Mary, Arthur Houghton, Louis Silver, Louis Rabinowitz, and others, but my contacts with them had been peripheral. During the war, John Fleming had emerged as Crown Prince in New York, and he was not anxious to have other contenders for the title.

Far more important to my future were the scholarly librarians who were kind to me. Belle Greene at the Morgan Library had been most helpful when, as a tyro, I was working on the Lewis medieval manuscripts. William Jackson, while he was still engaged in writing the great Pforzheimer catalogue, came into Rosenbach's to do research and impressed me with his elephantine memory for books he had once seen no matter where. When he moved and took over the administration of the new Houghton Library at Harvard, Bill always received me graciously on trips I made to study manuscript poetical commonplace books or some such thing. The most important lesson I learned from “the Grand Acquisitor” of the Houghton Library was to keep the stack shelves looking neat and clean, like someone's private library. “If a potential benefactor sees how you keep your books, he may be impressed enough to give you his,” he told me. It became my custom to wander through the stacks of the Library Company aligning volumes on the shelves. I never forgot what Bill Jackson told me.

I had become very friendly with Julian Boyd during his somewhat frustrating years at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. We spent some time together when in an undertaker's establishment in Muncie, Pennsylvania, we microfilmed the Wallis family's extensive archive of land company records. The inheritors of the papers were willing to have them filed in situ, but would not let them out of their hands, nor were they willing to give or sell them. I wonder if anyone ever used the film. I was sorry to lose Julian's company to Princeton, but pleased on his account. Early in my career at the Library Company he paid me the highest compliment I had ever received. He invited me to be his assistant at the Jefferson Papers when Lyman Butterfield left. I was too wrapped up in my amazing discoveries to consider even so flattering an offer.

It was, of course, inevitable that I got to know a number of the librarian friends and customers of Dr. Rosenbach. Always warm and friendly to me were the irrepressible Randolph Adams of the Clements Library, the lean and outwardly austere Lawrence Wroth of the John Carter Brown Library, and the well-fleshed, more jovial Clarence Brigham of the American Antiquarian Society. In the course of my work at Rosenbach's and later when I had taken over the Library Company, Wroth and Brigham were outstandingly encouraging. From Wroth I have publicly acknowledged that I took the idea of an annual report in essay form and from Brigham the concept of collecting for a library what others weren't. Both of them were generous in their sharing of experience with and in their hospitality to me. Lawrence Wroth brought me home with him when the library closed and proceeded to regale me with rich book talk and to share a full pitcher of martinis. Clarence Brigham, on several occasions, took me to the Worcester Club for lunch, always preceded by three—not two—martinis at the bar. His plaint was invariably the same. “I don't understand that Ted Shipton,” he would sniff, “he only drinks tomato juice.” Fortunately for me, my training under Dr. Rosenbach had prepared me for the egregious consumption of liquor, so I was able to handle myself with honor. Poor Ted Shipton, Brigham's long-time assistant, who had to work for more than seven years for the Rachel of the directorship, perhaps because of his temperance. Jackson, Adams, Wroth, and Brigham were consummate rare-book men, autocratic individualists, who in their way made great libraries greater. They and their achievements were major influences in my later career.

In the early 1940s there had been something of a flutter in the Philadelphia area's libraries. A survey with suggestions for the better use of the city's resources was published by a Bibliographical Planning Committee under the direction of Dr. Charles W. David, professor of history at Bryn Mawr College, and soon to be director of libraries of the University of Pennsylvania. It had been Charlie David who convinced President Park of Bryn Mawr that it would be a good idea for me, despite my lack of formal credentials, to give a course in bibliography for seniors and graduate students, which I did in 1941-42. Dr. David's young wife Margaret, a recent graduate of the college, participated in my two-hours-a-week seminar. The first semester I taught paleography which everyone enjoyed-transcribing various medieval hands had the allure of crossword puzzles, I was told; the second half of the year I gave a history of printing and attempted to explain analytical bibliography as it existed before the hegemony of Fredson Bowers. The war ended my academic career.

A number of changes had taken place or were taking place in the local library world. The Free Library instituted a separate department for its rarities. Dr. William Lingelbach began adding enthusiastically to the long dormant collection of the American Philosophical Society and started plans for a new building. Dr. David at the University of Pennsylvania was studying blueprints for the Van Pelt Library with special collections in their own aerie on the sixth floor. The young historian Nicholas Wainwright came to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania as assistant to the director, R. Norris Williams, and as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, which he made into one of the top American historical journals in the country. Financial exigencies and management problems had moved the Library Company to make the Free Library its corporate librarian.

By 1950 I was beginning to get dissatisfied with my situation at Rosenbach's. The Doctor was out ill for long periods of time. I was nominally manager of the Philadelphia branch, but my role in the firm was anomalous. Philip Rosenbach, in his eighties, was unpredictable and his instructions—they were like a Czar's ukases—contradictory. It came to a head one day in the spring of 1952. Mr. Philip and I violently disagreed about what he had told me. I quit. When I stopped to tell Dr. Rosenbach that I had resigned in a huff, he mildly said he was surprised I hadn't done it sooner. My score of years working with the greatest stock of rare books and manuscripts of its day gave me an unusual catholicity of experience. In a world of specialists I was a generalist. I knew a little about a lot and learned in depth only when the need arose. I don't know of an antiquarian bookseller's inventory in this country today that is so wide-ranging as that was.

It was fortunate for me that a turning point in my career coincided with a change in the outlook of the venerable Library Company. With a leased parking garage on the site of its former uptown library and all its books consolidated in the Ridgway building in South Philadelphia, the institution was enjoying an infusion of income that enabled it to look to the future.

I—in numerous articles, in my brief history of the Library Company, At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin, and in thirty widely circulated Annual Reports—and Marie Korey—in her monograph, The Wolf Years—have narrated the history of the Library Company from its inception through its rebirth under my care as one of the nation's major research libraries. At the suggestion of W. Logan Fox, treasurer and the most influential member of the library's board, who had known me when he was landlord of the Rosenbach's Walnut Street store, I was asked in 1952 by Nick Wainwright, then president of the Library Company, to make a six-month survey of the contents of its Parthenonic building on South Broad Street and recommend to the Board what could or should be done to bring the library into the mid-twentieth century. With the enthusiastic and indispensable help of the Ridgway building's resident guardian, Barney Chesnick, I made the survey. The collection of the Library Company as represented by the books on the dusty shelves was so much broader, so much larger, and so much more important than anyone had known that my suggestions were unequivocally upbeat. Basically, what I thought should be done was to catalogue at least in a rudimentary fashion the books, reshelve them, think about giving up the lending-library aspect of the library's operation, and move out of the antiquated, badly located building. A committee of outside experts was brought in to look at the situation. It confirmed the value of the collection as a major research resource and approved my suggestions for developing it into a known quantity in the scholarly world. I was asked to carry out the suggestions, first as curator in 1953 and, when the connection with the Free Library was amicably ended in 1955, as librarian. As I often told people, I didn't want to be “director”; if “librarian” was good enough for Benjamin Franklin—albeit briefly—it was good enough for me. That was always good for a laugh.

I shall not continue on about the Library Company. Let the heretofore printed records stand, the most successful of which are my annual reports, impertinent, informative, unconventional—and read. There were, however, several facets of my life that were separated in part or in whole from my library responsibilities. Among these was an involvement in civic activities of a charitable and political nature. I was an early member of the board of Philadelphia's chapter of Americans for Democratic Action and a member of the group that helped the reformers Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth take over the administration of the city and breathe new life into it. Mayor Clark rewarded me for services rendered by appointing me to the Board of the Free Library of Philadelphia. At about the same time I became the chairman of the Friends of the University of Pennsylvania Library. In that capacity I worked with Harold Stassen, then president of the university, and Robert Dunlop, a trustee and president of Sun Oil Company, to celebrate in 1951 the bicentennial of the university's founding by bringing over Winston Churchill. A major exhibition was promoted of the writings and mementos of founder Franklin and the distinguished Englishman for which I prepared the catalogue. It was an all-out effort. The National Archives sent the peace treaty of 1783; the Philadelphia libraries supplied Frankliniana; Churchill supplied material from his personal archives; and supporting documents came from President Roosevelt's papers at Hyde Park. All was set. Then President Truman fired General MacArthur; the British Ambassador in Washington vetoed Mr. Churchill's trip lest he should say something that would roil Anglo-American relations; and I spoke on Franklin at the splendid dinner that followed the opening of the exhibition. It is the only time I ever took Mr. Churchill's place on a podium. When I started work at the Library Company, I resigned both the other library appointments so that there would be no conflict of interests.

During the late 1940s and 1950s I also worked for the Community Chest, later the United Fund, in positions of increasing responsibility. For a long time I was an officer of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association, and as chairman of the local Jewish Welfare Board one of the founders of the USO in Philadelphia. Later I became president of the Jewish Publication Society of America, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Federation of Jewish Agencies of Greater Philadelphia. I was in demand as a speaker at Jewish philanthropic dinners across the country to such an extent that I was jokingly referred to as “the Jewish Billy Graham.” These activities gave me a high profile apart from my professional life.

Out of my interest in Jewish culture came my first major book, A History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson which, written in collaboration with Maxwell Whiteman, was published serially in Philadelphia's weekly Jewish Exponent from January to July 1955. It was reworked as a full-dress, annotated book and issued by the Jewish Publication Society in 1957. Max did most of the research; I did most of the writing. As a community ethnic history it broke new ground; it was readable. I was stiffly ethical about paid-for time on the job, so I accustomed myself to writing at home after supper from seven to eleven, a practice I continued throughout my career when the subject matter was not directly concerned with the Library Company.

The next venture was a biography of Dr. Rosenbach. The Doctor had died a few months after I left and his brother Philip a year later. The store in Philadelphia was emptied and much consolidated in the Rosenbach's DeLancey Street home which became the headquarters of the Rosenbach Foundation, the main beneficiary of both the brothers' wills. John Fleming, of the New York office, and I were approached by Lee Grove of New York's Oxford University Press to write the story of his career. We agreed, and the trustees of the Rosenbach Foundation consented to turn over to me all the records in their custody. The company's archive and personal papers—dozens of file drawers and cartons of undigested material from high school reports to correspondence about the greatest book transactions of the era, sales books and scrapbooks of clippings from all over the world—were transferred from the basement of the Locust Street store to the Library Company. I took them home container by container, threw out old electric-light bills, orders for mouldings—Rosenbach's had an extensive picture-framing business—and such inessential documents, and after making notes sent the residue back to the foundation.

Over a period of several years I wrote the life history of A. S. W. Rosenbach from the vast amount of information I had garnered from the files and cartons supplemented by material of an anecdotal nature supplied by Fleming. I type what I write—or did before I got a word processor. I typed 1,200 pages of the Rosenbach biography. Oxford took one look at it, and said it was much too long. I retyped it down to 800 pages. Oxford said it was still too long. At that point parts of the abridged manuscript had been read at my request by such book persons as the Donald Hydes, Bill Jackson, Frederick Adams of the Morgan Library, and a few others. They advised me not to cut further. That was the end of Oxford's involvement. Within days—word got around fast—William Targ of World Publishing Company read the manuscript, and World enthusiastically took over the contract. The work was published in 1960. One of the biggest thrills of my life was to see Rosenbach: A Biography favorably reviewed by Lawrence Clark Powell, then librarian of UCLA, on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. It was also played up in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, London Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A second edition was called for. Today it is still being read and enjoyed by book collectors, antiquarian booksellers and librarians. A first edition sells for an embarrassingly high price.

The provenance of books had always interested me. At Rosenbach's a good pedigree enhanced value; at the Library Company it was part of a fascinating untold story of the history of the book in America. In 1955 I gave a paper at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on “The Romance of James Logan's Books.” Lester Cappon was there and asked if I would submit it to the William and Mary Quarterly, which I was pleased to do. In the following year it appeared, the first public declaration of my affair with that finicky, crotchety, wordy polymath, the most consummate bookman of colonial America. I paid my full tribute to his memory with the massive Library of James Logan, published in celebration of the tercentenary of his birth in 1974. I have been told by some of my admiring assistants over the years that I had acquired by osmosis many of Logan's admirable and not-so-admirable qualities.

The chase after provenance turned up scores of books that came from the library of William Byrd II of Westover, duly recorded in 1958 in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society—to which I was, thanks to Clarence Brigham, elected in 1953. Even more exciting was the hunt for volumes that had belonged to Benjamin Franklin once I had identified the shelf-mark that was a certain sign of his ownership. In 1960 I received a form from the Guggenheim Foundation telling me that I had been suggested—by Allen Hazen of Columbia I later learned—as a candidate for a fellowship. I was in a quandary. For me to take a year off with momentum building up for major changes at the Library Company was to me unthinkable. The eminent and always jovial Roy Nichols was a director of the library and a good friend to me. I sought his advice. “Ask them for three months and see what happens,” he told me. So I put in an application to travel for three months during the summer to libraries from Ohio to the eastern seaboard looking for books from Franklin's library. Amazingly enough, in 1961 I got a three-month Guggenheim. The result was “The Reconstruction of Franklin's Library; An Unorthodox Jigsaw Puzzle,” which appeared in the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America the following year and which was reprinted in 1980 in the Society's 75th anniversary retrospective collection of its best published articles. Recently when I asked Thomas Tanselle of the Guggenheim Foundation if I could get another “three-month” grant for a different project, he told me quite categorically they never gave such a thing.

There were other discoveries. I thrived on technical textual and bibliographical puzzles. Articles and book reviews I wrote on a wide range of subjects appeared in the better journals. I admit to being snobbish about that. And there was always the Annual Report of the Library Company to put out. While I was often told that the writing of them must have been easy for me, it was tough work and took much polishing. One of the hardest things to do in writing is to make it look effortless. Then there were exhibitions and their catalogues which began to be undertaken after the Library Company moved next door to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on Locust Street in 1966. I was particularly proud of the 1969 pioneering Negro History 1553-1903. This was so early in the awakening, before black was beautiful, that “Negro” was the accepted adjective. All the exhibitions and a number of anniversary occasions were celebrated by receptions. Having sat at the feet of a-bottle-of-whiskey-a-day Rosenbach, I saw to it that those parties were always well lubricated and hence convivial. As the host for meetings of appropriate book, historical, and cultural societies, the Library Company became known for entertaining that was fun. With a glass of bourbon on the rocks in my hand I had a good time, too.

In the 1970s I became involved in two considerable projects of Philadelphia history. Robert McNeil's Barra Foundation decided to underwrite a major comprehensive, onevolume history of the city, there being none. Dr. Roy Nichols agreed to be chairman of a small committee of direction, composed, as I remember it, of Whitfield Bell, Nicholas Wainwright, and me. A dozen authorities in special areas were each assigned a chronologically encapsulated period. Then the wandering in the desert began. Chapters didn't get written. Nick Wainwright and I were the principal long-time readers, and we had to send far too many chapters back for almost complete rewriting. One summer I compressed 120 typed pages into sixty—I find it hard to do for myself—for an author who, having written what he had written, didn't want to have any-thing more to do with it. The project dragged on and on. Roy Nichols and a few authors died; some had to be replaced or at least rescued by another writer. Finally Russell Weigley of Temple University took over as editor-in-chief with Nick and me as associate editors, and the volume moved on to completion, coming out in 1982 as Philadelphia A 300-Year History in time for the city's tercentenary celebration. Thanks to Weigley's excellent editing and the smoothing out by others the ugly duckling turned into a swan. It is now in its third printing.

Not long after the Barra Foundation's volume began its long trek toward publication, I was asked by the William Penn Foundation to put together and write a popular picture-book history of Philadelphia for the 1976 Bicentennial. It was a rush job. Philadelphia: Portrait of An American City came out in time for Christmas 1975. It is one of those publications that gain on one in retrospect. A printing of 20,000 copies was sold or given away as civic public relations gestures and as prizes by the Foundation. Governor Shapp of Pennsylvania sent a copy to each of the other governors. The book is out of print and now sells at a considerable premium. It may well be that my questionable reputation as a walking encyclopedia of Philadelphia is due to my authorship of that work.

My scholarly and other promotional activities at the Library Company culminated with the 1981 Quarter of a Millennium celebration. When I started out I was told it was arrogant to call it the “Quarter of a Millennium”; it was arrogant to expect to raise $250,000 for it—the Board of the library wanted to settle for half that; and it was arrogant to expect speakers and distinguished guests to come from Great Britain, Ireland, France, Western Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, and other unusual places such as the People's Republic of China, Poland, Portugal, and Peru. We raised the money and the guests and speakers came. My administrative assistant Jean Benoit made the complicated logistics seem simple. I have to boast: it was in every respect fantastic. The superbly illustrated catalogue, the writing of which I shared with Marie Korey, is a handsome, permanent record of the Library Company's development over a period of 250 years. And everyone enjoyed the whole affair.

And so, having run the library patriarchally for some thirty years, I retired at the end of 1984. I do pretty much what I had done before my retirement except that I have no administrative responsibility and I don't have to raise money any more, no small blessing. The Library Company kindly provided me with a desk in a comparatively quiet corner of the second floor where I can conduct my own various research projects. I have been scrupulous about non-interference in the library's operations to the extent that I haven't the faintest idea when things are going badly or well. I don't ask. People do call for information they think only I can supply. I am asked to write an article occasionally and speak from time to time. When I complained to my wife that it seemed queries and commitments were piling up, she merely said, “Aren't you lucky?”

It was partly at my suggestion that a consortium of the area special collections are planning an exhibition and programs for April 1988. Triggered to a degree by the New York Public Library's not-too-impressive “Treasures” show, the idea was to let the world know what Philadelphia's treasures—so long hidden by Quakerly modesty—really were. I thought in terms of “Wow!” items. As curator of the exhibition I consulted with the staff of each of the sixteen libraries to select what would be shown. Then, depending on the quality and style of descriptions submitted by the participants for a catalogue, I rewrote or merely edited them. The proof of that has been corrected, in good time it might be said. The whole project definitively named “Legacies of Genius” is well on its way directed by a committee of four heads of participating libraries.

At the same time as I was working on “Legacies of Genius,” England, as in my youth, became the center of another phase of my career. I was named Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford University for 1985-86. For one with no undergraduate or graduate degrees that was a pinnacle of recognition. The appointment required that I deliver five lectures at Oxford and submit a manuscript of them for publication by the Oxford University Press. I decided to work up what had been a long-time interest of mine, books in Philadelphia, into something substantial that would complement the increasingly popular field of I'histoire du livre. For this I, who had been called “dinosaurus bibliothecarius Wolf” for my adherence in the Library Company to a card catalogue and other antiquated library relics, bought a word-processor. Out of it came The Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books, Bookmen, and Booksellers. In my eccentric way I first wrote the book with the full panoply of footnotes, and then cut the text of each chapter down to an hour-long lecture. How easy that was with a word-processor! I mailed the finished complete manuscript to the Press to anticipate my arrival in May 1987. It was a first; never had a manuscript been handed in before the lectures had been given-and all too often recently, not at all. When I came to the Walton Street bastion of the Oxford University Press after I reached Oxford to ask what the verdict on the book was, I was told that it would not be touched until I had finished my lectures. Furthermore, it would not be touched until that fact had been certified by the Bodley Librarian. David Vaisey was prompt; the certification was duly made. The venerable press moved quickly thereafter. The manuscript was read, recommended, formally approved for publication, copy-edited, and set in type in short order. I returned the proofs at the end of the summer of 1987; the book will appear the following year.

There's always something else to do. Now I shall be free to resume work on a project that has been underway for some time but was shelved when more immediate matters came up. Following my bent of seeking the esoteric, I have begun a book on American embossed bindings from 1825 to 1855. There is confusion been “embossed” bindings and “stamped” bindings, a bit too technical to explain briefly. The former are remarkable examples of what generically can be called Victorian design. Yet, although the book is the most sophisticated artifact of man, the enthusiasts of Victoriana have almost completely ignored them. Embossed bindings, which decorated the gift books or annuals that sat on every middle- class parlor table, have not been studied. There are something over 160 rubbings of different designs in my workbook, obtained from a dozen libraries and two private collections. There are still other libraries to visit. Maybe my book will be published by the time I am eighty. Then there are the books from Franklin's library to put into publishable form. I think I'll be busy for the foreseeable future.

“Legacies of Genius” opened in April 1988; in its six-month run it attracted more than 17,000 visitors, making it the most popular exhibition ever mounted in the Library Company. This was the first program of the sixteen-member Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries. PACSCL continues as the vehicle for various cooperative projects, and it is likely to prove even more effective in the future as the electronic links between the members' catalogues become more sophisticated. “Legacies” and PACSCL were conceived simultaneously one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1985, around Mr. Wolf's dining-room table; both are in every sense legacies of his genius.

Next Mr. Wolf devoted all his energies to finishing his bibliography of American embossed leather bindings, 1825 to 1855. He did manage to visit another dozen libraries in search of new plaques; he would have liked to look further, but gradually declining health restricted his travel. Just after Thanksgiving of 1990 From Gothic Windows to Peacocks came off the presses, to his great satisfaction. At about the same time his long out of print Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City was reissued in an expanded edition.

The reconstruction of Franklin's library, which Mr. Wolf had foreseen as his next publication, was never completed. His card file of known Franklin books was practically ready to be typeset, but he could think only of the hundreds of leads still to be followed up. The fruit of his decades of work was shared with the public in the Library Company's 1990 catalogue and exhibition, “Poor Richard's Books.” Mr. Wolf's last months were occupied with tying up a loose end dating back to his days at Rosenbach's, relating to the doctoring of the Kern-Rothschild copy of Tom Jones. He continued to come into the Library Company every few days until the week before his death.

All Rights Reserved. Rights and Reproductions policies are available on our web site or from the Print and Photograph Department staff.

The Library Company of Philadelphia, Wolf Papers.

Microfilm: None

Gift of Edwin Wolf 2nd 1988-1990.

Processed by Lawrence Epp.

The Wolf Years: The Renascence of the Library Company of Philadelphia 1952-1984, by Marie Elena Korey. Philadelphia: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1984.

Photographs of Edwin Wolf are available in the Print and Photograph Department and the LCP Archives.

Painting of Edwin Wolf on display in the Library Company first floor Cataloging Office.

English.