In 1707, the correspondent began his letter with an elaborate salutation in French: “Monsieur Mon Cousin,” he wrote, then explaining to the recipient, in effusive and flattering terms, that a small gift was en route.
He ended the note with a simple signature in his native Cyrillic script: “Peter.”
As in Peter I, Peter the Great, Peter the Tsar, Peter the Emperor, the polymath genius who by military and diplomatic turns, both brilliant and cruel, all but founded modern Russia. His hand, his attention, his touch all right there in a few strokes of a pen nib. He’s not the great man of history here; just Peter, signing off. You can almost hear the scratch of the pen across the parchment.
Three centuries later, this talisman from another time rests on a table in the Manuscript Division reading room, a stunning autograph in the John Davis Batchelder Collection, a litany of more than 1,800 signatures from bold-faced names who helped define Western politics, painting, philosophy, science, music and culture from the Renaissance to the mid-20th century.
Napoleon, Beethoven, Debussy, Rodin, Voltaire! Henry VIII, Catherine II (aka Catherine the Great), Louis XIV (aka The Sun King), King Frederick II of Prussia (aka Frederick the Great) José de San Martìn! Pope Pius VII, Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Orville Wright, Albert Einstein and an array of U.S. Founding Fathers: Washington, Jefferson, Adams — it’s a dizzying list, all in one green leather-bound volume after another.
Then writers, poets and playwrights such as Goethe, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Paul Laurence Dunbar (who worked at the Library!), Sinclair Lewis and Eugene O’Neill, to name a few. There’s John D. Rockefeller Jr., the oil scion and philanthropist; Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing; the actors Sarah Bernhardt, John Barrymore, Mary Pickford, Anna May Wong, dozens of opera stars … you begin to get the idea.
Or perhaps not quite.
Batchelder, who died in 1958 at the age of 86, also had exquisite taste as an antiquarian collector. This side of his work includes more than 1,500 books, manuscripts, prints and other items that captured significant creations of Western culture. Examples: The first printed Greek editions of Aristotle, Sophocles and other ancient Greek notables; parts of the Gutenberg Bible; 35 volumes of incunabula, books printed during the first decades of printing up to 1500; and, quaintly, a lock of Beethoven’s hair.
The collection, donated to the Library in 1930s, is now spread over five divisions: Rare Book and Special Collections, Manuscript, Prints and Photographs, Music and Asian. The art of collecting autographs is as old as Western civilization itself, but Batchelder’s is one for the ages.
“The genius of the autograph collector is that they’re not necessarily after the great correspondence of history, but often just the signature itself on ordinary things,” says Jane Cross, an archivist in the Music Division who has worked with the Batchelder collection. “They often capture the human aspect of famous people that would have been lost otherwise.”
She loves that the Library’s Beethoven signature is on a note to a delivery boy — the great composer just handling a household chore, getting through another day.
And here’s the editor of a small New York literary magazine, trying to drum up subscribers for his new publication in November of 1845. This tedious-but-essential one-pager begins with him complimenting the patron for subscribing to one of his previous efforts and hoping he’ll do so again:
“I venture now frankly to solicit your subscription and influence for ‘The Broadway Journal,’ of which I send you a specimen number.”
He then signs off with “Yr. Mo. Ob. St.” (Your most obedient servant), Edgar A. Poe.”
It’s a quotidian task that, these days, would be assigned to an intern, but I confess that the letter gave me goosebumps. The paper is so ordinary, the penmanship so careful, the name so neatly underlined that the sincerity (and maybe the quiet desperation) is palpable some 180 years later.
As Cross says, it’s just so relatable. The iconic Poe is not in the fever dream of imagination here, writing “The Raven” (he’d done that earlier in the year), or plumbing the depths of his psyche for “The Tell-Tale Heart.” No, you can reach out and touch him, the paper that was in his hand is right here before you. The man writing this please-buy-my-magazine note is a regular guy, a thirty-something editor with an ill wife at home, knocking off an item on the to-do list.
Time remembers Poe, and many of the marquee names in Batchelder’s collection, but most people today are not familiar with the short but brilliant life of Adelaide Neilson, a star of the Victorian-era stage.
She was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1848, to an unwed mother and grew up in bone-jarring poverty. Still, she made her way to London and, by dint of hard work, talent and beauty, evolved into the reigning actress of the British stage. She came to the U.S. in 1872, became a star all over again, lived extravagantly and divorced her husband amid scandal.
She apparently had quite the time in Boston, even in the dead of winter. On Feb. 21 (she didn’t list a year), she signed the back of a photo with an exuberant: “I like this place and willingly could waste my time in it!”
Alas, the good times did not last. Just a few years later, in 1880, she suffered an internal hemorrhage while horseback riding in Paris and died immediately. She was 32.
Ironically, we know more about most of the people who are in Batchelder’s collection than the man himself.
Born in 1872 in Faribault, Minnesota (population of about 3,000 at the time), he was something of an enigma. He was the son of a prominent attorney and was educated at the University of Vermont, then Johns Hopkins University, then at some the finest universities of Europe, including the Sorbonne and Oxford. He returned to the U.S., taught briefly, settled in New York City and Washington, D.C., and devoted himself to full-time collecting shortly before turning 40.
He never married, traveled widely and apparently wrote little about his life’s work.
“He was not a flashy collector or person at all,” said Michael North, head of the Reference and Reader Services Section, who developed the Library’s guide to the collection. “I could find virtually no references to him in newspapers except when he donated some of his major pieces … I couldn’t find a photograph of him until I delved into the student yearbooks of the University of Vermont during his time there.”
In the 1930s, his donations to the Library were so profound that he was given an office on the premises for a time. He presented an exhibition of 400 items in 1936 but gave no backstory about himself or why he devoted his life to the project: “… (the catalog) does not contain a preface by Batchelder to inform us about how he chose in the items in his collection or how he went about gathering them,” the Library notes.
After he died in 1958, his body was returned to Faribault and buried in the family plot. His headstone only rises a few inches above the dirt, doesn’t spell out his middle name and includes only the years of his birth and death.
His legacy, though — the signatures and stories of people who influenced human society over hundreds of years — is preserved under his name at the world’s largest library.
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Comments
Very interesting, please keep researching and writing. Thank you.