In an eighth-floor sanctum of the Fine Arts Building at 410 S. Michigan Ave., the bookshelves are bare, the cartons packed and ready to be moved to the auction house and Ralph Newman has time to talk.
Which is nothing new. He has always loved trading stories, has always believed that good conversation is a part of his calling, a key to his success, a big reason why these last six decades have been so satisfying.
“Your customers have got to become your friends,” he says. “You should make them enjoy dealing with you. You’re not selling a necessity like food. So it should be fun.”
Newman, 84, is closing out a long, impressive career as an internationally recognized dealer in books and rare manuscripts relating chiefly to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War but also encompassing the full sweep of American history.
“I used to explain to the people who worked for me that when someone walks into your shop and walks out empty-handed, they’re more disappointed than you are,” he says, describing the distinctive nature of his clientele. “They’ve walked in hoping something wonderful would happen to them, hoping they’d take home a treasure that would give them a lot of pleasure.”
He likes to quote Vincent Starrett, who, speaking for this species of bibliophiles, wrote: “I suggest . . . that when we are collecting books, we are not just collecting books, we are collecting happiness, and if that is not the absolute quested by all of us, I do not know what it is.”
In aiding the pursuit, Newman has found contentment.
Among many other things, he has been a friend and confidant of Carl Sandburg, helping him research his multi-volume Lincoln biography. He has provided books for every president from Herbert Hoover to Bill Clinton (“They all think they have some Lincoln in them,” he says). He has appraised the papers of Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon–with the Nixon association snaring him in the wide net of the Watergate scandal.
He championed the introduction of Disney’s automated Lincoln (15 facial expressions, 29 body movements) as the featured attraction of the Illinois exhibit at the 1964-65 World’s Fair, choosing excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches and the person (character actor Royal Dano) who would record them for the 10-minute program, the hit of the fair (“I escorted Pope Paul VI and sat next to him; he stayed for two shows,” he says).
He co-founded the Civil War Round Tables, dining-and-discussion groups that focus on the great, bloody turning point in American history and whose total chapters throughout the world now exceed 300 (“We have six in Australia; I should have franchised them”). He was board president of the Chicago Public Library for more than a decade in the ’60s and ’70s (“We made sure you don’t have to walk more than a mile in Chicago to find a branch library”).
He is the subject of a poem by the head of the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress that begins, “Servant, student, seeker, scholar” and concludes, “Preceptor of the past for the enlightenment of the present.” He has received seven honorary degrees, including one from a university in Japan. He has bought and sold letters written by everyone from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Davy Crockett and Jesse James. He acquired, among numerous other prizes, a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, which he sold for $1.6 million, and the first two printings of the Constitution, which went for $2.5 million.
He has been the guest of Edward R. Murrow on Murrow’s “Person to Person” in the ’50s and of Brian Lamb on a CSPAN special about the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the ’90s.
Indeed, if our lives, as some say, are essentially a process of self-invention, top marks would seem in order for Ralph Geoffrey Newman.
Through passion, study and brains, he would transform himself into a respected historian, the author and editor of some 20 books, the more prominent of which are “Lincoln for the Ages” (1959) and “The American Iliad” (1947), a Civil War history.
Date with destiny
It’s quite a story, this metamorphosis of Sparky Newman, which starts with a moment in late 1932, when he has just turned 21.
He is two years out of Northwestern University, which he left after only one term to play minor league baseball, but an injury in his second season ended his dream of the majors.
And now he isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life. He knows he doesn’t want to work in a bank. Even though it’s the depth of the Depression, he has just quit his job as a teller. Too boring.
Then one day as he’s walking on North Clark Street near the Newberry Library, he notices a bookstore that’s going out of business.
The door’s locked and the windows papered over. He knocks, and a son of the owner, who has recently died, says he can look around if he’s interested.
It’s a huge place–six floors–that trades in used and antiquarian books. He takes his time, checks the inventory, comes up with 160,000 volumes. The owner’s son says $10,000, and it’s all his. (The equivalent in today’s dollars is $125,000.)
He does some fast figuring. That’s 6 cents a book, an incredible bargain. He says it’s a deal, even though he has only $15 in his pocket and no big family stake to draw on, his father being the owner of a small cigar store.
He finds the money, of course, even if it’s a usurious, ex officio, short-term loan for $15,000 at 100 percent interest from some young bankers he’d worked for.
He reopens the store with a sale: “75 Percent Off Everything!” The response is overwhelming. Other booksellers, who think he’s naive or nuts, are filling autos, taxis, trucks, everything but wheelbarrows with his wares. He is up all night marking books with prices he drastically reduces in the morning.
A fortuitous choice
The debt is paid in four months. A short time later, Newman decides that in an age of specialists–he’s struck by this trend among doctors and lawyers–he’d be wise to follow suit.
He chooses Abraham Lincoln as his specialty. “People think of Lincoln as someone on their own level, someone they could feel comfortable with,” he says. “He embodies the virtues that people most revere–his rise from poverty, his self-education, his belief in freedom.”
The timing of Newman’s embrace of the Civil War, which dovetailed naturally with Lincoln lore, was also fortuitous.
“There was always an interest, but the market boomed in the ’30s and ’40s,” he says. “There was `Gone With the Wind’ in 1936, and the movie three years later, and you had Sandburg’s books on Lincoln (six volumes, 1926-39) and (Douglas Southall) Freeman’s books on Lee (1934-35) and his lieutenants (1942-44).”
Still, it was the rewards from Newman’s customers-are-friends policy that produced the attention he needed in order to thrive.
He had soon moved his Home of Books–“A terrible name,” he complains–from the Near North Side to the Loop, where some of the regulars were Sandburg and his fellow reporters and editors from the Chicago Daily News, whose newsroom was nearby.
“Sandburg and (managing editor) Lloyd Lewis had encouraged me to concentrate on Lincoln and the Civil War, and I think they were conscience-stricken that I was just scraping by,” Newman says. “So they formed what I call the world’s greatest free advertising agency. They asked all their magazine and wire-service friends to write stories about me.”
Sandburg got the Saturday Evening Post to do “The Book Shop Everybody Runs,” and Lewis talked Collier’s into “Where Abraham Lincoln Gets His Mail.” Reader’s Digest commissioned a piece, and the Associated Press and United Press turned out lengthy features.
In 1940, he got smart enough to change the name of the business to the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, and after a succession of sites in the Loop, he bought a graystone at 18 E. Chestnut St., which was the shop’s home from 1967 to ’84, when he sold the business to an associate. (It’s now at 357 W. Chicago Ave.)
Trouble with a president
A dark period came in 1975, when Newman was found guilty by a jury and fined $10,000 for his part in Nixon’s fraudulent claim of a 1969 income tax deduction for pre-presidential papers donated to the federal government. Newman, who appraised the papers, had been recommended to Nixon by Lyndon Johnson.
In 1969, a federal law was enacted that sharply limited deductions for such papers after July of that year. Nixon’s tax attorney was charged with back-dating the time of the donation to make the deduction lawful, and Newman was accused of signing an affidavit that supported the fraud.
“When the President’s attorney tells you he made a gift of these papers on a certain date, you don’t ask questions,” Newman says.
The prosecution of Nixon’s attorney was thrown out by a California court, and Nixon was pardoned by President Gerald Ford. Newman was the only person tried in the case.
“I look back and find it hard to believe it happened,” Newman says. “I found I had a lot of friends I didn’t know I had. I received many, many letters of support. A petition was signed on my behalf by 100 leading historians. All the groups in which I was an officer refused my resignation.
“(Washington attorney) Edward Bennett Williams charged me only expenses for the lawyers he sent to Chicago to defend me. Afterward, I told him, `I guess my career is over.’ He said, `Ralph, you’re now the best known appraiser in the world. Your business will double.’
“He was wrong. It tripled.”
Since 1984, Newman’s Ralph Newman Co. has concentrated on appraisals and securing rare books and manuscripts for collectors, most recently from the Fine Arts Building and a small office in the John Hancock Center.
Newman’s timing is again impeccable; today seems a perfect time for retirement. “Lincoln manuscripts have virtually disappeared,” he says. “We used to always have 50 on hand. Now we have two. And the rare Lincoln books are becoming very, very hard to find.”
In September, Newman will offer some 1,000 items to the public at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers. “This is probably as big a collection in Lincoln and Civil War materials that’s privately owned by a business as you will ever see,” he says. “It’s mostly books, but there are some important Lincoln busts, and several hundred volumes of Limited Edition Classics.”
In some ways, however, little will change. “I’ve read so much about Lincoln and written so much and traveled to the places that are close to him that I feel he is with me all the time and always will be. I have a great affection for him.”
He pauses. “It would have been great to know him.”
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The Newman auction at Hindman galleries, 215 W. Ohio St., is at 6 p.m. on Sept. 18 and 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. on Sept. 19. Items may be viewed from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sept. 14-16-17.
