When Ralph Newman died on July 23 at age 86, Chicago lost one of its true originals. The words used to describe him in his obituary are accurate–“bookseller,” “autograph dealer,” “author,” “Lincoln scholar”–but they don’t begin to tell us what he was like.
Ralph Newman was the last of a dying and now extinct breed of legendary bookmen who dominated their trade. When he founded the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop nearly 60 years ago, Ralph made a greater contribution to the preservation of American history than an army of PhDs. The bookshop became a touchstone that inspired several generations of collectors, scholars and writers. The shop was like a club whose charter members included Carl Sandburg, poet and Lincoln biographer; Douglas Southall Freeman, author of “Lee’s Lieutenants” and “George Washington”; and legendary historian John Hope Franklin, author of “From Slavery to Freedom” and board chairman of President Clinton’s Initiative on Race. There were dozens more.
After several changes of location in the Loop, the shop found its long-term home in 1948 in a beautiful brownstone at 18 E. Chestnut St. The fireplace, the floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves with sliding glass doors, the photos and engravings and the comfortable furniture gave the shop the lived-in look of a private library. That ambience occasionally disoriented a first-time visitor who would hesitate at the threshold, look around nervously and then apologize for mistakenly intruding on someone’s private home.
In the course of his long career, Ralph Newman bought, sold or appraised some of the great documents in American history. A short list can only suggest the array and quantity of the material that passed through his hands: the first printings of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution; George Washington’s own copy of the Federalist Papers; Gen. Grant’s letter announcing the surrender of Lee, along with the inkwell used at Appomattox; Lee’s farewell letter to the Army of Northern Virginia; and thousands of Abraham Lincoln autographs and manuscripts, including the best letter of them all, in which Lincoln tells a young girl whose father was killed in the Civil War that “in this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all.”
Although Ralph sold a multitude of rare books, documents and manuscripts, he never behaved like a salesman hawking goods. He spurned the “hard sell” and that, to an outsider, made his success appear effortless. But I learned otherwise as an employee of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in the early 1980s. Ralph was a voracious and aggressive competitor when acquiring material. He pursued every lead, developed vast networks of contacts with descendants of people who knew Lincoln. He was almost unstoppable at public auctions; what he wanted he usually got. He hated to disappoint a customer. His advice on selling was terse and revealed an astute understanding of the collector’s psychology: “Remember this. The customer is always more disappointed than you are when he leaves the shop empty-handed. He was counting on you to sell him something he loved, and you failed.”
Ralph believed is collecting books and manuscripts for the love of them, and not as investments. He thought little of pushy dealers who tout their wares as “investment-grade collectibles.” He was disgusted when a dealer cut up a Lincoln manuscript into two or three word fragments and then hawked the remains of this dismemberment in fancy frames at high prices.
To his credit, Ralph Newman loved the stories behind manuscripts regardless of the worth of the manuscripts. If a book or document resonated with a wonderful story, then Ralph Newman wanted to tell you about it. If you loved history, he would give you his time whether you were Malcolm Forbes or an impecunious high school student. I was a teenager the first time I met Ralph, and when I went to his office, he showed me Lincoln letters and other documents worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, even though he knew that I couldn’t afford a one. Ralph’s accompanying stories were free.
Ralph was a great raconteur. You always knew you were in for a good one when he leaned back in his chair and began “that reminds me of the time that. . .” or “I loved Carl Sandburg, but his one fatal weakness was. . .” or “Did I ever tell you about the time I dated Al Capone’s brother’s girlfriend?” or “Although the Kennedys mistreated Lyndon Johnson, few people realize how much Jackie liked him. As LBJ once told me. . . .”
His best stories were usually about politics. Ralph loved the fray. He was instrumental in securing the parole of Nathan Leopold of Leopold and Loeb infamy. He bluffed Robert Moses, New York planner and strongman, into paying for much of the cost of the Illinois exhibit at the New York World’s Fair. He befriended Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas. He maintained a correspondence with Harry Truman. But his favorite was Lyndon Johnson. Ralph worked in the White House for LBJ on special projects and also appraised the president’s papers. He admired LBJ’ s complex blend of idealism and ruthlessness, of honor and the exercise of raw political power. Ralph once said, “Saints don’t get to be president. Not even Lincoln.”
I remember calling Ralph when I was at the Department of Justice to find a Lincoln quotation. I knew Lincoln said it, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. As usual, Ralph recited the line from memory. Then the politician in Ralph spoke up: “By the way, is there a job for you in this?” When I explained that I didn’t know, but that the president had nominated the very judge for whom I had recently completed a clerkship, Ralph chuckled and said, “You’re learning.”
It is both sad and ironic that a man so passionate about history never got around to writing his own. He took a few stabs at it. Several years ago he prepared a chronology of his life as a way of getting started, but nothing came of it. Last year he handed me a few typed pages but complained that he couldn’t get inspired sitting in front of a keyboard. I suggested recording his memories on tape. There would always be time for that, he implied; later. Even after he became ill last fall, he continued to look ahead. He wanted to return to Washington, D.C., to visit old friends and customers. He was contemplating the purchase of Lincoln’s 1862 “Letter to Fanny McCullough.” With all these plans, it seemed that writing his memoirs was a last act that he wanted to postpone. As he said once in an interview, “How can I sit back and write about my memories when there is still so much to be done?”
