Printer, Publisher, Peddler:
The Business of the Jewish Book

III. Peddler

The emergence of such a large market created new kinds of business for the Judaica book trade as a whole. Marketing books, through advertising, advanced subscriptions, through the mail, by cart, and on foot by peddlers and door-to-door salesmen, increased the circulation of books and periodicals. Rare books became sought after luxury goods and signs of refinement, in addition to sources of knowledge and information. Auction houses served as one of the means by which precious items, and entire libraries, would change hands. Book dealers became experts in their own right, not only of the market for such books and the prices people were willing to pay, but of the books themselves.

Bookseller catalogs, often replete with valuable descriptions explaining significance, condition, rarity, and price helped the novice and the expert alike navigate the specialized world of the Judaica book trade. Some booksellers took pride in producing catalogs with beautiful graphic designs. These sales catalogs did not merely list books for sale, but could be viewed as collector’s items in themselves. They combined scholarly descriptions of Judaica with a new-found aesthetic appreciation for the art as well as for the business of the Jewish book trade.

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Sh. Y. Abramovitsh
Mendele Mokher Sefarim : Dos Mendele-bukh: briv un oytobiografishe notitsen [“Mendele the Bookseller” The Mendele Book: Letters and Autobiographical Sketches …]
New York: Ikuf, 1959.

Perhaps no literary figure came to occupy a more familiar place in the imagination of Ashkenazic Jewry in the second half of the 19th century then Mendele Mokher Sefarim or Mendele the Bookpeddler. Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, who is known by the name of his invented character Mendele, is considered one of the founders of modern Yiddish literature. The critic Dan Miron emphasizes that Mendele was not a pseudonym and not only a system of literary devices. The traveling bookpeddler symbolized the principle of freedom of the “insider-outsider” who was able to come and go as he pleased and for whom “traveling is a way of life.” The reality of life for itinerant peddlers however was far different. Surviving memoirs describe a life of loneliness, fear and uncertainty filled with obstacles and travails as peddlers moved from town to town trying to eke out a living.

[Menasseh ben Israel and Samuel Abravanel Soerio]
Mi-bet-defuso shel Menasheh ben Yi´sra'el : reshimah `im mavo.
Facsmile reprint, with introduction by Abraham Yaari
(Jerusalem : [s.n.], [1946 or 1947])

Purchased at the Kestenbaum and Company Auction, February 8, 2005.

This extremely scarce “Catalogo” of Jewish religious and Spanish language editions, reprinted in bibliophilic facsimile, is the earliest extant Judaica bookseller’s catalog. Notably, it was printed in Roman rather than Hebrew letters by the printing house of Menasseh ben Israel and is designed to appeal to Iberian Conversos who returned to Judaism. The prices are given in Dutch florins (the name of the currency officially changed to guilders after 1816).

Almanacco Orientale Per l’Anno 1762
Turin: Stamperia Orientale, 1762.

Purchased at the Kestenbaum Auction, April 5, 2005 , thanks to a generous gift from Annette B. Freund.

Almanacs were a popular and necessary guide for merchants traveling between different countries. This particular one, published in Turin by the “Oriental Press” is mainly intended for the use of Jewish traders moving back and forth between the Ottoman empire and Catholic Italy. The entire Jewish calendar cycle is provided along with Muslim holidays and the dates of the “fiere principali” or principal market fairs in Christian Europe and especially in Italy.

Jewish Encyclopedia Book Dummy.
From the Michael Zinman Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library

American booksellers famously employed “book dummies,” or “canvass books” to attract advance subscriptions to proposed publications. Colorful sample pages meant to appeal to the potential reader/subscriber would highlight the contents, using multiple fonts, boldface, strategic capitalization, and color illustrations. The Jewish Encyclopedia, the first ever made in the English-language, was “prepared by more than Six Hundred Scholars and Specialists from All Parts of the World.” Funk and Wagnalls Company, which took on the $750,000 cost to produce this twelve volume edition, emphasizes its “150,000 subjects,” “2,500 illustrations, Many of them full-page plates in color.”

J. L. Joachimsthal, J. L. (Firm, Amsterdam ).
Reshimat sefarim = Catalog der reichhaltigen Sammlungen hebräischer und jüdischer Bücher, Handschriften :... nachgelassen von Meijer Lehren, Akiba Lehren und Moses de Lima.
Amsterdam : [s.n.], [1899]

Purchased at the Kestenbaum and Company Auction, April 5, 2005 through a generous gift from the Ruth and Raymond Brenner and the Brenner Family Fund for Jewish Studies in honor of Gregory Brenner, W’, 1999; Adam Brenner, W’, 2001; Jason Brenner, W’, 2005.

This catalog, produced by the Joachimsthal auction house, documents the extraordinary two-week sale of the Lehren/De Lima banking families’ Hebraica collections of 4,288 books. The preparation of such a catalog is known to have taken more than a year. This copy features handwritten notes on interleaved sheets of paper recording the hammer-prices (i.e., when the auctioneer’s hammer ends the bidding) and the names of the successful bidders.

Sefer Sha’ar ha-Rahamim
Livorno : Shelomoh Belforte ve-havero 5695 [1934 or 1935].

Gift of Jack Lunzer, Custodian of the Valmadonna Library Trust.

This remarkable prayer book, printed and distributed by the Belforte Press of Livorno Italy , contains the ownership stamp of the Musleah family of Calcutta. The Belforte press was the major supplier of prayer books to the Jewish communities of North Africa , the Levant and India.

“Bookseller Catalogs”

Purchased from Dan Wyman, Dan Wyman Books, June 2005.

This sample belongs to a collection of pre-WWII bookseller catalog recently sold to Penn by Dan Wyman Books, located in Springfield , Massachusetts. The last item in this group is the Kestenbaum and Company Auction Catalog of the Library of the late Rabbi and Professor Abraham J. Karp, which is displayed with its auction “paddle” used for bidding. The Penn Library received a unique donation from Dr. Deborah Karp of her husband’s collection of the bookseller catalogs which he used to build his own magnificent collection.

Ex Libris of Oscar Polges.

Ch. Eggimann, with Christian Hebraic typography and woodcut.

S. Gewurz, Katalog with the woodcut of Jacob dreaming while the angels ascend and descend the ladder.

J. Kaufmann, with the orange-colored type, featuring the Usque printers mark (original featured above).

"Alte Judaica," of Taeuber and Weil, featuring a hooded man, seated on a bench reading a book on a reading stand.

Lipschuetz' PhiloBiblon, with the small cover illustration of a man reading, with his initials "ML”.

Louis Lamm catalog of the "Werke von und Uber Moses Moses Maimonides," with an imagined picture of him and a facsimile of his signature.

Maggs Bros. cover.

Kestenbaum & Company. Auctioneers of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Fine Art.
Auction Catalog of The Library of the Late Professor Abraham J. Karp “Hampstead Sale” Number Twenty Eight. Auction held on Tuesday, 5th April 2005 at 3:00 pm precisely.
New York : Kestenbaum and Company, 2005. Gift of Kestenbaum and Company.