Collector's Additions
Bibliophile James Wilson scores big with a rare New Orleans photo book
“This was the call every collector hopes for,” said James Wilson.
Wilson was at his desk at LSU Press in Baton Rouge when his cell phone rang last February. The caller was his friend Russell Desmond, owner of Arcadian Books in New Orleans.
“Russell called to tell me about an estate sale of the library of Dr. Milburn Calhoun,” said Wilson. “Within a few days four more people called or texted me about it.”
Wilson, marketing and sales manager of the Press, was previously associate director of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press. Besides dealing with books in his professional life, he has assembled an impressive collection of Louisiana books and ephemera in his collecting career, which dates back to his college days.
He has several stars in his collection: Jewell’s Crescent City Illustrated by Edwin Jewell, which took him ten years to find; a three-volume first printing (1758) of the Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz history of Louisiana in French; the first Louisiana civil code, published in 1825; Proofs of the Corruption of Gen. James Wilkinson and His Connexion with Aaron Burr, from 1809; and My Idyll by Leona Queyrouze Barel, printed in Japan in an edition of 250 copies.
When Wilson learned of the Calhoun sale, he made plans to attend all three days. “I had heard rumors for years about how great his collection was,” he said. “Also, I knew that he had had the resources, the money, to buy anything that he wanted.”
Calhoun (1930–2012), a physician who also owned Pelican Publishing Company and the bookstore Bayou Books, both based in Gretna, was a longtime collector of items related to Louisiana history. The sale was held in late February at his house in English Turn, a gated community in Algiers, Louisiana.
On Thursday, February 21, Wilson drove to New Orleans to meet Desmond. They had planned to go to the sale early Friday morning, but Wilson decided they stood a better chance of being first in the door if they spent the night on site.
“I decided that on the drive to New Orleans,” he said in a recent interview. “I hit Rouse’s [supermarket] on the way to get Russell and grabbed a bag of bagels. Russell brought a flask of bourbon, so we had all of the essentials.”
Arriving about 10:30 pm, “we spent the night in the car in a parking lot outside the gates of the community,” said Wilson.
Between swatting at mosquitoes and sipping from the flask, they got little sleep. At 4:30 am, there were already about fifty people queuing up for numbers, which are typically handed out at sales to ensure an orderly event.
At 6 am they were handed cards with numbers 2 and 3, meaning they would be the second and third buyers admitted to the house.
While they waited for the doors to open, they stood on the front porch and peered in the windows at Calhoun’s library.
“He had a two-story library with a circular staircase in the middle,” said Wilson. “It was modeled after the staircase in the movie My Fair Lady.
“We could see into the library where the five-dollar books were. There were a few good books visible from the window, so I thought maybe I should go there quickly before hitting the collectibles room. Then they told us that only six people would be allowed into the collectibles room at a time. I knew I had to go straight there and not risk being left out of the first six.”
When the doors opened at 9 am, Wilson went immediately to the “rare book room” on the second floor.
“It was hot,” he said. “An upstairs room getting hit by direct sunlight. After about ten minutes I was drenched in sweat.
“The pamphlets were in boxes on a separate table. I browsed the main book tables quickly and then went to work on the table with the pamphlets, which is where I spent most of my time.
“I was looking for anything published pre-1900 in New Orleans,” he said. “After an hour I had a stack several feet high and priced at several thousand dollars. I had decided before that I’d max out my credit card. I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“What was surprising was the breadth of the items,” said Wilson. “A pamphlet on pauperism and destitution in New Orleans; that was rare. I found a booklet on [the Mardi Gras Krewe of] Comus that is pretty rare; an 1885 pamphlet about an 1884 riot in New Iberia; pamphlets on dueling and on cremation; a first edition of Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire.”
The latter, by Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes (1849–1928), a civil-rights activist and writer, was later translated into English as Our People and Our History. It describes the contribution of Creoles to Louisiana history. Published in Quebec in 1911, it was the first such book written in French by a member of the Louisiana Creole community.
“I’d seen it in libraries but never for sale,” said Wilson, who also found a first edition of The Negro in Louisiana by Charles Barthelemy Roussève, published by Xavier University Press in 1937. “The Roussève is even rarer. Both of those were high on my list.”
After visiting all the other tables in the room, Wilson moved to a table of oversized books.
He picked up one titled Photographic Album of the City of New Orleans, Comprising the Principal Business Houses and Views of the City. With photographs by Edward T. Adams, the book was published in 1887.
“I really debated if I wanted to spend [a few hundred dollars] on it,” said Wilson. “But I quickly said ‘screw it’ and handed it to the lady who was holding my stack of books.”
Desmond, meanwhile, was going through the five-dollar books, quickly selecting several hundred titles.
By noon, both men were exhausted. They retrieved bankers boxes from Wilson’s car, loaded the books into them, then loaded the boxes into Wilson’s SUV.
“We couldn’t have fit one more book in that car, it was so packed,” said Desmond.
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After dropping Desmond at his French Quarter bookstore, Wilson hauled his six boxes of books up to the second-story condo in the Quarter where he was staying with his son Caleb.
He called his friend John Stinson, an expert in rare books, and told him about his finds.
After going over his purchases and sending photos to Stinson by email, Wilson eventually realized that the find of the day was the photographic album of 1887.
“I honestly had forgotten all about that book,” he said. “It just didn’t stick out in my mind as a treasure. Even when Stinson asked me if I got anything good, I didn’t mention it. It wasn’t until I was going through each box later that afternoon that I rediscovered it and thought, ‘Wait, this could really be something good.’
“It was meant to be a high-end trade directory or guide to the commercial businesses in the city. Did the businesses included finance it? My guess would be probably so.”
Measuring 11 x 9 inches, the book contained fifty cyanotype, or blue-tinted, photographs with an elaborate typographic advertisement on the opposite leaf. Its original cloth cover with gilt titles was loose but intact.
Among the businesses depicted in the book are the New Orleans Times-Democrat and the New Orleans Picayune newspapers. (The two papers would later merge into the Times-Picayune, which was published for more than a century until it was sold and dismantled last month.)
“I remembered that John Lawrence of the Historic New Orleans Collection had told me about the photo book a couple of years ago,” said Wilson. “He told me, ‘This is the Holy Grail.’
“Stinson said it was valuable, but five thousand dollars was the most I’d have thought. If someone had offered me that, I’d have sold it. We did an online search, so I knew there were only four copies in libraries.”
Stinson contacted a dealer in Ohio who specializes in rare and out-of-print photographic literature. The dealer told him a copy of the same book had sold for $40,000 in 2006.
“Very quickly we realized it was worth a lot,” said Wilson, who has since made a purchase agreement to sell the book to “a high-end institution on the East Coast” for $25,000.
Another valuable find was a copy of a novel called The Wedge, written by newspaper columnist Hermann Deutsch in 1935, with illustrations by sculptor and artist Enrique Alferez.
Alferez had penciled an inscription on the flyleaf and had also made three drawings on the endpapers, including both male and female nudes.
“The book by itself is worth about twenty-five dollars,” said Stinson, “but with the Alfrerez drawings it’s probably worth about $750.”
“One of these items would have been a great find, but there were hundreds of them.” —James Wilson
Wilson asked Stinson to accompany him to the second day of the sale. This time, he focused on pamphlets. At one point, Stinson handed him a sheet of paper measuring five by nine inches. “It was a broadside printed in Clinton, Louisiana, in 1864, recruiting soldiers to the Confederate army,” said Wilson.
Wilson hauled two more boxes back to the condo. Stinson put him in touch with Wes Cowan in Cincinnati, an internationally recognized expert in historic Americana, who told him the enrollment document is probably worth two to three thousand dollars. Wilson sent the broadside to Cowan for an auction to be held June 21.
He also sent Cowan a pamphlet titled Opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the case of Ex Parte John Merryman Applying for a writ of Habeas Corpus, published in New Orleans in 1861. It too will be in the June auction, estimated to sell for two to three thousand.
Wilson went back to the sale alone on Sunday, the final day. “This was the first chance I had to go through the five-dollar stuff, which was now reduced to two dollars,” he said. “I found several good items there, but one great book—an 1853 report on yellow fever in New Orleans that has a very rare map. The book with the map is worth about five hundred dollars. I also got a rare New Orleans fire department book that they found on that last day—for three hundred dollars, no discount.”
At his Lafayette house, most of the books are still in boxes. “I haven’t opened up ninety percent of the stuff I bought,” he said.
“Ninety percent of what I bought I’m keeping for my own collection,” he said. “Anything printed in New Orleans prior to the Civil War I will probably never sell. The [Calhoun sale] let me boost my collection into the stratosphere and pay for it with one sale.
“One of these items would have been a great find, but there were hundreds of them.”
Having spent about $12,500 on his purchases, Wilson’s first order of business was to make back some of the money he had spent. That goal will be easily met with the sale of the New Orleans photo book.
“The story of this one book should go down in Louisiana rare-book lore,” said Wilson. “This was definitely a needle in a haystack.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.