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Letters to a New Zealand Collector

‘Cordially yours, Edward Friehold’: Letters to a New Zealand Collectore g friehold 1928

From Helen Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road to Joel Silver’s Dr Rosenbach and Mr Lilly, the correspondence between collectors and members of the antiquarian book trade offers a rich resource for research and publication. One need only scan the pages of appendix five of Out of Print and Into Profit to get a rough idea of the number of monograph memoirs based on letters and other archival sources, not counting of course reminiscences, stories and histories published as articles in journals and periodicals.[i]

What follows stems from the discovery of a clutch of letters between the London book dealer Edward George Friehold and the New Zealand book collector Alfred Hamish Reed. The letters were uncovered among some miscellaneous papers once belonging to Reed and now held by the Heritage Collections of the Dunedin City Library. As little archival evidence pertaining to Friehold has surfaced, this article provides some details on his life and business based upon this correspondence.

 

Beginnings

E. G. Friehold was born in Kensington, London, in March 1868, the second son of Ferdinand (ca. 1833–1915) and his wife Mary Ann (née Smith). His father, who emigrated from Lübeck, Germany, sometime before his marriage to Mary Ann in 1864, did not sell books specifically, but is recorded on Edward’s birth certificate as a ‘general dealer’. This line of work, however, seems to have proved unprofitable, for Ferdinand is afterwards listed as being employed as a grocer. Neither of Edward’s brothers was involved in the book trade. The youngest, George Charles, died at the age of twenty-four in early 1895. The eldest brother, Adolph, followed in his father’s footsteps as a grocer, and seems to have later settled in Shoreditch.

 

Friehold’s New Zealand client, Alfred Hamish Reed, presumably his only Antipodean customer, was born about eighty kilometres to the west of Shoreditch, in the industrial town of Hayes, in 1875. He, like Friehold, was a middle son, born to James Reed, manager of a brickfield, and Elizabeth (née Wild). When the brickfield business failed, the Reeds immigrated to New Zealand in 1887 and established themselves on the North Island. After being forced to leave school due to a debt, Reed spent years of back-breaking labour digging up kauri tree resin as a teenager before finding employment with the New Zealand Typewriter Company. In 1897 he was sent to open a branch in Dunedin. When the other branches closed, Reed bought the Dunedin office and turned it into a Sunday school supply business run by himself and his wife, Isabel. This venture later gave way to book publishing and the establishment of the Reed firm, which became what the poet and co-founder of the Caxton Press (Christchurch) Denis Glover called ‘the best bloody publisher in New Zealand’.[ii]

 

Though an avid reader all his life, Reed did not begin collecting books until 1907, his thirty-second year, when financial stability allowed for such an enjoyable pastime. Unlike his elder brother Frank, who amassed one of the finest collections of works by and about Alexandre Dumas outside of France[iii], A. H. Reed’s collecting interests ranged from the Bible in English and medieval manuscripts, to the works of Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson. He also collected association books and autograph letters, the latter purchased primarily from Bernard Halliday, Maggs, and Friehold.

 

‘40 Years with Bull & Auvache’

The earliest letter between Friehold and Reed held by the library is dated 4 March 1925. ‘I am very pleased’, wrote Friehold, ‘to receive an order from you – my first one from New Zealand [Friehold’s emphasis]’. Friehold stated his credentials on his letterhead: ’40 years with BULL & AUVACHE, of Bloomsbury, London’. Unfortunately, exactly what Reed first purchased from Friehold remains unknown. The letter, however, did arrive at a time when Reed’s medieval manuscript collection was in its infancy, and something in Friehold’s catalogue caught his eye. ‘The 15th cent manuscript is still in stock’, continued Friehold. ‘The initials are in gold and colours – and it is really not a bad specimen for the price £12-0-0 (less 10% to you)’.

 

Though none of the correspondence that immediately followed hinted at Reed purchasing the manuscript, the sale is referenced in a letter dated 8 April 1929. Commenting on the prices being realised for manuscript material, Friehold wrote that ‘single leaves of early MS with fine miniatures bring long prices. Even the manuscript you bought from me would probably bring as much again at Sotheby’s’.[iv] Despite not being described beyond having initials ‘in gold and colours’, this manuscript must be the Book of Hours [use of Utrecht], written in Cologne and bound in eighteenth-century calf, donated by Reed to Trinity Methodist College, Auckland, and held by St John’s Theological College (also in Auckland), since their amalgamation in 1972.[v]

 

Further Acquisitions & Friendship

While Reed bought this manuscript and some printed books from Friehold, the majority of their correspondence concerned the acquisition of autograph letters. Reed was a keen (if somewhat indiscriminate) collector of them, amassing a collection of over 5,000 letters, documents, and signatures from the sixteenth to early twentieth century. Two years after their initial contact, Friehold wrote to Reed in January 1927 that he had success in the sale rooms of Puttick & Simpson. There he acquired two lots for Reed: a large parcel of letters by ‘Peers, Divines, Artists (some French), Authors, etc., etc.’ and three autograph letter albums for £3 5s.[vi] These were the first of no fewer than eight parcels or albums of letter purchased by Reed through Friehold. A second album (not described) was acquired in October 1927, but the rest came in throughout 1928 and early 1929. Prices realised ranged from £3 3s to £12. The cost of autograph letters weighed heavily in Friehold’s correspondence, and he often informed Reed that the likelihood of making cheap purchases was not possible. ‘I made several journeys to sales’, wrote Friehold, ‘in the hope of picking up one or two … autographs at the prices you suggested, but prices brought were greatly in advance of your figure. Charles Dickens – separate letters brought [up to] £118-0-0 … Sir Walter Scott (average prices £10 to £20 each), John Wesley you quoted about £3-0-0, and … two letters brought £23 and £31 … Samuel Johnson you offered £10-0-0, three separate letters recently brought £78, £158, £170’.[vii] Along with high prices, Friehold’s main competition at the time appears to have been W. T. Spencer, whom he described as ‘a man of wealth [who] comes along and swoops up the lot. I expect his prices are very high’.[viii]

 

Despite these factors, Reed added many hundreds of letters to his collection through Friehold’s efforts. Fortunately, Friehold occasionally affixed catalogue clippings from successful bids at auction to his letters, so we are able to identify at least some of the documents purchased from him. In January 1928 Friehold bought at auction three lots titled ‘Royal Celebrities’, which included letters by Queen Victoria, Charlotte Sophia, and Sophia Electress of Hanover; ‘Ecclesiastics, Divines, Etc.’, with letters by Charles de Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen, Philip Doddridge, and Thomas Secker and Thomas Tenison, respective Archbishops of Canterbury; and ‘A collection of Letters and Docs’ mostly by a number of English bishops. Other parcels included letters by George Cruickshank, Robert Browning, W. S. Gilbert, Charles Kingsley, John Forster, Edward Cave, James Macpherson, Rose de Freycinet, George Costard, Adam Ferguson, a partial letter signed by Thomas Jefferson, the signature of Joséphine de Beauharnais, and letter by John Sharp to Horace Walpole, which Reed later sold to Wilmarth S. Lewis in 1938.[ix]

 

Like other dealer-collector relationships, Friehold and Reed’s correspondence developed into more than just business transactions. By January 1928, the two men were discussing their home countries, exchanging gifts, and enquiring after the health of their respective wives. Friehold was not above some friendly subterfuge either. It appears that sometime in 1928, Isabel Reed secretly wrote to Friehold and purchased a parcel of autograph letters intended to be a Christmas present for her husband. Her surprise, however, was spoilt by an overly diligent neighbour, who phoned Reed at his office and let him know a registered parcel was left at their house. ‘I went to call for it’, wrote Reed to Friehold, ‘and found it was addressed to Mrs Reed, and had your label on it. I am keeping it very dark … and she will probably not know that I have seen it’.[x]

 

It is among the 1928 correspondence that we learn something of Friehold’s career. In March, Reed enquired after what became of Bull & Auvache, from whom he had purchased second-hand books.[xi] ‘Speaking of the firm’, wrote Friehold in reply, ‘tempts me to give you a few details of my career’.[xii] Friehold’s career in the book trade began in 1882 with Bull & Auvache as an errand boy at the age of fourteen. After the death of Alfred Bull and later his widow, E. J. Auvache took control of the business. Their sons (who held shares in the firm) decided to carry on independently. About 1910, Auvache, who was seventy at the time, left the business, and Friehold carried on as an assistant to Alfred Bull, Jr., working mainly as a cataloguer. The firm survived the economic hardships of the First World War but, according to Friehold, the air raids undermined the health of Bull who died from diabetes a few years after the war. His brothers decided not to carry on the business, and so the firm, along with Friehold’s forty years of service, came to end. In his will, Bull left Friehold £200. Friehold used this money along with some savings to start his own business in 1923, which he ran from his house in 56 Overstone Road, Hammersmith. ‘There is just the dear wife and myself in the old home’, wrote Friehold, ‘– bunged up with books – and life passes very pleasantly’.

 

Despite Friehold’s cheery and friendly demeanour his life was marred by personal tragedy. Not only did a brother die at a young age, but both of his sons perished from tuberculosis, contracted by the eldest while fighting in France during the First World War. Later his granddaughter Dorothy (aged 10) also succumbed to the disease, and the mother of the poor child, Edward’s daughter Alice, reportedly committed suicide due to marriage difficulties.[xiii] The sad event is alluded to in Friehold’s 21 January 1930 letter to Reed: ‘Have just lost a daughter under tragic circumstances, and we are prostrated with grief, so unable to discuss any further business matters just now’. Reed’s reply to this news was met with heart-felt thanks. ‘May God bless you and Mrs Reed for your sympathy on the sad death of our beloved daughter’, wrote Friehold on 22 April 1930. ‘It is so nice to receive such a loving letter from the other side of the globe’. As a token of his appreciation, Friehold gave Reed a letter by Samuel Nevill (1837–1921), first Anglican Bishop of the Diocese of Dunedin; his correspondence addressed thereafter to ‘Friend Reed’.

Death & Legacy

E. G. Friehold died at home on 17 May 1934. Part of the stock from his shop was sold by Hodgson and Co. later that year, along with a manor house library and the collection of Julius Kohn, Esq., ‘formerly of the Austro-Hungarian Consulate’.[xiv] According to the sale catalogue, Friehold’s stock comprised ‘incunabula, rare English sixteenth and seventeenth century books, early Bibles and foreign theology, books relating to the Pilgrim Fathers and the Quakers, etc., mostly in old calf bindings’. It appears that the Pilgrims were of particular interest to Friehold. The photograph taken of Friehold in 1928 and reproduced for this article shows him standing in front of the Mayflower stone at Plymouth.[xv]

 

Some evidence of Friehold’s bookselling activities exist beyond these Dunedin letters. The only other archival source located is the University of Virginia special collections, which holds correspondence between Friehold and the American collector Edward L. Stone for the years 1924 to 1931.[xvi] The British Library holds a run of Friehold’s catalogues beginning in 1923, and catalogues are also found in the National Library of Wales / Llyfgrell Genedlaethol Cymru and the Universitätsbibliothek Basel respectively.[xvii]

 

I also found records for some of Friehold’s other sales. In her 2003 conference paper ‘The Interplay Between Prints and Illuminated Manuscripts in Brigittine Convents of the Low Countries During the Sixteenth Century’, Ursula Weekes noted that a mid-sixteenth-century Dutch prayer book donated to Syon Abbey, near Isleworth, was bought prior to this from Friehold on 12 November 1925.[xviii] Later that month Friehold sold a copy of Dorlandus’s Viola anime, sive de Natura hominis (Cologne, 1499) to the University of Cambridge.[xix] Shaw and Shoemaker’s American Bibliography notes a copy of Psalms and Hymns (Haverhill, Mass., 1815) as being on offer in Friehold’s catalogue 38 (1929)[xx], and the Huntington Library holds a copy of Bythner’s Nova et Methodica (London, 1635) acquired from Friehold on 21 June 1930.[xxi] At the time of writing this article, I found one book from Friehold’s stock for sale. It is a 1549 edition of the Great Bible, sold by Friehold to B. R. Donaldson of the Ford Motor Company in 1929, and on offer by Nehushtan Antiques of Woodbury, N.Y.[xxii]

 

Friehold also made contributions to the scholarly community. His name appears in OCLC as the supplier of missing title-pages or other information for no fewer than twenty-nine sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English books. Noted under the entry for Thomas Shepard’s The Sincere Convert (London, 1659) in the Bibliotheca Americana: Catalogue of the John Carter Brown Library is, ‘A copy of the original edition of 1640 in this Library and a variant copy discovered in 1927 by Edward George Friehold, of London, are the only recorded copies of the first issue of the book’.[xxiii] Charles Ripley Gillett, editor of the Catalogue of the McAlpin Collection, touchingly wrote in his preface that, ‘the list of those to whom hearty thanks are due, would be gravely deficient if failure were made to acknowledge the valuable service rendered by Mr. Edward George Friehold … who generously and gratuitously supplied copies of a large number of title-pages, which, but for his aid, must have appeared in mutilated or incorrect shape’.[xxiv] Bibliographic studies were very near indeed to Friehold’s heart. ‘The research work among “olde bokes”’, wrote Friehold, ‘is a never-ceasing joy’.[xxv]

 

Despite what seems to have been a friendly correspondence, Reed was unaware of Friehold’s death in 1934. In a 3 August 1964 letter to Maggs, Reed enquired: ‘I suppose the Friehold business is no longer in existence? I have not heard from him for many years’. Three years later, Reed commented in his 1967 autobiography: ‘After the outbreak of the Second World War E. G. Friehold ceased sending catalogues; I think he was near retiring age; I hope he escaped the blitz’.[xxvi] As we know, Friehold never lived to see the horrors of the Second World War, and while it is disappointing that Reed never learnt the fate of his distant dealer and correspondent, the discovery and examination of their letters goes some way in reviving a relationship with depth and poignancy that developed solely on (and essentially about) paper.

 

 

Anthony Tedeschi

Rare Books Librarian

Heritage Collections

Dunedin City Library



[i] ‘Appendix 5: Twentieth-Century Rare and Secondhand Book Trade Memoirs: A Checklist of Published Sources’ in Out of Print and Into Profit: A History of the Rare and Secondhand Book Trade in Britain in the Twentieth Century edited by Giles Mandelbrote (London: British Library, 2006), 351– 66.

[ii] Quoted in Gavin McLean’s Whare Raupo: The Reed Books Story (Auckland: Reed Publishing Ltd., 2007), 61.

[iii] Auckland City Library received Frank Reed’s Dumas collection as a bequest in 1953. For more see Donald Kerr’s ‘Frank W. Reed’s Dumas Collection: Portrait of a Bibliophile XXXLII’ in The Book Collector 45:1 (Spring 1996): 46–66.

[iv] E. G. Friehold to A. H. Reed, 8 April 1929.

[v] Margaret Manion, Vera F. Vines and Christopher de Hamel. Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts in New Zealand Collections (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 76 (no. 48).

[vi] Page thirty-three of the 12/13 January 1927 Puttick & Simpson catalogue, enclosed with Friehold’s letter of 17 January 1927.

[vii] E. G. Friehold to A. H. Reed, 8 August 1929.

[viii] E. G. Friehold to A. H. Reed, 28 September 1928.

[ix] A. H. Reed. An Autobiography (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1967), 286; W. S. Lewis (ed.). The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 vols. in 49 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–[1983]), 40:158–159.

[x] A. H. Reed to E. G. Friehold, 15 December 1928.

[xi] A. H. Reed to E. G. Friehold, 10 March 1928.

[xii] E. G. Friehold to A. H. Reed, 19 April 1928.

[xiii] Notes on the Friehold family, including Alice’s suicide, were found on the RootsWeb site:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~cbye/ftweb/friehold/ethel%20caroline/index.htm (accessed 14 July 2010). The supplier, however, does not cite where he or she found this information.

[xiv] A Catalogue of Valuable Books from Various Sources Including a Library from a Country Manor-house … [and] a Selection from the Stock of the Late Mr. G. E. [sic] Friehold … (London: Messrs. Hodgson & Co., 1934).

[xv] ‘I am not a Quaker, but if I joined any particular sect, perhaps my inclination would tend that way’. E. G. Friehold to A. H. Reed, 1 January 1931.

[xvi] See the ‘Guide to the Edward L. Stone / Borderland Coal Company Papers’: http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=uva-sc/viu00663.xml (accessed 20 August 2010). There is doubtless to be other letters and invoices/receipts scattered among various other institutions.

[xvii] Further catalogues likely exist elsewhere, perhaps bound up with other catalogues and not yet fully catalogued or indexed.

[xviii] Ursula Weekes. ‘The Interplay Between Prints and Illuminated Manuscripts in Brigittine Convents of the Low Countries During the Sixteenth Century’ in Under the Influence: The Concept of Influence and the Study of Illuminated Manuscripts edited by John Lowden and Alixe Bovey (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007), 168 n.2.

[xx] Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker. American Bibliography: A Preliminary Checklist for 1815, Items 33762–36665 (New York: The Scarecrow Press, 1963 ed.), 328.

[xxi] Cecil Kay Edmonds. ‘Huntington Library Supplement to the Short Title Catalogue of English Books, 1475–1640’ in The Huntington Library Bulletin No. 4 (Oct. 1933), 116–17.

[xxiii] Bibliotheca Americana: Catalogue of the John Carter Brown Library in Brown University, 5 vols. (Providence: Published by the Library, 1931), 3:23.

[xxiv] Charles Ripley Gillett (ed.). Catalogue of the McAlpin Collection of British History and Theology, 5 vols. (New York: The Union Theological Seminary, 1927–1930), 1:xii.

[xxv] E. G. Friehold to A. H. Reed, 28 December 1927.

[xxvi] Reed, Autobiography, 286.

 

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