Ex Libris

U. S. Grant used to stop at Low-dermilk's bookstore in the afternoon to browse, and Teddy Roosevelt ordered volumes on wildlife there. The more literate Congressmen and Senators prowled among its shelves. Sometimes their own books found their way back into Lowdermilk's massive stocks. The store in downtown Washington had volumes bearing the senior Henry Cabot Lodge's bookplate, the Ex Libris of Speakers of the House, even that of Davy Crockett, the Tennessee Congressman who died at the Alamo.

The 98-year-old Lowdermilk's, oldest of the nation's great secondhand bookstores, was a print fancier's Golconda. In a pre-paperback age, the books themselves, passing through Lowdermilk's from one owner to another, acquired histories and characters of their own. Roaming among the shop's six miles of shelves, the browser might have come upon a 1702 edition of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, a signed first edition of John Brown's Body or a mint copy of Agricola's De Re Metallica signed by the translators, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. In the musty chaos of books--memoirs, Shakespeare, Chinese history, the Arctic, the Civil War, Egypt--a visitor to Lowdermilk's was in a Gutenberg's midden of all manner of civilizations.

Favorite Tavern. Only a few of America's great secondhand bookstores remain. There is Goodspeed's in Boston, the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, Howell's in San Francisco and Dawson's in Los Angeles. They are survivors of a fading American scene. More than a year ago, Leary's closed in Philadelphia, and last week an auctioneer sold Lowdermilk's 200,000 volumes and documents for a total of $110,000. Among the items were 52 glass negatives made by Mathew Brady.

The store will make way for a terminal in Washington's new subway system; but that is not what killed it. Such shops are simply no longer profitable. Books require space that is more and more costly in downtown buildings. The choice out-of-print and rare books are being absorbed by new colleges and universities, especially since tax laws now make it more profitable for collectors to donate their libraries to institutions than to sell them. Fewer Americans collect books now, and more and more often they get them from book clubs, or buy paperbacks.

Lowdermilk's was a wonderfully archaic place redolent of the 19th century, with its air of oddity and discovery. Ralph Newman, owner of Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, observed: "It was like going to your favorite tavern--you could always find things there, like a first printing of the Gettysburg Address." Newman will keep his own store open as long as he can. "We're one of the few bookstores left where you can get a drink in the back," Newman smiled. "Try that on the Book-of-the-Month Club!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.