661. An American Vale Press Collector: Frederick W. Lehmann

Frederick William Lehmann (1853-1931) was an American lawyer, politician, United States Solicitor General, and rare book collector.

His parents had moved to the US from Prussia when he was two years old, his mother died young, and because of his father's strict upbringing, he ran away from home when he was ten. He roamed the Midwest, as a shepherd, farmhand or newspaper boy. When he was seventeen, he worked on the farm of Judge Epenetus Sears of Tabor, Iowa, who was so much impressed with his ability that he sent him to Tabor College. Lehmann graduated in 1873, and practised law in several cities. In 1890 he moved to St. Louis, Missouri. Active in Iowa politics, in 1910 William Howard Taft named him as United States Solicitor General. He had a remarkable, possibly photographic memory and was called 'the best educated man in St. Louis.'

F.W. Lehmann (1914)
[Wikimedia Commons]

He also manifested himself tirelessly on the cultural front, being a founder of the St. Louis Art Museum and the State Historical Society of Missouri and a president of the St. Louis Public Library. As a bibliophile, he collected works by Robert Burns and Charles Dickens and illustrations by George Cruikshank and Aubrey Beardsley.

He left a collection of autographs to the Missouri Historical Collection. The Frederick William Lehmann Papers at the Washington University St. Louis contain letters, pictures and documents of American political figures and authors including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Thackeray, and ephemera such as bookplates and calling cards.

He had the vast majority of his collection auctioned off at the Anderson Galleries in New York in 1930: A Charles Dickens Collection of Superlative Merit and Equally Fine First Editions of American and English Authors. The Library of the Honorable Frederick W. Lehmann St. Louis. MO. The catalogue [read the contents here] shows that his collection was rich in first editions of Dickens (lots 233-366), Emerson, Harte, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and others. 

Strengths, moreover, included extra-illustrated copies and bindings (such as an edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland bound by Cobden-Sanderson), and private press editions: The Cuala Press (42 books), Daniel Press (4 books),  The Doves Press (5 books), Essex House Press (5 books), Kelmscott Press (36 books  in 46 volumes [not including Chaucer], of which one printed on vellum), The Vale Press (18 volumes).

A Charles Dickens Collection of Superlative Merit and Equally Fine First Editions
of American and English Authors. The Library of the Honorable
Frederick W. Lehmann St. Louis. MO (1930, p. 158)

The Vale Press books were offered in one lot (unlike the other private press books). A few things can be noted. 

First, the lot contains two books published not by the Vale Press, but by George Allen in London: John Ruskin's Of King's Treasures and Of Queen's Gardens. These books were printed by the Ballantyne Press, the firm where Ricketts also had his books printed, and even though the publisher's name is clearly stated in the colophon, these books were often attributed to the Vale Press. [See my earlier blog 'A Summer's Miscellany of Mistakes (1)'.]

That leaves: 18 volumes. Compared to Kelmscott Press, Lehmann owned a smaller collection of Vale Press books (still relatively large).

The incomplete set contains one pre-Vale edition: Daphnis & Chloe (but not: Hero and Leander). Lehmann did not have copies of the magazine The Dial (he did acquire copies of magazines that printed Beardsley's illustrations, such as The Savoy).

Nor does the set include the much-sought-after volumes with wood-engravings by Ricketts, such as The Parables, but it does include the last book illustrated by Ricketts: T.S. Moore's Danae that has three wood-engravings by Ricketts.

The set is made up of volumes that reprinted early English poetry by Suckling, Drayton, Campion, Constable, Chatterton, and The King's Quair. There is also prose by French author Maurice de Guérin and the memoirs of Cellini.

Of the programmatic works, he owned only Ricketts's A Defence of the Revival of Printing (1899).

Notable is John Gray's religious collection, Spiritual Poems, but particularly the four plays by Michael Field, and Lehmann thus owned all the Vale Press editions by this author. Indeed, he collected all the editions of contemporary authors in the Vale Press publishing fund.

The tentative conclusion may be that Lehmann was mainly interested in private press editions of literary texts by contemporary authors and that he found editions by more or less forgotten authors equally fascinating. He was less interested in Ricketts as a book artist.