A Profile and Remembrance of J. Howard Woolmer (1929-2022): Gentleman, Scholar, and Bookdealer Extraordinaire

A Profile and Remembrance of J. Howard Woolmer (1929-2022):Gentleman, Scholar, and Bookdealer Extraordinaire Richard J. Gerber It may sound like hyperbole, but in the annals of twentieth-century American independent bookdealers of literature, the name J. Howard Woolmer, though far less well known, might be mentioned alongside those of A. S. W. Rosenbach and L. J. Rosenwald. However, Howard's skills as a bibliographer also put him in a class of his own. He passed away in December 2022 at the age of ninety-three, and this profile provides but a glimpse of his remarkable life and illustrious career. My wife Margy and I met Howard in the early 2000s. At that time, he was completing work on his final major projects, the world-class Leonard L. Milberg collections of Irish prose, poetry, and theater, American poetry, and Jewish-American writers at Princeton University. From the late 1980s, Howard had been flying around the [End Page 247] English-speaking world in pursuit of treasures that can now be found at Princeton. But some of his other professional achievements, over seventy years in the book trade, were the equal of his last act, and his personal story is fascinating as well. Margy and I knew none of this when we drove the one hundred miles from our home in New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, to meet Howard for the first time; neither did we know that it would be the start of a close friendship. Howard's name and business had appeared for years in listings of Joyce books for sale that we regularly perused; we were intrigued. We learned that Howard had compiled the first preliminary census of fifty-nine of the one hundred signed copies on Dutch handmade paper of the first Shakespeare and Company edition of Joyce's Ulysses.1 So that is what most drew our attention to him, and we set up the meeting. When we arrived, we discovered that Howard's home was filled with modern first editions, correspondence, and mementos from his long career and close relationships with a who's who of twentieth-century literary figures: Seamus Heaney, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Muldoon, Edward Albee, Sebastian Barry, Penelope Fitzgerald, Robert Penn Warren, and Malcolm Lowry, to name but a few. While we regret not writing down all the stories Howard told us about his life and work, a few facts can be drawn from piecing together parts of a memoir he wrote,2 an account of his bibliographies, and the memories of some of his friends. J. Howard Woolmer (the "J" was for James) was born in 1929 in Montreal, Canada, the second of three sons of a bricklayer and artist, later a construction superintendent, who emigrated from London in 1908. His mother was Scottish and worked as a secretary. Growing up during the Depression, Howard's family often visited bookshops for entertainment, and his father read Sherlock Holmes stories to the boys. In 1945, toward the end of World War II, an underaged sixteen-year-old Howard sneaked his way into the Canadian Merchant Marines (by changing the date on his birth certificate), and he traveled around the world (for the first time) over the next five years. Those years replaced any formal higher education he might have pursued. Returning home, he discovered that his older brother, Grant, had bought a second-hand bookshop in Montreal; it was actually "little more than a junk shop," according to Howard. The business eventually grew into a respected dealership in Canada, though, and Howard frequently helped out in the shop. By 1958, Howard had taken a job with the Australian government and was posted to the consulate in New York City. He also scouted New York bookshops, making purchases for his brother's inventory. But the urge to get more involved in the book business began to grow, so he took a side job at Frances Steloff's Gotham Book Mart. When [End Page 248] questioned about this brief period in his career, Howard revealed that one of his main tasks at the Gotham was cutting the nails on the paws of Steloff's cats. Inspired by Steloff and building on his experiences at...

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