We have been discussing bookstores and booksellers in this series that are probably familiar to your experiences in searching for and buying books. Today, we're going to examine the more rarefied practice of rare book dealing by examining its most rarified and sophisticated practitioner in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s, Mrs. George Madison (Alice) Millard.
If you've heard of her, it's probably in conjunction with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, because she commissioned him to build her a house in the Arroyo section of Pasadena, near the Rose Bowl, one of the five houses, and the first of the four textile-block houses, Wright built in Los Angeles between 1918 and 1925. Here is the living room which doubled as her showroom.
This should demonstrate that we're dealing with a woman of exquisite taste. This is the only picture of her I could find (in a folder in the Special Collections room of Denison Library at Scripps College) and I was thrilled to find it.
So much for Los Angeles after World War I as some kind of hick town. If it could support Alice Millard, some of its inhabitants had to be at a level of high cultural sophistication. I've talked about Robert Crunden's idea that Hollywood brought film to the party that was American modernism. Books aren't necessarily modernist, and Alice Millard provides a very clear example of how the bookselling community in Southern California could be seen as exclusive of, if not oppositional to, this version of modernism provided by Hollywood. She also demonstrates how the booksellers of Los Angeles were directly connected to the book people of Great Britain, especially the artists of the English Arts and Crafts movement.
About the English Arts and Crafts movement. Modern in the sense that it represented a change from Victorian excess because it was revolted by Victorian excess. Started by book people! William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain was an accomplished printer, and his project was part of an effort to return to an earlier, craft-based method of book production by stepping away from the processes designed for the age of mechanical reproduction he lived in.
Alice Parsons met her husband George Millard in Chicago at McClurg’s bookstore, where he ran the “Saints and Sinner’s Corner.” She asked him for a biography of William Morris, and George replied that he was personally acquainted with both Morris and Morris’s bookbinder, Thomas Cobden-Sanderson; they were married soon afterward. She joined George in the rare book business when they moved to California in 1914, greeting customers in a house in South Pasadena distinguished by its large windows and ample bookshelves. Working with her husband, she developed strong friendships with the rare booksellers of London, notably Bernard Quaritch and Ernest Maggs, two of the pioneers of working with booksellers in Los Angeles.
On her husband’s death in 1918, Mrs. Millard sold all the standard sets and “gentlemen’s books” that her husband had dealt in (“I’m tired of this piddling business,” she said) and proceeded to present the rare-book buyers of Los Angeles with a much higher level of quality and significance in the books she sold; while she shared clients with the established bookseller Ernest Dawson and his San Francisco counterpart, John Howell, neither of them had a desire to compete with her style of bookselling. In 1923, she moved into “La Collina” (also called “La Miniatura”), a house and adjoining salesroom/museum which she had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design and build for her in the arroyo section of Pasadena. There she displayed illuminated manuscripts and incunabula as well as material from the English arts and crafts printers Doves Bindery and the Kelmscott Press, for whom she had a virtual monopoly in the United States because of her friendships with May Morris and T. J. Cobden Sanderson. This is the house from the street (24 Prospect Circle, Pasadena)
and this is the exterior looking from the arroyo.
"La Miniatura" was her second commission from Wright. She had ordered one of his prairie-style homes to be built in Chicago You get the impression from accounts of her that it was never built, but it was, and I can only conclude that the house was built for the Millards but they never lived in it because of their decision to relocate west.
Alice Millard was interested in the aesthetic delight that a well-designed book could deliver, which confirms her devotion to Arts and Crafts principles and explains why this did not conflict with the modernist sensibility involved in hiring Frank Lloyd Wright, because his work was aesthetically pleasing to her as well. She created a sensation at Sotheby’s in London at some point during the 1920s “when she joined the bidding for [and won] a rare Froissart manuscript,” as she was probably the first woman to bid at a Sotheby’s auction. She had an undeniable effect on “philistine Pasadena.” She would tell her bankers,
I want to go to Europe, and I want to spend $500,000 and buy a lot of good books because Pasadena needs them,
and then sell the books she acquired to collectors all over the United States, including J.P. Morgan, Robert McCormick of Chicago, and William A. Clark, Jr, of Los Angeles, who relied heavily on Mrs. Millard once he decided to build a library for his collection of books. During the 1930s, she was able to get stock from London on consignment. The variety of Mrs. Millard’s clients demonstrates the extent to which bookselling and the trade in rare books continued to be an international business. In fact, the editors of
Publishers’ Weekly, in 1928, quoted Iolo A. Williams, a British authority on bookselling, as having observed,
I have never met an English antiquarian bookseller who has not admitted that a very large proportion of his business is in these days done with the citizens of the United States of America.
It also indicates that, at least by the 1920s, no gender barriers existed to limit participation in the worldwide book trade.
In the speech in which he proposed that Los Angeles had experienced a “small renaissance” in cultural attainment after 1928, Jake Zeitlin commented that organizing the book clubs that he saw as one of the manifestations of that renaissance required
a considerable number of people endowed with the means and taste for the collecting of fine books.
His example? An exhibition Alice Millard put together in 1929. She was able to arrange a loan collection of the fifty-three books printed by William Morris at his Kelmscott press, 1891-1898, which she exhibited in the Little Museum at her home, La Miniatura, in Pasadena. She assembled all fifty-three from the collections of thirteen Southern Californians (to whom she had probably sold almost all of them). Seven, including a presentation copy of Edmund Spenser’s
The Shepheardes Calendar inscribed to her by T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, the bookbinder for the Kelmscott Press, came from her own collection, and nine came from the collection of William Andrews Clark, Jr. This exhibition demonstrated that book collecting on the West Coast, and particularly in Southern California, had come of age
A significant number of these books came from the collection of Estelle Doheny, the wife of E. L. Doheny, the oil tycoon who was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal. Mrs. Doheny was introduced to book collecting by her husband's attorney, Frank Hogan and, while she patronized many of the bookstores downtown, she has a special interest in the books and manuscripts that Alice Millard stocked. Lucille Miller, Estelle Doheny’s secretary and librarian, believed that Mrs. Millard provided a necessary counterculture antidote to her surroundings. She described her as
A Voice crying out in the Wilderness – the Wilderness of the Depression; the Wilderness of class-conscious Pasadena; the Wilderness of her struggle to survive as a woman alone, without capital or financial resources or backing of any kind. . . .she built the Little Museum, arranged her exhibits, and expounded her Gospel of Beauty to any who would listen. She left us so suddenly [in 1938] and the Beauty she created vanished like Cinderella’s coach.
Alice Millard set a standard for bookselling in Los Angeles that elevated the trade and gave the field something to emulate; in Zeitlin’s words,
she educated the rare book buyers of Southern California to a . . . higher level of appreciation.
And what is she remembered for?
The house.
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule
AND A NOTE: At 5 AM on Tuesday, June 4, I will be waking up in Louisville to begin my fourth day of grading the AP US History exam, so there will be no All Things Bookstore diary that week. We will resume the series on Tuesday, June 18.
9:37 AM PT: Thank you, Community Spotlight. Learning should be why we use the net at all!