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V4 2001 INDEX       E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 4, Number 31, July 29, 2001, Article 13 HOW NOT TO STORE BOOKS IN MIAMI Alan Luedeking writes: "Your news of the death of John Davenport brought back a memory, and after pondering whether to share it or not, have decided that the lesson to be learned therefrom is worth it. I do not exactly recall the date, but it was Summer 14 or 15 years ago, when I received a call from Colin Bruce at Krause Publications asking me if I could assist him by visiting the home of John Davenport and help him to pack up his library which he had decided to donate to KP. He was about to move from Coral Gables up to central Florida and couldn't carry it all with him. I eagerly accepted, as I considered it a privilege to meet and help Mr. Davenport. Colin had also generously offered that for my efforts I could keep whatever interested me in the line of Latin American numismatic material. On the appointed weekend morning I arrived at Mr. Davenport's small but elegant-looking 1930's art-deco style house, typical of the hey-day of Coral Gables. He lived there alone. He was then I believe in his mid-seventies or older, but looked in his sixties at most, thin as a rail and small-boned, birdlike but intense. I looked at his library and felt a pang of disappointment as it consisted of nothing but one medium bookcase, perhaps two-thirds full, with nothing that greatly impressed me at the time. (It should be mentioned that I'm a better judge of numismatic literature now than I was then, in my numismatic infancy so to speak.) I was surprised at how small his holdings were and wondered to myself how such a fabulous wealth of numismatic knowledge and series of great crown books could have sprung from a man with such a paltry library. After a short chat, I said I'd run out to my jeep and get the boxes and stuff to pack up his books. Then came the surprise. John said the stuff he wanted to ship up to KP was in his concrete storage shed in the garden, and what was here in his living room was what he intended to keep! He repeated Colin's offer that I could keep whatever I wanted in exchange for my help. He pointed me in the right direction, thanked me profusely in advance and said I should pack up anything and everything I found in the shed, he wanted nothing left behind. With pounding heart I trotted over to the shed, unlocked it, and opened the door. A powerful musty odor assailed my nose and I reared back. Letting my eyes adjust to the gloom for a moment I stepped further in, found the pull cord for the overhead naked light bulb, and revealed --- a swarm of cockroaches that instantly disappeared. To make a long and very sad story short, I labored in awful conditions, pouring sweat in 100+ degree humid heat to pack up hundreds of auction catalogs and a few cartons of books, almost all of them covered with a green and gray growth of mold and fungus, not to mention cockroach and rat droppings. The vast majority of these pages would never see the light of day again, as they were forever stuck together. I reported back to Mr. Davenport what I had found, and while he knew already, I could not resist asking him why he had not thought to install an air conditioner in the shed. I do not believe my comment was well received, and after I left his home we never spoke again. I reported to Colin what I had found, and we reluctantly agreed that I should ship him 3 cartons worth of material that might still be salvageable, all catalogs that had come from the innermost piles, since perhaps the clean, cool dry air of Northern Wisconsin might kill the mold. The remaining dozen cartons or so I regretfully consigned to the tender mercies of the Dade County dump, my only consolation being that I saw nothing older than from the 1940's with perhaps a few catalogs from the thirties. Much of it was European, with some American series, and a few Scott and Wayte Raymond and the like. I kept for myself not a thing but a lesson on how NOT to store books in Miami, and a moldy smell in my jeep for a few days thereafter."

Wayne Homren, Editor

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