This Day in Cultural History

January 27, 1885 – Jerome Kern, one of the half-dozen most important contributors to the Great American Songbook, was born in New York City to a first-generation German-Jewish family. The 16-year-old was able to overcome his father’s insistence on joining the family retail business by making a spectacular mistake: singing an order for 200 pianos rather than the two he was assigned to secure. (Well, it was just two decimal places off!)

Together with lyric partners such as Oscar Hammerstein II, Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse, and Dorothy Fields, Kern wrote, for Broadway and Hollywood, such enduring standards as “All the Things You Are,” “Smoky Gets in Your Eyes,” “Ol’ Man River,” “A Fine Romance,” and “The Way You Look Tonight.” Everybody knows this—or should.

But did you know that Kern also compiled one of the greatest book collections in American history? I didn’t either, until I was working for a brief spell at an antiquarian book magazine during what seems like a lifetime ago.

Like yours truly, Kern had a mania for collecting—but unlike yours truly, his earnings during the Roaring Twenties enabled him to purchase on a grand scale invaluable rare books from the past few centuries (think first editions of Robinson Crusoe and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”). Eventually, because of his increasing musical workload and need to pay more attention to his wife’s precarious health, Kern reluctantly decided he had to part with his collection.

The resulting booksale is still regarded as a highlight of antiquarian book history. It was actually two sales, spread out over the first two weeks of 1929, with the collection sold off in pieces to maximize sales. The items were sold separately rather than as a unit to maximize their sales potential.

The price for the entire collection--$1,729,462—capped a period of madly appreciating prices on the rare-book market, much like the stock market. In fact, the antiquarian book market would not see prices as high on a number of items for another 50 years.

Kern’s decision to sell the collection in early 1929—just before the onset of the Great Depression—illustrates that the great composer’s acute sense of timing was not only confined to music.