The Finer Things

A daughter of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, Edith was one of the nation’s richest women at the time of her wedding to International Harvester heir Harold F. McCormick. The power couple put their fortunes to work, supporting opera, establishing a zoo and a hospital, and purchasing tremendous collections of antiques that included a silver dinner service of 1,600 pieces that Napoleon had given his sister as a wedding gift; Peter the Great’s Persian carpet; an assortment of fine laces to rival the Vatican’s; rare Gothic tapestries; and some of the Russian crown jewels. The McCormicks were assembling a collection not just for their own pleasure but eventually intended as a museum for the people of Chicago.

But wealth did not protect them from tragedy. Two of their five children died young, sending both Edith and Harold off to seek refuge in Carl Jung’s practice in Switzerland. For Edith, the stay would last eight years. She became not only Jung’s leading patroness but also an analyst herself. When she finally returned to the states, Harold had fallen for a mediocre opera singer (think Citizen Kane), and a divorce was unavoidable. The fallout from the break up, combined with the 1929 stock market crash, devastated Edith financially. She died of cancer in 1932, aged fifty-nine, and her precious collections were sent to auction. 

Edith’s pride in her collections was evident; each successful acquisition was a triumph. But her most prized possession was surely her 15,000-volume library—books gave her sustenance, expanded her thinking, and formed her worldview. Prone to agoraphobia, Edith was happiest in her own head and her own home. She was quoted as saying that reading was more important to her than eating.

“The library of Edith Rockefeller McCormick was an intellectual treasure house in which she lived,” Melamed writes. He focuses on her philosophical and theological collection, dissecting her interests: epistemology, ethics, psychology, comparative religion, astrology. He claims her tremendous collection of Kantian studies was “sufficient to satisfy the needs of any Kantian scholar.” Hers was a working library: for instance, her copy of Critique of Pure Reason was “so covered with marginal notes in her own handwriting as to almost obscure many passages of the text.” Furthermore, as a talented linguist, whenever possible she read and notated in the author’s native language. Her books provide a virtual syllabus of her studies, with handwritten dates indicating that she began Critique on June 7, 1917, and finished on October 11; Plato’s Republic was tackled between September 20 and November 15 of the following year.

Melamed concludes, “Her thirst for knowledge, her devotion to philosophical truth, her evaluation of the creative personality, her sweeping historical concepts and her great … learning made her the outstanding feminine intellectual of her generation in America.” He ends with a zinger: “Because she was very careful in the selection of her parents she undoubtedly missed a great academic career.”

When the auction gavel fell in February 1934, Edith’s books were dispersed, some individually but most in large lots: 400 volumes of psychology; 143 volumes of Goethe (then the largest collection of its kind); 30 volumes of Hugo; two separate large sets of Shakespeare. Where they all went—these thousands of books bearing her ERMcC bookplate—is a mystery. Newspaper reports indicate her daughter Muriel McCormick Hubbard bought a fifty-volume Balzac set as well as a set of Joseph Jefferson’s dream series. All others were scattered to the wind.

Among the treasures were 152 volumes of John Ruskin’s works bound for Edith at the Doves Bindery. Representing the largest group of Doves bindings ever offered at public auction, these books are now steadily reappearing on the market. And while the books sold for a paltry total of $4,282 at the 1934 sale, bringing in precious little for Edith’s ravaged estate, now they are realizing their worth. In 1995, Christie’s sold two volumes of Ruskin’s Arrows of the Chace for $2,070. In 2014, Phillip J. Pirages Fine Books & Manuscripts in Oregon, which has handled several of Edith’s books in recent years, sold her copy of John Ruskin’s The Oxford Museum, bound in dark blue crushed morocco by the Doves Bindery, for $9,000. Somehow, Edith ended up with Ruskin’s personal bible, containing annotations made in his own hand. Where is this prize now?

Edith also managed to obtain several pieces from Charles Lamb’s personal library, including uncut copies of Blank Verse and John Woodvil and several first editions, many with marginalia in Lamb’s hand. Other authors’ autograph manuscripts in her possession included those of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Robert Browning, and Lord Byron. Autographed books from James Joyce (whom she supported financially as he wrote Ulysses), Chicago theater producer Donald Robertson, and actor/director Edward Gordon Craig bear personal inscriptions to Edith in gratitude for her patronage.

Edith’s autograph manuscript of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Saga of the Skeleton in Armor” has made repeat appearances at auctions over the years, first at Parke Bernet in William Randolph Hearst’s 1938 show; next, in 1954 when Parke Bernet again offered it from Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.’s collection. From there, it appeared in bookseller John F. Fleming’s collection at Christie’s in 1988, and most recently at Bonhams in 2017, where it didn’t reach its minimum of $15,000.

Tracking down the pieces of Edith’s library is a Humpty Dumpty exercise in putting her back together again. Her first printed edition of Herodotus’ Histories, in Greek, printed by Aldus Manutius in 1502, brought in $15,000 at Christie’s in December 2018. Containing scholarly marginalia dating back centuries, one can imagine Edith gingerly poring over each comment, obediently curbing her own tendency to scribble. As Edith once declared she’d been Tutankhamen’s child bride in a previous incarnation, Christie’s specialist Rhiannon Knol commented she “like[d] to think of her taking a look through it and imagining her past life as an Egyptian queen.” In addition to Edith’s bookplate, the Herodotus offers clues to its journey with the additional label from Frederick Spiegelberg, a New York judge who must have nabbed this at Edith’s auction.

A 1523 volume of Arthurian Legends, C’est L’Hystoire du Sainct Greall, provides an opportunity to look both forward and backward from Edith. Offered by Pirages roughly a dozen years ago, recent bookplates indicate ownerships from Maurice and Edward Schenk, John A. Saks, and George Abrams, who purchased it for $12,000 in 1980. But the lineage preceding Edith is even more remarkable, beginning with André-Prosper Victor Masséna, the Prince d’Essling, then traveling to Edward Vernon Utterson in 1847, Bernard Quaritch in 1857, William Morris at Kelmscott Press, and Richard Bennett before Edith purchased it for £55 and had it rebound. Many careful hands have admired its delicate woodcuts. 

Edith seemed to have had a good connection to the Kelmscott Press, owning nine of their vellum editions, including Laudes Beatae Mariae Virginis, the first book printed at the press in three colors. She also owned A Note on his Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press, the last book printed at the press. Sydney Cockerell’s compilation, Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century, printed on vellum and bound in a unique dark green limp vellum with tan silk ties, fetched $55,000 at Hindman Auctions last November. It was difficult to find comparables as no other vellum copy of this book had ever sold at auction and Edith’s copy contained signatures from both Cockerell and William Morris. While researching this item, Gretchen Hause, director and senior specialist of Hindman’s books and manuscripts department, marveled at Edith’s “remarkable level of connoisseurship and artistic sensibility in assembling such an astounding collection.”

But much of Edith’s collection has vanished into thin air. It was publicized in 1911 that she purchased a 1512 first English version of Lohengrin, Helyas, Knyght of the Swanne, on vellum, for $21,000 (roughly $500,000 today). In fact, this purchase from Robert Hoe’s library first identified her publicly as a bibliophile. The story goes that the book had been sold to a “mysterious Chicagoan,” with even her husband Harold unaware of the purchase. But where is the Helyas now? It does not appear in her auction catalogue and was perhaps sold off quietly during the financial panic.

One of the headliners from her auction was a fifteenth-century illuminated Book of Hours. It seems likely she also nabbed this at Hoe’s sale, given his massive collection of Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis. But, as illuminations go, none could compare with her Byzantine New Testament. Found by University of Chicago theologian Edgar Goodspeed in Maurice Stora’s Paris bookshop in 1928, this treasure dating back to Constantinople in the 1200s features nearly 100 illuminations and a hammered silver cover added three centuries later. 

Certain there was no other such manuscript in the world, and that it would contribute significantly to the study of Byzantine iconography, Goodspeed approached Edith in the hope that she might sponsor a fund drive for the purchase. She surpassed his desires when she pledged to buy it outright. Goodspeed dispatched a university representative to France to purchase the codex. He had two checks from Edith in his possession, one in the amount of $20,000 and a second for $5,000, should the first prove insufficient. The shop required both.

Once the Rockefeller McCormick New Testament arrived in Chicago—a Newberry Library official declared it “marked the beginning of a new era in the cultural life of the city”—Edith authorized up to $16,000 to have the university reproduce color copies for study purposes. These facsimiles came through just in time for Edith to admire them in the last days before she died.

After her fortune crumbled, Edith inquired numerous times whether the University of Chicago could purchase the New Testament from her, to help stave off bankruptcy, but they were in no position to do so. It remained in her estate until 1942, when niece Elizabeth Day McCormick purchased it as a gift to the university, where it now resides in their special collections and is fully digitized.

Certain there was no other such manuscript in the world, and that it would contribute significantly to the study of Byzantine iconography, Goodspeed approached Edith in the hope that she might sponsor a fund drive for the purchase. She surpassed his desires when she pledged to buy it outright. Goodspeed dispatched a university representative to France to purchase the codex. He had two checks from Edith in his possession, one in the amount of $20,000 and a second for $5,000, should the first prove insufficient. The shop required both.

Once the Rockefeller McCormick New Testament arrived in Chicago—a Newberry Library official declared it “marked the beginning of a new era in the cultural life of the city”—Edith authorized up to $16,000 to have the university reproduce color copies for study purposes. These facsimiles came through just in time for Edith to admire them in the last days before she died.

After her fortune crumbled, Edith inquired numerous times whether the University of Chicago could purchase the New Testament from her, to help stave off bankruptcy, but they were in no position to do so. It remained in her estate until 1942, when niece Elizabeth Day McCormick purchased it as a gift to the university, where it now resides in their special collections and is fully digitized.

Edith had a particular fondness for items with royal lineage. Bookplates from King Charles II, Marie Antoinette, King Louis XIV, Queen Elizabeth, and Napoleon appear alongside hers. It seems she was also an autograph hound: in 1964, Parke Bernet offered her collection of 1,200 autographs, most belonging to British parliamentarians and noblemen. The eight-volume collection sold for a mere $325.

Lest one thinks Edith was all seriousness, it is important to note that her catalogue also included books about archery, gardening, Oriental rugs, art from all corners of the world, the history of ghosts, and astrology (though the latter were rare tracts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). She also had a complete set of the British weekly humor magazine Punch, 149 volumes from 1841 to 1915—enough levity for a lifetime.

Edith’s intention for her carefully chosen books was to display them in a museum for the edification of all Chicagoans. Although this noble plan disintegrated, her rarities were shared in a different way. Strewn haphazardly in a Depression-era auction, selling for mere pennies on the dollar, these little pieces of her personality were dispersed far and wide and they still provide inspiration and enjoyment to today’s bibliophiles … somewhere, wherever they may be.