How a $12 Copy of Ulysses Started a Book Empire
Remembering Bookseller Natalie Bauman
Two New Catalogs Today
[LIST 121: NEWLY CATALOGED BOOKS, MOSTLY SIGNED →]
[LIST 122: ABAA VIRTUAL FAIR "CALIFORNIA" 2025 →]
List 122 has some new arrivals plus some classics. It is exclusively available through this newsletter link until the Virtual Fair opens on February 6.
Upcoming Event
ABAA Virtual Book Fair: California Edition
February 6–8, 2025
The big annual California Antiquarian Book Fair was cancelled this month due to the fires in Southern California. The Red Cross took over the venue for relief operations, so this year’s fair will be virtual. Visit abaa.org/vbf for more information.
The Legacy of Natalie Bauman
It’s curious that in a profession dominated by men, the two most important American booksellers in 2024 were women. But while Sandra Hindman continues her work as the leading American dealer in illuminated manuscripts, the rare book world has lost Natalie Bauman,1 who died on January 28 from complications of cancer.
Bauman’s influence on the trade went beyond the impressive scope of her business, which included galleries in New York, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas. She found a new way to sell books by creating welcoming retail spaces in high-traffic locations, training generations of booksellers, and cultivating new collectors who might never have otherwise entered the field.
“I think booksellers are not as good if they don’t have real physical interaction with people,” she said in an interview.2 “How do you anticipate a question? How do you read silences? We read faces, we understand clients.” This philosophy guided her approach to the trade for five decades.
The contrast with most rare bookstores of her era could not have been starker. While many dealers operated from appointment-only offices or crowded shops tucked away on side streets, Bauman opened elegant galleries in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and later on Madison Avenue. In 2008, she supported her husband David’s idea to take a chance and open in Las Vegas, believing that visitors there could be turned into collectors if they had “the time to look at books and put a toe in the water.”3
To better understand just how different Bauman’s approach was, it helps to look at how the traditional rare book trade operated. I got my start scouting the used and antiquarian book shops of Northern California, a continent away from Manhattan’s book showrooms. These locations were were often funky, messy, and laid back places with roots in the hippie counterculture. In other words, places where I felt at home.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there were three fabled secret gardens of books, each requiring a different kind of apprenticeship to access. Peter Howard of Serendipity Books had a warehouse a few miles from his Berkeley store. Daryl and Jean Van Fleet of Bibliomania guarded a pamphlet room above their Oakland shop. Most elusive was David Sachs’ apartment bookstore4—even a personal introduction from Peter Howard, a one-time president of the ABAA, wasn’t enough to gain immediate entry.
“Patience, grasshopper” was the unspoken motto. The sure way never to be invited in was to express interest in going. In spite of their bohemian roots, these places retained some of the conservative old boy’s club nature of the book trade.
The Baumans started differently. In the early 1970s in Philadelphia, Natalie and her husband David discovered books at Freeman’s auction house basement sales, where Natalie recalled finding an original Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses for $12. “We really didn’t know there was a rare book business,” she said years later. “I think our innocence probably propelled us in a way that was fortunate.”5
I remember when these two worlds intersected in my own career. After years of paying my dues as a customer of Serendipity Books, Peter Howard finally took me to his warehouse in his overworked book van. On the way over, he told me he was dying of cancer, the way his father did. Then he let me loose in several thousand square feet of bookshelves, grocery bags, and mounds of boxes, all filled with books.
Among the first editions I found that day were beautiful copies of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Dylan Thomas’s A Child's Christmas in Wales. Neither book was particularly rare, but these copies were exceptionally pretty. When I took them to a book fair a few months later, Natalie Bauman bought them without hesitation.
At the time, I puzzled over her purchases. Did Bauman Rare Books really need these books, I wondered. While I had priced them fairly, they weren’t bargains. Over the years, I came to understand that Natalie Bauman operated on an entirely different level. She recognized something I was just beginning to learn: truly fine copies of collectible books are always worth attention. Nice-enough copies may be common, but fine ones seldom are.
The Baumans’s approach to bookselling was unique for its public presence—for decades the firm ran ads on the back cover6 of the New York Times Sunday Book Review—and in its bespoke service.
Bauman Rare Books made sales online and in their galleries, but much of the business was done by phone, fax and email—private offers to fill gaps in their clients’ libraries, often gaps the customers didn’t know they had until one of the Bauman booksellers pointed it out. Natalie’s goal wasn’t to sell books to existing collectors. The Baumans built their business by deliberately seeking out new customers who might not know rare books existed. “The more public one becomes, the more that market becomes yours,” she once said of her business strategy.7
This philosophy extended to how they hired. Rare book firms typically look for employees with extensive book knowledge or advanced degrees. Natalie instead looked for book aptitude—the ability to engage with clients and share enthusiasm for the material.
Rebecca Romney, the best-known bookseller who learned the trade at Bauman Rare Books, described the hiring process as a “gauntlet” that could include discussing “the obscenity lawsuit of Ulysses, the reason for Milton not rhyming in Paradise Lost, and how John Locke influenced Thomas Jefferson.”
That led to a remarkable group of booksellers. “We have people with library science and English degrees,” she wrote in an online forum. “Others have philosophy, or political science, or film degrees. We have an Oxford-trained poet on staff. We have a lawyer on staff. And a reverend.”
At book fairs, seeing the Bauman team in action was something to behold. They systematically worked the floor, piling up carefully curated stacks of books at booth after booth. For many dealers, having Bauman’s stop by meant the difference between a good fair and a bad one.
Over the years, the Baumans pumped tens of millions of dollars into the rare book trade this way. A good book could turn up in a small town shop, be purchased by a traveling book scout, who’d sell it to a more established dealer, who would take it to a fair and sell it to Natalie. Everyone made a profit. Natalie most of all. Like the heart in William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, the kind of famous rare book that the Baumans specialized in, Natalie’s spending pumped vitality through every vessel and capillary of the antiquarian book trade. Booksellers at all levels, from major urban dealers to part-time vendors with spaces in rural antique malls, benefited from Bauman’s purchases.
The true measure of a bookseller’s influence lies in those they trained, and here Natalie Bauman’s impact will live on for another generation. While managing the Las Vegas outpost of the Bauman empire, Rebecca Romney became nationally known as the rare book expert on the reality TV show Pawn Stars. Today Romney is a founding partner in Type Punch Matrix and the author of a couple of books about books, including the forthcoming Jane Austen’s Bookshelf.
Heather O’Donnell, another Bauman alumna, founded Honey and Wax Booksellers and established a prize for young women book collectors, extending Natalie’s legacy of bringing new people into the field.
I never heard even that vaguest rumor that Natalie Bauman was ill. Business at Bauman Rare Books continues much as it always has. Two weeks ago they bought a box of books from me to fill a specific gap in their inventory, and a few months before that they moved their Manhattan shop to a new location, a project that underscores the firm’s plans to carry on.
The last time I saw Natalie was a few years ago at a book fair. She moved through the aisles with her characteristic energy, accompanied by an assistant with a tablet computer connected to their inventory database. What I didn’t realize then was that Natalie was “functionally blind”, a challenge she refused to let slow her down. Like her husband’s serious stroke a few years ago and her later illness, it was a vulnerability she covered with strength, continuing to operate at the highest levels of the trade through sheer force of will.
As I watched Natalie work the fair that last time, she bought books with the same intensity she had shown years ago when examining my Hemingway and Thomas first editions. She wasn’t just considering which books to purchase. I think she was already imagining the right collector for each one. It was this gift—seeing the connection between books and their potential owners—that had helped her build not just a business, but a new generation of collectors and booksellers.
—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books
There is some uncertainty in the trade about how to pronounce “Bauman.” In Bauman Rare Books’ YouTube videos, they say BOH-man (rhymes with snowman).
Quoted from about the 12-minute mark in this ABAA interview.
The New York Times, “The Baumans, Sellers of Really, Really Rare Books” by Geraldine Fabrikant, January 30, 2019.
If you google David Sachs, you’ll find only intriguing snippets of information. Of all the twentieth century booksellers who haven’t written memoirs, David’s story may be the most worth telling and yet he remains the least likely person to tell it.
Quoted near the beginning of Natalie Bauman’s ABAA interview.
Looking for one of these ads brought home to me how much the newspaper business has changed. The Sunday Times for December 18, 2002, was 664 pages! And that’s just for one day. Bauman’s ad is on page 336.