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34-C Maine Antique Digest, March 2015
- FEATURE -
“Collectors who haven’t curated a show have
no idea of the pressure,” Susan Jaffe Tane said one
afternoon as we sat together drinking tea in the
library of her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side. Tane’s collection of Edgar Allan Poe books,
manuscripts, and artifacts is unquestionably the
foremost in the world. She has lent items from it
to museums and other institutions here and abroad
for nearly two decades. In 2013-14, the Morgan
Library & Museum borrowed a host of them for its
show
Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul
. In fact,
a third of what was on display at the august venue
in midtown Manhattan came from Tane, and her
pieces more than held their own against holdings
from the New York Public Library and the Morgan
itself. When she agreed to curate her own show at
the Grolier Club, however, she took on a task far
more formidable than merely being a lender.
The oldest ongoing literary society in the United
States, the Grolier Club, founded in 1884, expects
its members to share their collections by mount-
ing exhibits at its clubhouse. Located at 47 East
60th Street and ParkAvenue, it happens to be about
a half-mile walk from where Tane lives. But the
society isn’t interested in show-and-tell displays,
Tane told me. With the objects you choose and the
way you arrange them, you have to create a narra-
tive with a beginning, middle, and end. “You have
to tell a story. And it’s hard. It’s very hard,” and
time-consuming. On the day of my visit, Tane had
already been working for three and a half years on
what would become
Evermore: The Persistence of
Poe
. And the show of the choicest items from her
collection, with a few complementary pieces lent
by others, was still six months away from the open-
ing of its nine-and-a-half-week run on September
17, 2014.
Besides selecting and organizing the materi-
als into a coherent, compelling whole, Tane said,
“There is a catalog to be written with footnotes.
Everything must be photographed. There are labels
to be composed for the cases. There are deadlines
and more deadlines.” The designing of the exhibit
is another onerous job. “You arrange the items on
the dining-room table, you put them on the floor,
you walk around them for months. Then when they
go into the cases, they may look very different. Or,
after you add the labels, it may be too crowded.
You pull out some things and put in others.”
The proximity of the Grolier to her apartment
was a help when she hand-carried some of the most
important and most fragile items to the venue. She
had to find the right mover for the larger pieces,
such as a framed poster for a movie version of Poe
tales that usually hangs in her foyer.
Curating a show at the Grolier Club entails
substantial expenses. Tane had to underwrite the
catalog, for example. She also hired an assis-
tant, Gabriel Mckee, an author and librarian, who
worked with her part-time for all four years of the
project. Tane described him informally as “my
right hand and my left hand too.” More formally,
as she noted in the catalog, he was her co-editor
and co-curator.
Besides Mckee, Tane cited numerous others who
joined her effort. Johan Kugelberg of Boo-Hooray,
an archives business dedicated to the organiza-
tion, stabilization, and preservation of 20th- and
21st-century cultural movements, specializing in
ephemera, photography, and book arts, provided
some of his interns. Numerous Poe scholar-friends
helped check facts. Some of Tane’s other friends
read copy to make sure it would be understood by
the general public and not just aficionados. Grolier
Club volunteers, experienced with the process of
putting on exhibits, gave their expertise. Jennifer
K. Sheehan, the Grolier’s exhibitions manager,
was the coordinator of everyone.
In addition, Tane’s collector-friend Peter Fawn
of Great Britain lent graphics, music, and some
Poe-influenced popular items—a skateboard was
one—that Tane didn’t have. While Tane’s Poe col-
lection is the world’s foremost in terms of quality,
Fawn’s 30,000-item collection tops hers in terms of
quantity, Tane said. From John Reznikoff, widely
recognized as the preeminent collector of “celeb-
rity hair,” Tane borrowed a locket that contains the
hair of both Poe and his wife, Virginia. There was
also some institutional lending. Most notably, the
Edgar Allan Poe Museum of Richmond, Virginia,
made available a silk vest worn by Poe and his
walking stick.
Yet it was Tane, only Tane, who shouldered “the
responsibility” of what she called “the largest and
probably the most important show I’ve ever been
involved with.”
None of this could possibly have been envi-
sioned by Tane when she became a Poe collector
quite by accident in 1987 while strolling around a
Wendy show at the Seventh Regiment Armory on
66th Street and Park Avenue. There she encoun-
tered dealer Stephan Loewentheil, who had a first
edition of
The Raven and Other Poems
among
his wares. Loewentheil is proprietor of The 19th
Century Rare Book & Photograph Shop, based
in Stevenson, Maryland, just outside Baltimore,
where, as it happens, Poe lived, died, and is bur-
ied. Tane has always been a serious reader and
collected things like swizzle sticks as a child. But
reflecting on her serendipitous introduction to the
world of collecting literary rarities, she said, “Trust
me, I never went into that show to buy a book, but
when I saw it, I just had to have it.” Never mind the
$10,000 price tag. “I had to have it.”
Having begun with a plum such as
The Raven
,
Tane went on to buy something even more remark-
ably rare at Sotheby’s. With Loewentheil acting as
her agent, she acquired a first edition of Poe’s first
book. Self-published in Boston, Poe’s birthplace,
in 1827,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
is the only
book known to have been issued by its printer, Cal-
vin F.S. Thomas, when he and Poe were both just
18 years old. The size of the edition can only be
guessed at. Only 12 copies are known. The institu-
tions that own a
Tamerlane
include London’s Brit-
ish Library; the Henry E. Huntington Library and
Art Gallery in San Marino, California; the library
at the University of Texas, Austin; the New York
Public Library; Indiana University; Free Library
of Philadelphia; and the University of Chicago.
The University of Virginia had one, but it was sto-
len circa 1974. Besides Tane’s, only one other is
owned privately.
Tane’s copy, the most recent to come to light,
was discovered by a Massachusetts-based collector
in 1988 among vintage farming pamphlets at H.G.
Webber Antiques in Hampton, New Hampshire,
a business that continues to operate in the Gran-
ite State. The collector paid $15 for it. The book
went on to Sotheby’s, where bibliophile Richard
Manney bought it for $198,000 (including buyer’s
premium). When it returned to the auction house in
1991, it sold to Loewentheil for $143,000.
Susan Jaffe Tane: From Collector to Curator
by Jeanne Schinto
Photos courtesy collection of Susan Jaffe Tane
Susan Jaffe Tane, pictured in her library. The bibliophile and philan-
thropist earned a B.S. from Boston University’s School of Education
and later pursued postgraduate courses at Hofstra University and
C.W. Post University. She began her career as a schoolteacher and
later launched Fashions by Appointment, a small business dedicated
to dressing local businesswomen. She served for 15 years as vice
president of marketing for a manufacturing company where she was
co-inventor of a patented plastic container and handling assembly.
Widowed, she has two children, four stepchildren, and a number of
grandchildren. Photo credit: Robert Lorenzson.
A copy quarter-plate (4¼" x 3¼") daguerreotype of
Edgar Allan Poe by William Abbott Pratt. The orig-
inal was made by Pratt in September 1849, a month
before Poe’s death. Pratt made the copy in 1854 or
1855 for journalist Thomas Dimmock, who gifted it to
The Players Club’s Hampden-BoothTheatre Library.
Sometime after 1981, the portrait disappeared from
the library. It was discovered in an antiques shop in
Walnut, Iowa, by one Sally Guest, who bought it for
$96. Guest brought it to a filming of
Antiques Road-
show
in 2004 in Omaha, where C. Wesley Cowan
gave it an auction estimate of $30,000/50,000. It was
returned to the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library
in 2005. It is now part of the Tane collection. Photo
credit: Robert Lorenzson.
Tane’s first edition of
Tamerlane and Other
Poems. By a Bostonian.
Published in Boston in
1827, 40 pages, orig-
inal printed wrap-
pers, 6¼" x 4¾".
Photo credit: Robert
Lorenzson.
“I never went into that
show to buy a book, but
when I saw it, I just had
to have it.”
One half of the Grolier Club’s ground-floor gallery as it appeared during
the run of
Evermore.
Photo credit: Robert Lorenzson.