Maine Antique Digest March 2015

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Maine Antique Digest, March 2015 35-C
- FEATURE -
The cover has a circular mark on it obviously made by the bottom
of a wet drinking glass. “That’s how much they thought of it,” Tane
said of whatever previous owner had been so careless. “They used it
for a coaster.” That afternoon at her apartment, the coaster Tane gave
me to put under my teacup was a facsimile of that abused cover—
from a set given to her as a gift by Loewentheil.
With both The Raven and Tamerlane in her possession, Tane had
to make a decision. She could go on to collect other high spots of
19th-century literature or she could concentrate on Poe. Icon-buying
is the style of collecting preferred by many new collectors, perhaps
because, although it takes more money, it takes less time. Nonethe-
less, while Tane does now have notable works by other 19th-century
masters, she decided at that turning point to dive deeply into Poe, col-
lecting not only first editions and manuscripts but also letters, peri-
odicals, newspapers and other ephemera, Poe artifacts, Poe-inspired
artworks, books about Poe, illustrated Poe titles, and all sorts of other
Poeana. What is Poeana? Here’s one example from the Tane collec-
tion: a copy of Register of the Army and Navy of the United States for
1830, where Poe is listed on page 84 as a student at the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point. (He was there for seven months, dismissed
for deliberately bad behavior in January 1831.)
“I often give talks on collecting, and I tell people that, rather than
getting high spots, you can develop a much more important collec-
tion if you specialize in one area,” Tane told me. “It wasn’t that I was
so smart. It was just more interesting to me to do that.”
Tane’s story of Poe begins with his forebears, a complicated family
tree. Numerous pieces of ephemera represent the theater backgrounds
of some of his biological relatives. These include two playbill broad-
sides advertising performances by Poe’s grandmother Elizabeth
Arnold and copies of plays in which Poe’s parents performed. Tane
has, from Poe’s adoptive family, a seven-piece decanter set, each
piece etched with an “A” monogram. The set was originally owned
by Poe’s foster father, John Allan. It came to Tane from “a man who
was selling some of his things down south,” said Tane. “People who
have things find me. They want me to have them. They know I’ll take
good care of them and that I’ll share them.”
Items that relate to Poe’s early successes include not
just Tane’s rarer than rare Tamerlane, which has
been called “the black tulip of American litera-
ture.” She also has such things as a copy of the
periodical in which his prize-winning tale of 1833,
“MS. Found in a Bottle,” was published. An auto-
graph manuscript of Poe’s early tale “Epimanes,” is
another of her treasures. A single folded leaf of four
pages, it is the only Poe tale, early or late, in private
hands. I was shown “Epimanes” in Tane’s library
on the afternoon of my visit and marveled at Poe’s
tiny handwriting that resembles lacework. I marveled
again at the perfectly formed rows of inked words
when I saw “Epimanes” and other manuscripts in the
exhibit. This evidence of his steady hand is particularly
notable considering the notoriously unstable nature of
his mental life.
As Poe’s literary stature grew, he began to attract
fans. A book (not one of Poe’s own) that he inscribed
to a young admirer is part of Tane’s collection. He also
acquired unimpressed critics, one of whom described The
Raven as “a parcel of current trash.” He had numerous lit-
erary feuds over what critics said about him and what he
said as a critic about others. That’s par for many a writer, but
when he got himself involved with two married women (an
image of one, Frances Sargent Osgood, is owned by Tane),
the scandal led to his banishment from the New York branch
of the literary world.
Poe’s famous tale “The Cask of Amontillado,” whose
protagonist’s plot of revenge is ignited by an insult, reflects
some of the anger Poe felt toward his banishers, Tane specu-
lates in her catalog. More overtly autobiographical is his poem
“Ulalume,” which first appeared in The American Review: A Whig
Journal in 1847, a copy of which Tane has in original wrappers. The
poem was inspired by the death of Virginia Poe within the same year.
The poem’s narrator wanders through a landscape with “ashen and
sober skies”—a “ghoul-haunted woodland”—until he comes upon
the tomb of his beloved on the anniversary of her death.
When Poe married Virginia, she was 13 and he was 27. Poe’s first
cousin, Virginia died at age 24. Poe himself died two years later at
age 40. “There was a terrible obituary of Poe written by Rufus Gris-
wold that starts with something like, ‘He’ll be missed by nobody,’”
Tane said. Actually, the wording was “He had few or no friends,” and
it is true that only eight people attended his funeral. His write-up in
the New-York Organ, a weekly journal devoted to the cause of tem-
perance, was no better than Griswold’s. It called Poe an “unhappy,
self ruined man.” Poe’s cause of death, however, has never been
determined.
A traditional biography would end there. Not this one. Poe’s after-
life, as Tane calls it, is the subject of the second half of her Poe story.
In that afterlife, Poe’s literary greatness was gradually understood;
his reputation underwent repair; and even his bodily remains were
exhumed and dealt with more reverently than they had been upon his
demise. Buried in Baltimore in the Poe family plot, he was relocated
in 1875 to a new marble monument in the city’s Westminster Hall
and Burial Ground. At the time of the exhumation, artifacts were
“collected,” including coffin fragments. Tane owns one.
In 1909, the centenary of Poe’s birth, there were celebrations
and publications. The Grolier Club itself issued a bronze memorial
medallion, sculpted by Edith Woodman Burroughs, in an edition of
277. Tane has one of them. On September 26, 1930, the first meeting
of the Edgar Allan Poe Club was held at 530 North 7th Street, Phil-
adelphia, where Poe, Virginia, and Virginia’s mother, Maria Clemm,
lived in 1843. (Today it is a National Historic Site.)
A certificate commemorating the event was signed by a participant
who was an early collector of Poeana, as well as
the then owner of the house, Richard Gimbel. Tane
owns that certificate. She got it on eBay.
Tane has not neglected artists’ renderings of
Poe-inspired images. They constituted a rich part
of the show, and many were reproduced in the cat-
alog. One of them is from a series of woodcuts by
Antonio Frasconi (1919-2013), published in 1959
in The Face of Edgar Allan Poe with a text by
Charles Baudelaire. Another is a lithograph of a
raven’s head by Édouard Manet for his illustrated
book of The Raven, titled in French Le Corbeau.
Published in 1875, the book, with a translated text
by Stéphane Mallarmé, is signed by both men.
On the afternoon I visited Tane in her apartment,
she told me the show would be called “From Poe
to Pop.” In the end, the Grolier Club thought that
title didn’t reflect the importance of this nearly
500-object show or its full depth and breadth. “So
we had a brainstorming session,” Tane recalled,
“and ‘Evermore’ came out.”
The original “From Poe to Pop” phrase was
retained as the title of one of the show’s final chap-
ters. That was all about kitschy Poe. A T-shirt with
an image of Poe captioned “Dropout” says every-
thing we need to know about how Poe’s popularity
has made him a hero in circles other than literary
ones. The same goes for the skateboard of Tane’s
fellow collector Peter Fawn. On the board’s deck is
an illustration of a raven pecking the top of Poe’s
head, which is opened like a lid to reveal the pink
squiggles of his brain.
If asked to choose my favorite item in the show,
I would say Tane’s photograph of the place where
Poe is thought to have composed The Raven. It is
an image of a farmhouse in a rural setting. In fact,
it is present-day West 84th Street. Poe lived there
in 1844 (The Raven was published in 1845) when
what is now the Upper West Side was far from the
heart of the city. It’s not a particularly rare image,
but it provides the kind of context that makes this
collection unique. That quality is also what made
Tane’s telling of Poe’s story in an exhibit so appeal-
ing. Now that the show is over, the same quality is,
likewise, the reason why the catalog makes such a
satisfying permanent record.
Of collecting Poe over these last nearly 30 years,
Tane told another interviewer, “I love doing this.
I love putting all the pieces together, and there’s
still so much more to learn.” She has, however,
moved on a bit to Walt Whitman. The bicentennial
of his birth is May 31, 2019, and she hints that she
is gearing up for it. “I had the opportunity to buy
some major Whitman pieces from someone. I have
the good pieces. I need some fillers,” she said.
In the more immediate future, Tane is under-
taking another Grolier Club exhibit of items from
her collection, this time one that is not Poe-cen-
tric. Scheduled for September to November 2016,
the as-yet-untitled show will explore 19th-century
American authors’ relationships with each other
and with their publishers. For more information,
contact the Grolier Club through its Web site
).
This gold engagement ring was given by Poe to Sarah
Elmira Royster in 1849, shortly before he was struck with
whatever ailment killed him. It is engraved “Edgar.” The
ring was sold along with other items and accompanying
documents to Tane for $96,000 at a Profiles in History
sale in December 2012. The cache came directly from Poe
descendants. As a teenager, Royster became Poe’s first
love, but her father’s disapproval ended the relationship
while Poe was at the University of Virginia, where he did
no better than he had at West Point. She married, had
children, and was widowed in 1844. Poe came back into
her life four years later; they were engaged but never
married. Photo credit: Robert Lorenzson.
Dust jacket of Evermore: The Persistence of Poe:
The Edgar Allan Poe Collection of Susan Jaffe
Tane. It was published in hardcover by the Gro-
lier Club in conjunction with the exhibit of the
same name, on view at the club from September
17 through November 22, 2014. The book is 208
pages and fully illustrated. Its price is $60 plus
shipping and handling from Oak Knoll Books
), exclusive distributors of
Grolier Club publications. The portrait of Poe
on the cover is a woodcut by Antonio Frasconi.
Belgian poster for Roger Corman’s
1965 film of The Raven (Le Corbeau).
The poster measures 21¼" x 14". Cor-
man’s popular series of Poe adaptations
“take great liberties with their source
materials,” the Evermore catalog states.
Photo credit: Robert Lorenzson.