Do you ask “How do all these people manage to earn a livelihood?” Mr. Stammer, the great book dealer from Fourth Avenue, whose specialty is hunting up every book that anybody in the United States might desire, no matter when and where printed, and who knows the most obscure book dealer in the most obscure part of New York, answered this question: “Because two-thirds of the book dealers in New York are selling exclusively almost to the remaining third. The big book dealers very rarely buy books from private sources. These little book shops are our vanguards, that collect the honey for us and we come and take whatever we can use, or they bring it to us, and we are glad to have them come regularly.” Mr. Stammer makes his round to these small book dealers almost constantly every day. He is their educator and patron. He tells them what books are worth money, and he pays a good price whenever he can use them. He is a welcome figure on rent day, and most of the treasures of these cobwebbed corners wander to the comfortable shelves of his palace on Fourth Avenue. 1918 Dealers in Literary Property Letters of celebrated men and women, dead and alive, can today be purchased in the open market. The more private they are and the more they incorporate of the writer’s soul, the higher the price. There is no atmosphere of romance in these transactions. The autograph dealers sell because they wish to make money. The purchasers buy because they desire to possess something unique and because they know that the letters and autographs of celebrities are an excellent investment. Let us put aside untimely sentiment and assume that it is perfectly proper to sell at auction Shelley’s love letters, or that a letter of Poe’s grocer demanding in rude terms immediate payment of two dollars and fifty cents for food supplied, is a fitting library ornament if expensively framed together with the poet’s portrait, and let us visit a few of the important dealers in such literary property in New York. Mr. Benjamin’s office is situated on the third floor of the Brunswick building facing Madison Square. This building occupies the site of the old Brunswick Hotel, once famous as New York’s resting place for the literati who visited the United States. The walls of this place of business are lined with enormous safes, a solitary typewriter clicks solemnly; the dignity of a broker’s office prevails, such dignity as obtains where deeds are executed involving the transfer of millions. Behind an enormous table Mr. Benjamin is seated. Nothing here reminds one of an antiquarian’s cabinet or of a collector’s museum. It is the working table of a bank president, whose chief motto is “efficiency.” “No, there is mighty little romance in this business,” Mr. Benjamin began, and there seemed no reason to doubt his statement.