Twenty-five miles north of New York City on the eastern shore of the Hudson River lies Tarrytown in an area called Tappan Zee (Tappan for the local people of the Lenape; zee is Dutch for sea) in Westchester County, NY. It was home to the Weckquaesgeek who cultivated the land, fished and hunted there.
The European earliest residence in what would become Tarrytown was built in about 1645. Its first white pioneers were farmers, fur trappers and fishermen from the Low Countries. The local soil was light and loamy and suitable for growing wheat. It has been argued that the village’s name was derived from the Dutch word for wheat (tarwe); others maintain that it was named for John Tarry, an early settler from Long Island.
Lords of the Manor
Tarrytown’s history started with the activities of the Dutch merchant and slave trader Frederick Philipse (born Frederik Flypsen in 1626 in Bolsward, Friesland) who had arrived in New Netherland in about 1653 and began buying land. He acquired 90,000 acres and built his estate and gristmill in the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow from where, using an enslaved African labor force, he distributed grain along the Hudson. Philipse was also responsible for erecting the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow in 1685.
When the English took over the colony, Frederick pledged allegiance to the Crown for which he was granted a Royal Charter in 1693, creating the Manor of Philipsburg. Upon his death in 1702 he was one of the area’s largest landowners. His son Adolph succeeded him as Lord of the Manor, further expanding the family holdings.
By the late nineteenth century Tarrytown had become a favorite residence of many affluent New Yorkers. It was home to a number of industrial giants, representing a very American story of commercial success and cultural investment which resulted in the foundation of some great museums, libraries and institutions of learning.
John D. Rockefeller settled in the town in 1893. His grand mansion Kykuit, located on the highest point in Pocantico Hills and surrounded by fine gardens overlooking the Hudson River, was completed in 1906. The name (meaning “look-out”) is a reminder of Tarrytown’s Dutch heritage. By the mid-1910s the estate symbolized the excesses of unrestrained capitalism.
In 1914, Kykuit and other local residences became the site of numerous anarchist demonstrations and the intended target of several dynamite bombing attacks.
Rockefeller had been preceded by another industrialist. Born in October 1784 in the village of Hose, Leicestershire, Robert Hoe sailed from Liverpool to the city of New York in 1803 after finishing his apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner.
Having married Rachel Smith in Salem in January 1805, he joined his brothers-in-law Peter and Matthew Smith to establish a workshop Smith, Hoe & Co. at Cedar Street, Manhattan, manufacturing a hand printing press. In 1811, they moved the firm to Pearl Street.
After the death of his partners Robert took charge of the business in 1823, changed the name to Robert Hoe & Co.: Machinists, and moved to the firm to Gold Street. Aware of the growing demand for printing tools, he manufactured what is believed to have been the first cylinder press in America in 1827. Robert introduced the Hoe press and was (probably) the first American machinist to employ steam as a motor for his machinery.
Washington Irving’s Sunnyside
Failing health compelled Robert’s retirement from business in 1832 and he died the following year in Tarrytown. Two years later Washington Irving settled in the area, acquiring a property that was part of the Manor of Philipsburg.
Known as Wolfert’s Roost, the history of the farmhouse dated back to 1650 and had been built by Dutch-born Wolfert Acker, a one-time privy council to Peter Stuyvesant and the second deacon of Sleepy Hollow’s Old Dutch Church (having succeeded his brother Jan Acker in that role). Wolfert acted later as an official of the English colonial government. He featured in Washington Irving’s short story collection Wolfert’s Roost and Miscellanies (1855).
Having renamed the estate Sunnyside, Irving wrote what he considered his “crowning effort” there, the five-volume biography of George Washington, completing the work only weeks before his death in November 1859.
In the meantime, Robert II and Richard March continued the Hoe business. Robert was both an effective manager of the firm and a man of culture who acted as patron of numerous young artists (he died in Tarrytown in September 1884 and is buried in Sleepy Hollow).
Richard by contrast had inherited his father’s inventive mechanical skills. He was a pioneer in developing improved presses that used the novelty of continuous paper rolls. His rotary press (patented in 1847) became known in the trade as Hoe’s “lightning press” as it enabled the printing of newspapers in volume and at speed.
The press gained a world-wide reputation. A later improved version named Hoe’s web perfecting press was first used by the New York Tribune, producing 18,000 sheets an hour, printed on both sides. By 1855 the company employed four hundred people.
In 1873, the Hoe brothers moved the firm to Grant Street, in between Sherrif and Columbia Streets. The business flourished. The era of press barons had arrived.
The mechanical printing press was one of the most significant inventions of the Industrial Revolution. It allowed copies of texts and images to be printed rapidly and cheaply. Newspapers, pamphlets and books were mass produced and distributed, spreading news and propaganda, socio-political campaigns as well as novels and poetry.
Whilst the mass availability of printed materials was celebrated as an step forwards, bibliophiles looked back to the past, lamenting the decline in quality caused by industrial book production.
In 1891, William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press. With carefully crafted publications, he set out to re-awaken the lost ideals of book design and inspire higher standards of production at a time that the printed page was at its poorest. In seven years of operation, Morris’s hand-operated press published fifty-three books in 18,000 copies. William Morris initiated an era of private press experiments which intensified the appreciation for fine printing and revived the skills of design and bookbinding in Europe and America.
Although Robert III (born in March 1839, the eldest son of Robert II) followed in the family tradition of printing press manufacturers, his ambition as a man “infected by book collecting” was to preserve
the great history of traditional printing.
As early as 1873, he had reserved nine rooms of his house at 11 East 36th Street (destroyed in 1911) for his collection. Hoe would become one of America’s foremost bibliophiles, assembling a rich variety of illuminated manuscripts, samples of early printing, illustrated books and fine bindings. Catalogues of his library were unique from both a typographical and bibliographical standpoint.
The Grolier Club
The nineteenth century was the age in which reason freed itself from religious restraints by establishing academic institutions. Yet, until late in the century, knowledge formation was not driven by universities, but by an array of learned societies that flourished in both cities and province.
Knowledge was diffused in a context of “club” sociability, creating the charismatic persona of the scholar. These societies were characterized by a cross-disciplinary approach to research rather than by an attempt to divide the domain of knowledge into a set of specialist disciplines.
The trend was set by the founding of London’s Royal Society in 1660 and the Academy of Sciences in Paris six years later. By the turn of the century, learned societies covering a range of subject areas had proliferated.
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin, was the nation’s first learned group aimed at promoting knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, publishing and the provision of library resources.
On the evening of January 23, 1884, Robert III invited to his home eight fellow bibliophiles to discuss the formation of a club devoted to the creation of books. Although the nine men differed in age and occupation, they shared the opinion that the arts of printing and typography in late nineteenth-century America were in need of reform. Amongst those present were Manhattan-born William Loring Andrews, book collector and first librarian of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That same evening a resolution was adopted specifying the purpose of the organization, a committee appointed to select a name and another to draft a constitution. Within two weeks the club was named after the French bibliophile Jean Grolier and a constitution drawn up. The Grolier Club of the City of New York was founded “to foster the study, collecting and appreciation of books and works on paper, their art, history, production and commerce.” Its mission was (and remains) to promote the book and graphic arts through exhibitions and educational programs.
In March 1884, the Club opened its doors at 64 Madison Avenue. Six years later, Robert III provided the land for Grolier’s first building at 29 East 32nd Street. He acted as the Club’s first President from 1884 to 1888 (and was succeeded by William Loring Andrews).
In fall 1895 a surprise addition was unveiled to the Club’s headquarters. Its unattractive grill room had been transformed into a Dutch-style tapperij (taproom) with an impressive oven, Delft tiles, blue-and-cream dishware, clay pipe racks and smoke-seasoned rafters. Beer was flowing from a cask, whilst small knobbed glass windows reflected the gleam of pewter and brass. Sand was strewn on the floor and some members suggested wearing wooden clogs in the room.
Physician and Club member Frederick A Castle came up with the design of the taproom (on the assumption that bibliophiles love books and beer in equal measure) which was realized by German-American William Shannon Miller. It was as if Washington Irving had made a return visit. Widely reported in the press, the opening of the room rekindled interest in the New Amsterdam era.
During the Club’s move in 1917 to its current home at 47 East 60th Street (designed by Grolier member Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue), the tapperij was dismantled and moved along to the fourth floor of the new base.
A Sensational Sale
Robert Hoe put his vast experience as a collector into writing. In 1880, he edited an American edition of Joseph Maberly’s The Print Collector (first published in London in 1844). He was, in addition, author of A Lecture on Bookbinding as a Fine Art (1886) and A Short History of the Printing Press (1902).
Robert III was married to Liverpool-born Olivia James and he spent a good deal of time in Europe to attend some of the major book sales in London, Paris and elsewhere (he actually died in London in September 1909 at his residence at 38 Brunswick Square; by 1911 that property was occupied by members of the Bloomsbury Group).
On April 24, 1911, Anderson Auction Company began The First Sale of the Robert Hoe Library at their (new) premises on Madison Avenue and 40th Street. Elaborate arrangements had been made leading up to the auction. Annotated catalogues were produced by the outstanding bibliographer Arthur Swann which carried a foreword by Beverly Chew, himself a notable bibliophile, who called the collection the “finest the country has ever produced.”
Never before had an American book sale attracted similar public interest. Record-breaking prices paid by intriguing local and foreign bidders were reported as news events in the daily press. Among the treasures were a Gutenberg Bible on vellum (sold for $50,000, then the highest price ever paid for a book), a Shakespeare First Folio, the Book of St Albans (all bought on behalf of the railway magnet Henry Edwards Huntington), a Gutenberg Bible on paper (bought by the London dealer Bernard Quaritch; now at Harvard) and a Morte d’Arthur (acquired by J.P. Morgan).
The sale of some 15,000 lots realized almost $2 million, an auction result that at the time was unprecedented. Some outstanding items made their way back to Europe, but most of the collection remained in America and found its way to various illustrious institutions.
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Illustrations, from above: “The Mill-Dam at Sleepy Hollow” by Currier & Ives, ca. 1857; A map of Philipsburg Manor with current borders overlaid on the property; Christian Schussele’s “Washington Irving and his Literary Friends at Sunnyside,” 1864 (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian); Hoe & Co.’s powerful presence in Grant Street, 1884 (NYPL); François Flameng’s “Jean Grolier in the House of Aldus Manutius,” 1889 (Grolier Club); The Dutch ‘tapperij’ at the Grolier Club (photo by Nicole Neenan); and Vol. 1 of Robert Hoe’s book sale catalogue, 1911.
