Bibliovoyeurism: An Author's View of the Codman Family Library

by KATHERINE HALL PAGE

Katherine Hall Page is the award-winning author of the Faith Fairchild mysteries (Wm Morrow/Avon). The Body in the Web, the twenty-sixth, goes on sale in May. Page has also published a cookbook, Have Faith in Your Kitchen, Small Plates (short stories), and books for younger readers. She lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Through her love of books, Page shares a personal and creative perspective on the Codmans' relationship with their family library.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the vast majority of people jump at the opportunity to look around when they are inside the homes of others. Upon so doing, some are drawn to examine the furniture, perhaps the bibelots displayed, while other eyes are drawn to the artwork hanging on the walls. However, when I walk into a room, what I call “bibliovoyeurism” takes immediate hold as I scan the books on the shelves and displayed on coffee tables.

They are what most clearly reveal owners’ personalities and pastimes. In short, the clues are in the books.

Turning left from the entrance hall into the library at the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts, we are given an immediate opportunity to imagine what the family was like: Ogden and Sarah Codman, and their children, Ogden Jr., Alice, Thomas, Bowdoin, Hugh, and Dorothy. In 1862, after a period of fifty-five years, the Codmans had regained possession of the home that Ogden and Sarah named The Grange. It was Tom and Dorothy's summer retreat until 1952, when they moved back year-round to Lincoln after selling the townhouse at 5 Marlborough Street in Boston that they bought after their mother's death in 1922.

The townhouse was also within walking distance of Boston’s most notable bookstores: Goodspeed’s, Lauriat’s, and the Old Corner Bookstore. None of the Codman children had children. Dorothy, the youngest, inhabited The Grange the longest, and fulfilled eldest brother Ogden Jr.’s wish that the estate be left to Historic New England after her death.

Ogden Jr., an architect, interior designer, and author of The Decoration of Houses with fiction writer and fellow interior designer Edith Wharton, was quick to change what had been Ogden Sr.’s billiard room into the library, getting rid of the huge game table. And what a library it is!

The earlier books indicate the senior Codmans’ taste, that of a Boston Brahmin couple. This predilection continued in the next generation to some extent. When the Marlborough Street house was sold, the books there probably would have been added to those at The Grange. Happily, this was a family that kept hold of treasured volumes.

That it was a Francophile family is immediately apparent from the yards of elaborate jewel-toned, leather-bound volumes in French shelved on the cases lining the walls: Essais de Montaigne, Memoires De Talleyrand, Lettres de La Marquise de Sevigne, Lesage’s Gil Blas, the complete works of Balzac, Daudet, Zola, and many more, both fiction and nonfiction. There is a reason for this. Following the catastrophic Boston Fire of 1872, which destroyed much of their real estate holdings, the family moved to Dinard in northern France, and remained there for twelve years. Yet, the bookcases also hold classic literary works in English that we would expect to find in this kind of household: Plutarch’s Lives, Allison’s History of Europe 1815-1852, Lamb’s Works, Burns poems, Edward Everett Hale’s James Russell Lowell and His Friends, and Letters of James Russell Lowell edited by Charles Eliot Norton.

What is wonderful about the library is that it was well used. The books are not for show but have obviously been read and there is an assortment of titles that a designer would have tossed. These include a number of cookery books, many in French, with plain paper covers to protect the original ones: Mrs. Beeton’s Dictionary of Every Day Cookery (1865), Maria Parloa’s New Cook Book (1885), La Cuisine Exotique Chez Soi (1931) by Charlotte Babette Catherine, Escoffier’s Ma Cuisine (1907), Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du Goût

(1825), Miss Leslie’s New Cookbook (an encyclopedic 1837 work that included 1,000 recipes—from fried chicken to Italian pork—adapted for American kitchens, utensils, and measurements). Among the more recent cookbooks is Coffee Cookery by Helmut Ripperger (1940). Aside from its claim to be the first devoted solely to coffee recipes, Ripperger’s coauthors were Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who would go on to greater fame in 1961 publishing Mastering the Art of French Cooking with Julia Child.

Clearly, the Codman household was a family with a fine palate, savoring a wide variety of cuisines. While in Lincoln, they would have enjoyed what the farm produced and, in the Boston dwelling, too, there must have been versatile cooks in the kitchen.

The library has been filled with light the times I’ve been in it and the furniture is perfect for curling up with a book, not just the Zola and Trollope tomes. There is a shelf of eight Reader’s Digest volumes from 1957–1962 that may have been Dorothy Codman’s. Was she drawn by the bestsellers Good Morning, Miss Dove (1950) by Frances Gray Patton? Or The Day Lincoln Was Shot (1955) by Jim Bishop? Another shelf has an assortment ranging from Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape to The Most of S. J. Perlman, a humorist—all books from her later days in the house.

Leaving the library for the drawing room—the 1799 Federal hall used as a ballroom and transformed into the pleasant spacious family gathering place in the 1860s—there are books with clues aplenty. American Gardens, edited by Guy Lowell (1902); Cyclopedia of American Horticulture

by L. H. Bailey (1906);

and John R. Whiting’s A Treasury of American Gardens indicate a desire for a broad knowledge of gardening. The view from the windows of the beautiful results of this interest must have been extremely gratifying.

There are several guides covering the British card game whist, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including American Whist (1890), as well as several copies of Hoyle’s Games. I picture the Codmans enjoying these parlor games—before there was screen time of all sorts—after dinner on a summer evening. The sense of leisure hours is also conveyed by the titles lined up on the tabletops as if someone had set them out as “to be read” or “reread,” among them: The Victor Book of The Opera, Richardson’s Clarissa, Sinclair Lewis’s The Man Who Knew Coolidge, and Radclyffe Hall’s The Master of the House

That this was a well-traveled family is revealed by a well-thumbed Inglese–Italiano dictionary and a large number of fiction and nonfiction unbound paper editions, mostly in French, some in English. These were sold with the intent that the purchaser would have the book bound in hardcover if desired. The bound Trollopes in the library are an example of that, with a few of the original paper Tauchnitz editions (the German publisher who pioneered the method) remaining. In pre-

Kindle days, the Codmans would have bought these books to read on trips abroad.

The drawing room is a beautiful place to linger, and by now this family has been revealed in some detail by their books—one devoted to pleasures of travel, the table, the garden, and intellectual pursuits— but an amazing clue awaits. A denouement. Not in the charming blue and white morning room (only a dozen horticultural books, including well-worn field guides, in a very narrow case behind a chair), nor the impressive Elizabethan-style dining room (wonderful china and art, no books), but located in an out-of-the way place: the domestic staff’s back stair. Behind the doors of simple hanging white-painted cabinets, of a type to hold various household objects, are shelves filled with hardcover crime fiction (pictured on page 8). Most are in the original book jackets, dating from the 1920s to the end of Dorothy Codman’s life in the late 1960s. For me, a reader and writer of mysteries, it was like looking into Ali Baba’s cave. Some of the cabinet doors are stuck shut and others are locked—making the thought of the unknown contents tantalizing. I showed the some 160 titles I was able to photograph and list to Stephen Powell, owner of Bar Harbor/Mystery Cove Book Shop in Hulls Cove, Maine. He is a world-renowned authority on the genre and was able to fill in some of the blanks for me—authors I did not know.

Dorothy Codman shared her family’s love of French literature and the language, but when it came to her personal library, she was a devoted Anglophile, although I later learned there were some titles in French, notably Simenon’s Maigret series. Most of the titles are from the “Golden Age” of British crime writing (roughly 1920–1950). I recognized, among others, what must have been her favorites based on the number of titles: Philip MacDonald and E. Phillips Oppenheim—the James Pattersons of the time. There are sixteen titles by Anthony Gilbert, many in the series featuring the London lawyer and amateur detective Arthur Crook. This author’s name was a new one for me. And it was not the writer’s real identity; Anthony

Gilbert was Lucy Beatrice Malleson’s nom de plume. It was a joy to see many authors I enjoy: Josephine Tey, Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, E. X. Ferrars, and Mary Roberts Rhinehart. The mysteries of Rhinehart, an American, were written in what came to be termed the “Had I But Known” narrative style, which was enormously popular. Many of the titles were adapted for the theater, film, and television. At the time of her death her books had sold over ten million copies. Then there is British novelist Patricia Wentworth, known for her amateur detective Miss Maud Silver, a retired schoolmistress of a certain age who gently steers Scotland Yard in the right direction. Rhinehart had a similar series with the protagonist Hilda Adams, a private duty nurse. Both are older main characters, women who go against type. Murder is at the forefront, but there is humor as well in Dorothy Codman’s choices. And her choices reflect an insistence on good writing. All the authors were known for their expertise and there were many award winners among them. The books also convey a strong sense of place and inform period details.

When I asked Stephen Powell to engage in bibliovoyeurism and describe the reader of the collection, he responded, “I’d say Dorothy Codman was a welleducated lady with a preference for sophisticated puzzles over action and thrills.” We both agreed that she would have eagerly anticipated a new title from her favorite authors and ordered it from bookstores. The Concord Bookshop opened its doors in 1940 and may have been one.

Many of the books have small, handwritten paper labels on the base of the spines with the author, title, and a date—that of purchase it seems. I learned from Powell that in many cases, the jackets are worth more than the book with the jacket; pristine book covers, especially those of certain cover artists, are rare. It is ironic that what some may have viewed as lesser literature is much more valuable than all the leatherbound sets elsewhere in the house and certainly more than the stacks of National Geographic issues.

Whist is a classic strategic English trick-taking card game popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A precursor to bridge— often mentioned in literature: Jules Verne, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Colson Whitehead—whist variations abound.

There are books all over the house. Tantalizing! I am writing about what I could see, but I am sure this family read other British detective fiction—Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and others. Tucked between the hardcovers there were a few Penguin paperbacks with green covers denoting the genre. More elsewhere?

Inevitably I became most interested in Dorothy Codman, the youngest in the family. Based on the books she read I have formed a picture of what I believe was a delightful woman, a kindred spirit. I learned that she collected Dennis the Menace comic strips, which debuted in 1951. Over tea I’d like to ask her why she was attracted by the energetic five-year-old who truly tries to help people, but always finds himself in trouble with an “All’s well that ends well” ending.

I came across an article, “Lincoln and the Codmans,” written by Lincoln resident Thomas Boylston Adams for Old-Time New England in 1981. He describes an encounter when his mother went to the house for help after her automobile broke down at the Codman front gate. She rang the doorbell and out “burst Dorothy Codman, profuse in greeting, overflowing with pleasure and hospitality.” Adams recalled visits with “all of us children, now quite grown up” that followed at Dorothy’s insistence. He goes on to describe a scene in late October 1940, when having proposed at a nearby location and been accepted, he and his fiancée, Ramelle Frost Cochrane, went to tell Dorothy, Hugh, and Tom their secret. “Their joy and happiness was as sincere as if it had been their own.”

I reread some of Dorothy’s books that I own, and my bibliovoyeurism became something much more. Whitman’s phrase, “Whoever you are holding me now in hand” came to mind as I felt a joyful connection with this particular booklover and her family, an invisible thread tying me to the twentieth, nineteenth, and even eighteenth centuries on the shelves of The Grange.