Zeitlin Auction: A Bittersweet Final Chapter

For 40 years--until it closed Nov. 3--Josephine Ver Brugge Zeitlin welcomed visitors to the red barn on La Cienega, the home of Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, Booksellers. This week she has been telling them, tongue in cheek, that the old building “is going to become a mini-mall.”

For days bibliophiles have been trickling through, sneak-previewing today’s auction of books, furniture and oddities that will be the closing chapter in the story of Jacob (Jake) Zeitlin, book lover, mentor, friend of the famous, raconteur.

At 10:30 a.m. today at 815 N. La Cienega, auctioneer George Lowry, president of Swann Galleries of New York, will offer to the highest bidders an eclectic collection of 273 lots that includes Zeitlin’s books, antiques, scientific apparatus and even his file cabinets.

“There really wasn’t anyone who could step into his shoes,” said his widow, Josephine Zeitlin, explaining the family’s decision to close up shop after Zeitlin’s death last August at 84.

For Josephine Zeitlin, for 48 years his wife and, for 45, his helpmate in the book business, the closing of the red barn is a “painful” time. For six years, from 1948 to 1954, the building had been both bookstore and home. The loft-like upstairs, later an art gallery, had been family bedrooms. Once, there were kitchen, living room and dining room where the offices now are. Son Joel, 45, a math professor on sabbatical from Cal State Northridge, recalled with a twinge of nostalgia how, as a kid, living there, he was free to ride his bike up and down La Cienega.

Some time in the future the 3,500-square-foot barn, with its raftered ceiling, weathered brick fireplace and plank flooring, will go up for sale. The property, which began as an antiques emporium in 1940, was bought by the Zeitlins in 1948 “for $31,500,” as Josephine Zeitlin recalls.

Prime commercial properties in West Hollywood at $30,000 and change are history but, she is able to say with a certain amount of satisfaction, “Los Angeles is growing all the time as a book center.”

In the world of booksellers, Zeitlin stories abound. He was always something of a fixture at the California International Antiquarian Book Fair, an annual event that will get under way for the 21st time at 4 p.m. Friday at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and continue through the weekend.

At the 1982 book fair, Zeitlin held court from a seat near the entrance to the exhibit area, his broken right foot in a cast. He had explained, “I was walking downstairs reading. Reading’s dangerous, you know.”

“He had friends in all levels of society,” said Muir Dawson, co-owner of Dawson’s Book Shop on Larchmont Boulevard, a firm established by his father in 1905 (22 years before Jake Zeitlin opened his first bookstore downtown). Through the years, friends included John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley (whom he persuaded to come to Hollywood to write movie scripts that were to include “Jane Eyre”); Lawrence Clark Powell, a one-time Zeitlin employee who became UCLA’s librarian; photographer Edward Weston, William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg and D. H. Lawrence.

The first of Zeitlin’s bookshops opened in 1927 at 567 S. Hope St. As his fortunes improved, so did his quarters. The second shop, on 6th Street, was designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright. There was a third move, to a former estate stables on Carondelet Street near Westlake (now MacArthur) Park, before Zeitlin & Ver Brugge settled in at the red barn.

Here, Barbara Rootenberg first met Jake Zeitlin, a meeting that was to change the direction of her life. It was about 17 years ago, she recalled, and there was another browser in the shop, “a wide-eyed boy of about 12. He was probably looking for a comic book. Well, Jake walks down and gets this little boy and sits him down and spends over an hour, talking to him about rare books. It was so beautiful. That’s how I fell in love with Jake.”

On subsequent visits, Zeitlin and Rootenberg talked and talked books. “I was kind of his protege,” said Rootenberg, whose background was in literature. With his encouragement, 16 years ago she opened B and L Rootenberg Rare Books in Sherman Oaks, specializing in science and medicine.

‘Really Competitors’

“We were really competitors after a while,” she said, “but that meant nothing to him. When new people went into the business he’d buy something from them even if he didn’t want it, just to give them a start.”

She will be there today for the auction, even though she has her own private collection of Zeitlin memorabilia, “a case filled with things he had given me, letters he had written, pictures that he signed for me, my own secret stash.”

If today’s auction is a bittersweet occasion, Joel Zeitlin, for one, takes some solace in the fact that “a lot of things, instead of disappearing, will go to the people who were interested in them.”

It will be farewell, though, for the seven employees, one of whom will become a book dealer, one an independent bibliographer, one of whom has taken a position with UCLA working in special collections. Hobbling around the store on a basketball-injured foot, son-in-law Glenn Kaplan, bookkeeper and office manager and husband of Adriana Zeitlin, said he was still exploring options.

The best of the Zeitlin & Ver Brugge book collection will not go on the auction block today. Earlier, 488 cartons--books on the history of science and medicine, other rare books and reference libraries--were shipped to New York where they will be offered by Swann Galleries at auctions in April, June and September.

“We just thought (New York) was a wider market,” Joel Zeitlin said, expressing some regret that the collection would not be sold here to help “to promote book activity in California.”

The piece de resistance among today’s auction items, in the view of auctioneer Lowry, is not a book but a Gothic style Flemish chest, possibly 16th-Century, that the Zeitlins bought from an antique dealer-friend in Santa Barbara about 35 years ago. Estimated value: $10,000.

‘An Authentic Rat Hole’

Josephine Zeitlin ran her fingers appreciatively over its carved facade, pointed to a wood plug in one side and said, “Jake always said that this is an authentic rat hole.”

Another highly valued item is a walnut wine table, French or English, circa 1800, also valued at up to $10,000. “When we bought the building and moved in, it was here,” Josephine Zeitlin explained.

Among books-by-the-shelf buyers will find “Fishes of the British Islands,” Joseph Wambaugh’s “The Choirboys” and such diverse volumes as “French Tapestry,” “Synagogues of Europe,” “Diseases of the Liver, Pancreas and Suprarenal Glands,” “Minerals for Atomic Energy” and “The Executive in Transition.”

Preview visitors included Mitsuo Nitta, proprietor of Yushodo bookshop in Tokyo, a member of the international rare booksellers’ fraternity to which Jake Zeitlin had belonged. Josephine Zeitlin greeted him as an old friend, telling a visitor that he had bought from her husband the first four portfolios of Shakespeare and a renowned Mark Twain collection. Nitta left with a gift of a pair of bell-shaped bookends.

The Shakespeare portfolio sale had been noteworthy, but the most significant for Zeitlin had been the sale in 1983 of 144 illuminated manuscripts from the 7th to 16th centuries to the Getty Museum for $30 million. He once told a reporter, “I finally became a millionaire when I turned 80.”

It is a big week for books in Southern California. Earlier this week, a small part of the renowned collection of the late Estelle Doheny, which she had donated to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, was sold at auction by Christie’s in Camarillo, and was expected to bring more than $3 million.

“We don’t expect to get as much as the Doheny sale,” Joel Zeitlin said, but sometimes “low estimates invite activity. We hope that we’ve invited activity.”

Doing his diplomatic best to dodge the question of whether New York is a better market for rare book sellers, auctioneer Lowry finally acknowledged, “Camarillo to the contrary,” California is generally thought of as being somewhat “provincial” in these matters--cowboy art excepted.

What does he expect the Zeitlin & Ver Brugge auction to bring in? Well, Lowry said, don’t underestimate “the legend of Jake Zeitlin” and “mob psychology.” By day’s end, Lowry said, “The place will be bare to the walls.” He projects the bidding will add up to about $100,000 and looks for “close to a million, easily” from the entire collection, including the three book auctions in New York.

He paused and said, “Los Angeles is losing an institution. I would rather not be doing this.”

Josephine Zeitlin was remembering how it all began. A schoolteacher from Kansas, she’d come West with a college roommate in 1937 “to seek my fortune.” She’d yearned to be in the book business and, before heading for California, had written letters to all the booksellers in Los Angeles. Jake Zeitlin wrote back.

“He asked me to come to tea,” she recalled. “Isn’t that romantic?” They met, and she asked him for a job. He said no. Apparently, he had other plans for this young woman. He did arrange another job interview for her and she got that job but in 1941 left to open her own bookstore, Ver Brugge Books, dealing in scientific periodicals. (It’s now Zeitlin Periodicals on La Brea and the proprietor is Jake Zeitlin’s nephew).

She had had her store about a year when he decided to close his and, she likes to say, “He joined me. He said, ‘Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, that’s a great name. Once you get it you don’t forget it.’ ”