Building the House of Books                      13

of thought in particular words, I actually wanted to be responsible for
that physical object known as a book. I associated my love of literature
with these objects, with leaves and hard covers and, with luck, dust
wrappers.

I knew there was this place in New York. I had got the address. I
wasn't prepared for the proprietor at all. This was on the ninth floor
up on .Madison, and there I found this wonderful, bird-like lady who
was neat, with an acute eye, a very busy, competent, attractive way of
addressing one, looking at one, and I was enchanted by her and I kept
going back. But it was very difficult to buy a book off her. I hardly
ever succeeded because one didn't feel one could very often sneak a
surreptitious look at the shelves. It was like being in somebody's house
and finding oneself in the library; it seemed rather rude to examine the
person's books. And the idea that one might open some kind of nego-
tiaticm about buying a book was absolutely impossible. And, in the end,
actually quite soon, I realised I ^^'asn't really a customer, I was one of
her friends, and that is where I went to see her.... Margie was there
and you came to find her, and I shall always think it a privilege to have
found her.

Stoppard and many of Margie's good friends shared in her joy
at the gala parties that were held at the University of Virginia
Library and elsewhere in Charlottesville to celebrate her gift of
the typescript of Hemingway's The Suv Also Rises to the library
and the opening of the splendid exhibition of which it \^'as a cen¬
terpiece.

Buoyed by this event and, subsequently, by her admission to
the Grolier Club, Margie's zest for life and her amazing energy
seemed those of a far younger person. In fact, younger people
walking on the street with her panted trying to keep up \\-ith the
pace she set. And, of course, she continued to be a familiar visitor
in book shops across the country and in London, to \\-hich she
traveled almost every year. One of the California book dealers,
Ralph Sipper of Joseph the Provider in Santa Barbara, has written
that on her last trip to his shop in 1981, "she divided her time in
the office between climbing the highest rung of our library ladder