The Library of Alan H. Kempner

KENNETH A. LOHF

In his memoirs, the late Alan H. Kempner wrote, "I've always
read books and accumulated them wherever I could." Book¬
sellers in Paris and London, rare book shops in New York,
Pittsburgh, or wherever the Kempners were traveling and living,
catalogues of dealers throughout the country, these were the
sources for the first editions and beaux livres that Alan collected
from his childhood on the upper west side of New York, through
his years as an undergraduate at Columbia where he majored in
Latin, and to his last years in the comfortable home on Kempner
Lane in Purchase that he and his wife built in 1929. His library and
collection of old master prints have now come to the University as
the generous gift of his widow, JMargaret L. Kempner, and are
housed and maintained in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library
as a memorial to his long associations with the University and the
Friends of the Libraries.

The library room on the first floor of the Kempner home, an
intimate and welcoming room with books shelved from floor to
ceiling, was the room to which Alan invited guests to be shown his
treasures, and to be encouraged to handle them. He knew his
books intimately, like old friends, because he read them and con¬
tinued to reread his favorite authors—Gibbon, Dickens,
Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, and Conan Doyle, among countless
others. Characteristically, his bookplate, designed for him by
Rockwell Kent, depicts a young man, propped on his elbows and
deep in concentration, reading a book.

Alan's interest in old master prints dates from 1920 when he and
Margaret, traveling abroad, began acquiring etchings and engrav¬
ings at the shop of Paul Proute on the rue de Seine in Paris. The

Opposite: Among Alan Kcmpncr's favorite books was John Gerard's The Herball
or Generall Historic oj Ptantes, 163 3, with its impressive engraved title page.