The Play's the Thing                                15

for book collectors as different as were Tom Stoppard and Carl
Petersen (1929-1992), the noted Faulkner collector and
bibliographer.

Although the House of Books closed when Mrs. Cohn died in
1984 (and the shop's books and papers became part of the Library's
collections), there are still a remarkable number of people who
fondly recall the shop and its owner who was known almost univer¬
sally as "Margie."

A number of people doubtless realized that Margie's knowledge
of twentieth-century first editions, their authors, and their collec¬
tors was unique, but Petersen was the only person to convince her
seriously to consider "posterity," as she herself came to call it. As a
result, during a series of holidays from his home and work in the
Midwest in the 1970s, Petersen interviewed Margie while a tape
recorder preserved their dialogues.

Sensibly beginning the interviews with recollections of his own
first visits to the shop when he had been in service with the Army in
the early 1950s, Petersen gradually broke down Margie's reticence
in front of the whirring posterity machine. She spoke with love and
pride of founding the business in 1930 with her husband, the late
Louis Henry Cohn, of somehow surviving against all odds during
the depression, and gradually coming to know what now seems a
veritable pantheon of twentieth-century literary giants (see Colum¬
bia Library Columns, November 1985). Among them were Robert
Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Vincent Benet, Marianne
Moore, and T. S. Eliot—all of whom were also represented in the
distinguished limited editions published by the House of Books as
the Crown Octavos.

Margie took particular delight in being the friend of so many of
her customers and most especially her "young men" whom she
watched over with great affection. As the interviews reached the
then-present day, the 1970s, Petersen teased Margie a bit by saying,
"I think your most recent conquest is Tom Stoppard." Margie
replied, "I don't know if you could call it a conquest" but gave an