The Lincoln Bequest of Maury A. Bromsen
MAURY AUSTIN BROMSEN was born in New York City in 1919, the youngest child of Herman and Rose Bromsen. He earned an undergraduate degree from the City College of New York in 1939, and a master's degree in Latin American history from U.C. Berkeley two years later. In 1942, Bromsen travelled to South America, studying and lecturing for a year at the University of Chile. In 1944, he began graduate work towards a Ph.D. at Harvard University, ultimately earning a second master's degree, and extending his studies in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay between November 1946 and February 1948, while supported by prestigious fellowships from Harvard and other agencies. He completed all of the requirements for a doctoral degree with the exception of a dissertation, but eventually dropped out of the Harvard program. In 1949, after leaving Harvard, Bromsen was employed at the Cultural Affairs Dept. of the Pan-American Union in Washington, D. C., where he became founding editor of Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia/Inter-American Review of Bibliography.
Bromsen began selling books as early as 1941, while teaching at City College in New York. He started a small mail order book business directed to libraries, and continued selling books through an arrangement he made with Schoenhof's International Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after he moved to the Boston area for the doctoral program at Harvard in 1944. One of the first business transactions Bromsen would have with Harvard occurred around this time, when the Harvard College Library allotted him three hundred dollars to purchase documents relating to the history of Ecuador. With his mother as a silent partner, Bromsen later began the Jupiter Book Company, a mail order business for which the central office was his mother's apartment in New York City. It was perhaps natural, then, that upon leaving the Pan-American Union in 1954, Bromsen chose to establish himself in Boston as a bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller specializing in the history of the Americas. Bromsen sold books on this subject to college and university libraries, public libraries, historical societies, and private collectors throughout the United States and internationally. Rather than issuing printed catalogues periodically, he prepared customized and highly focused proposals to selected institutions, demonstrating considerable research on institutional holdings and what they lacked in specific fields. In fifty years of business, the Maury A. Bromsen Company achieved real success without ever issuing a printed catalogue.
Bromsen called national attention to himself as a dealer by spectacular buying at well publicized book auctions, a tactic that drew customers to him. These purchases often included significant materials in North American history. When Thomas Streeter's collection of rare Americana was put up for auction in the late 1960s, Bromsen purchased the only known copy of the first work printed in Illinois, Governor Edwards' Communication to Both Houses of Illinois Legislature (Kaskaskia, 1814), for thirty thousand, five hundred dollars, a record at the time for a first state-imprint. In October 1969, in a continuation of the sale of the Streeter collection, Bromsen paid the highest price to that date for a work of American literature, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (New York, 1855), which sold for nine thousand dollars. In his work as an antiquarian book dealer, Bromsen found an outlet for his scholarly bent and also for his love of business. Few book dealers devoted as much time as he did to researching his book offerings and to putting items he was selling into a learned bibliographical and historical context. He was aided in this endeavor by a near photographic memory. To buy books from Maury Bromsen was also to get an education. His collection of Lincolniana represents an important accumulation of key books, manuscripts, prints, graphics and museum objects on the nation's 16th president.
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