OLD NEWSBOY ONCE
A PROSPEROUS MAN.
EDSON E. PHELPS HAD CITY'S
LEADING BOOKSHOP.
That Was Twenty Years Ago -- Sold
Papers Until His Death Sunday,
Forgotten by Those Who Once Knew Him.
They will be burying Edson E. Phelps today somewhere or other. He died in a third floor back on Sunday, which explains why the doubled-up, little, prematurely old man was not on his camp stool at Eleventh and Main yesterday or the day before, selling newspapers.
When the newspapers yesterday published the announcement of the death of the old "newsboy" they dismissed it in a line or two. There was no mention made about Mr. Phelps, formerly a book seller with a large establishment on Delaware street, and before that the head bookman in M. H. Dickinson's great store at 620 Main street.
The writers who picked up the death of Phelps, the old newsboy, and the undertakers who got his remains, and the deputy coroner who viewed them, were not old enough to remember the days when The Journal was on Fifth street and the town ended at the Junction, where Dr. Munford was talking of putting up one of the biggest buildings in the West, which he had somebody do afterwards, sure enough, and it is there today.
In those days Mr. Phelps, the best known book seller in this part of the country and an authority looked up to from New York and the shops in Churchyard street, London, no less. Mr. Phelps, without a doubt, was the best posted man on books in private trade. He would not snap his fingers to sell a set of new stuff, but he could make T. B. Bullene go miles to look at a hand-tooled Bible, and then made Mr. Bullene buy it and, which may be news to some people interested, he got Father Dalton interested in some other rich old books and the upshot was that Mr. Bullene gave Father Dalton his precious old hand-tooled Bible, that Mr. Phelps had secured for him, one of the only three of the kind in the world.
WITH GREAT FINANCIERS.
And Mr. Phelps could walk slap bang up to the desk of Simeon B. Armour, one of the great Armours, and talk books to him. Mr. Armour said once that he understood there was a Mazarin Bible for sale. Could Mr. Dickinson find out about it? Mr. Phelps was sent for, and he told that excepting for the copies in the British museum and the Lenox, N. Y. library, the only other copy was in the hands of a rich Chicago candymaker, and might be bought. What would Mr. Armour care to offer?
Thank you, he would run up and see if Gunther would take $10,000 for the book.
Last week Phelps would say thanks for two pennies for a copy of a newspaper he was selling, and he would take off his hat for a nickel.
Mr. Phelps -- this is going back to the '80s, when Dickinson's bookstore was the literary center of the city and the public library was on the second floor of the old trap at northeast Eighth and Walnut -- handled a Breeches Bible, and he negotiated for a Caxton Golden Legend, finally terminating the deal by deciding the copy was spurious. He knew the whereabouts of the only First Psalter, Caxton movable type print, and bought over half a dozen copies of Mlle De Maupane, excommunicated though it was and hard to get through the postoffice or customs house without having all the pictures and most of the pages torn out. He thought nothing of charging a $100 commission on a two or more volume set of old works when he was Mr. Phelps, and he cried like a child last winter one cold morning when a man, instead of buying a paper which old Phelps, the newsboy, was wobbling about as an offer, slipped a half a dollar in his hand and said, "Pretty cold this morning, Mr. Phelps."
WHEN HE WAS MR. PHELPS.
"Mr. Phelps" was getting back to the days of uncut first editions of "Pickwick Papers," second edition "Shakespeares," fully illumined "Arabian Nights," and Frank Tyler, and Cameron Mann, and when Miss Sheldley used to buy her expensive editions through Mr. Phelps.
Mr. Phelps would show his precious smuggled copies -- most of them consigned --to the biggest people of the city, and he had the right to walk into the private office of Colonel W. H. Winants in the old Armour bank and talk original plates to him.
But that was a long time ago. That was as long ago as twenty years, and twenty years are twenty decades in this rapidly revolving West.
The self-same Mr. Phelps did not dare to go into the humblest office where they let out desk room in his last years. He had the bad luck to live too long. He ought to have died when Herb Matthews, his old partner in the bookselling business in the Delaware street store, died, or when his other old running mate, Ed Burton, the stationer at Dickinsons, died. The three were the literary authorities of Kansas City. Two of them died ten years ago, and went to their graves in honor.
Phelps buried himself about the same time, but kept on breathing until last Sunday, and the longer he lived the deeper he buried himself, till he got so deep down and so far out of sight that he could come out in the open and sit on a cap stool at Eleventh and Main and sell papers for coppers, getting into greater ecstasy over a nickel than when he was Mr. Phelps and making $100 commission on a single deal. He did not have to die to be forgotten, but old-timers like D. P. Thompson, whose gallery in those days was near Dickinson's store on North Main street, turned up who remembered when Phelps, the newsboy, was Mr. Phelps, the bookseller and literary antiquarian, and the identity of the man was fixed.
