Richard M. Powers:

The Art of Science Fiction

Millions of  readers — especially of sci-fi — have seen his pictures, but few knew the name of Richard M. Powers, the artist whose work revolutionized science-fiction art and has appeared on the covers of more than 800 of the best science fiction books.

Powers’s career spanned more than 50 years. “During that time he established himself as one of America’s preeminent illustrators for science fiction novels as he transformed that style of illustration with what he once termed ‘abstract surrealist expressionism,’ nearly creating a style of fantasy art,” wrote Ridgefield Press reporter Jonathan Pingle in 1996.

In 1983, Locus, the science fiction industry’s newspaper, described his work as having “revolutionized science fiction book cover art in the fifties.” 

Richard Michael Gorman Powers — he sometimes used the name Gorman Powers, reflecting his mother’s maiden name — was born in Chicago in 1921. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois, and during World War II served with the Army Signal Corps. After the war he continued his studies at The New School in New York.

In 1949 Powers began doing art for Doubleday’s science fiction hardcover books, and was an almost immediate success. He wound up doing the cover art for such classics as Isaac Asimov’s Pebble in the Sand and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human. 

In 1952 he was included in the New Talent Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where his work is now part of the permanent collection. Over the years he has also exhibited at  the Metropolitan Museum of Art,  the National Academy, and at the Whitney Museum, all in New York, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington.  

In 2001, Jane Frank, Vincent Di Fate, and son Richard Gid Powers wrote a book, The Art of Richard Powers.  DiFate, a science fiction artist, said Powers had “an emotional rhythm that is captivating, plumbing the depths of the human spirit and challenging the will of that spirit to survive in a future life with danger. These paintings are far more than insightful, they are, in a word, brilliant.”

As an illustrator, his work went beyond science fiction, appearing in all areas of publishing from the late 1940s to the 1990s. He produced literally thousands of book jackets and covers including the first edition of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, the Dell Laurel Poets series, and most the Easton Press’s editions of Hemingway’s works.

He also did the book jacket and some interior illustrations for Silvio Bedini’s Ridgefield in Review, the 1958 history published for the town’s 250th anniversary celebration. In 1983, for the town’s 275th birthday, he did a poster of the Battle of Ridgefield.

 Powers and his family moved to Ramapoo Road in 1954, then to Old Branchville Road. In 1966, he sold his Old Branchville Road house, building a smaller home on his remaining land on Bloomer Road. 

He died in 1996 in Madrid, Spain, where he had been wintering each year with his daughter, Elizabeth. (His son, Richard Gid Powers, is a history professor and author of such books as  Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover and Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI.)

Richard Powers was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016. 

He was also honored in a rather unusual way. In 2017, Andy Partridge, former frontman of the British New wave band XTC, released a CD of music inspired by Powers’ art. According to Partridge, as a boy, he used to borrow three science fiction books a week, take them home and instead of reading them, he’d stare at the Richard Powers art. “Mesmerized by the covers,” he imagined his own stories to match the paintings as he stared at them, sometimes for hours.  Later, he created “a sort of soundtrack to the paintings,” as one critic put it.  “The resulting album [is] a musical accompaniment to the variety of alien landscapes which Powers illustrated so profusely.”

The name of the CD album? “Powers.”

Books Set in Ridgefield

Here’s a collection of novels and non-fiction memoirs set in Ridgefield.  

Fiction

A Dying Fall by Hildegarde Dolson, Lippincott, 1973: The victim supposedly slips on a step in the Aldrich Museum sculpture garden, falls and is mortally impaled upon a sharp work of art. Dolson lived in Lewisboro.

Cast Down; A New England Haunting by Tracy Petry, My Mutt Publications, 2015. Story of a family that moves to “Bridgefield” and  a ghost connected with the lost village of Dudleyville.  

Divide by Two by Mildred Gilman (Wohlforth), Mercury, 1940: Novel of a child of “modern” divorced parents who tries with unusual results to arrange his life to his liking. Mrs. Wohlforth, one of the original “sob sister” newspaper reporters, lived on Rockwell Road for many years.

Don’t Raise the Bridge (Lower the River) by Max Wilk, MacMillan, 1960. A humorous novel about life in suburbia, airline pilots and a country inn (what is now Bernard’s). Wilk lived on Silver Spring Road when he wrote the book.

God’s Payday by Edgar C. Bross, G. W. Dillingham Company, 1898: A romantic drama, with scenes in Ridgefield — the main character pays a visit by train to escape the city and stays at the Keeler Tavern. Bross was editor of The Ridgefield Press from 1887 to 1899

Hometown Heroes by Susanna Hofmann McShea, St. Martin’s Press, 1990: The first in a series about a quartet  of senior citizen amateur detectives solving mysteries. See also Ladybug, Ladybug, and The Pumpkin-Shell Wife. 

Ladybug, Ladybug by Susanna Hofmann McShea, 1994: See Hometown Heroes.

Murmuring Ever by Lynn Wallrapp, Manor Books Gothic, 1975:  Tale of a family moving to a New England town, where they discover a terrifying legend that has haunted the town since the Revolutionary War. The teenage girl falls in love with the ghost of a soldier hanged 200 years earlier. The author grew up in Ridgefield  and wrote the book here.

My Brother Sam is Dead by Christopher Collier & James Lincoln Collier, Scholastic, 1974: A fictional account of teenagers in the Revolutionary War, set in Redding as well as Ridgefield; won Newbery award, Christopher was Connecticut state historian.

Murder and Blueberry Pie by Richard and Frances Lockridge, Lippincott, 1959: The scene of the title crime is the Keeler Tavern during Ridgefield’s 250th anniversary celebration. The Lockridges, who wrote the famous Mr. and Mrs. North series of mysteries and movies, lived in Lewisboro.

Please Omit Funeral by Hildegarde Dolson, Lippincott, 1975: Deals with the death of the author of a controversial book that has just been banned by the local (Ridgefield) school system. The novel was written during Ridgefield’s famous “book burning” era. 

The Hessian by Howard Fast, Morrow, 1972: A novel about a fictional incident involving German soldiers during the Revolutionary War in Ridgefield and Redding. Fast lived on Florida Hill Road.

The Pumpkin-Shell Wife by Susanna Hofmann McShea, 1992: See Hometown Heroes.

The Red Petticoat by Joan Palmer, Lothrop Lee & Shepard,1969. A fictional account of the “Red Petticoat” legend from the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777, aimed at teenagers. Palmer, a former AP journalist, lived in Lewisboro.

The Ridgefield Tavern: A Romance of Sarah Bishop by Dr. Maurice Enright, privately printed, 1908. Highly fictionalized story of hermitess Sarah Bishop of the cave.

To Spite Her Face by Hildegarde Dolson, Lippincott, 1971: One of the two murders in this mystery takes places in the Ridgefield Thrift Shop. 

Two Little Girls in Blue by Mary Higgins Clark, Simon and Schuster, 2006. A thriller set in Ridgefield about a mother’s search for her kidnapped child.

Non-fiction

A Private Battle by Cornelius Ryan and Kathryn Morgan Ryan, Simon & Schuster, 1979. Kathryn Morgan Ryan used her late husband’s secret accounts to tell the story of his four-year battle with cancer. Cornelius was the author of “The Longest Day” and two other acclaimed histories of World War II, and Kathryn was an editor and novelist who assisted him in his research. They lived on Old Branchville Road. 

Life Without George by Irene Kampen, 1961: A humorous autobiographical account of dealing with single life in Ridgefield after Kampen’s husband runs off with another woman. Book became the basis of Lucille Ball’s TV series, “The Lucy Show.” Kampden wrote other humorous autobiographical books while living in Ridgefield.

Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia by Mark Salzman, Random House, 1995: Salzman, author of the book and movie, “Iron and Silk,” offers a light-hearted autobiographical look at his childhood and youth in Ridgefield.

Memories by Laura Curie Allee Shields, privately printed, 1940: An early activist for woman suffrage tells the story of her life, most of it lived on the corner of Main and Market Streets.

The Nearly Departed: Or, My Family and Other Foreigners by Brenda Cullerton, Little, Brown and Company, 2003: Humorous reminiscences about growing up in an unusual family  on lower St. Johns Road in the 1950s and 60s. 

Books About Ridgefield  

Here is an alphabetical list of more than two dozen, non-fiction books that have been published about Ridgefield, mostly from a historical point of view. 

Many of these titles are available at the Ridgefield Historical Society, including some out-of-print editions. Books on the Common has most in-print titles. Amazon can supply almost all of them. 

For used or reprint editions, check abe.com or amazon.com. Amazon offers many print-on-demand reprints of books that are considered “out of print.” Many of these titles are also available in electronic versions for Kindle, etc. — some older ones free of charge; try Googling the title. Some, like Rockwell’s history, can be read online.

About Ridgefield: 
What We Were - What We Are

A comprehensive, lavishly illustrated report on many facets of Ridgefield, including architecture, neighborhoods, history, landmarks, natural resources, cultural and religious centers, open spaces, cemeteries, and more; produced in 2002 by the Ridgefield Design Council, soft-cover, extensive index.

Account of the Battle of Ridgefield 
and Tryon’s Raid, An

First detailed history of the 1777 battle, published on the 150th  anniversary; by James R. Case, 56 pages, with map;  privately printed, 1927; later reprints were done.

Barbour Collection: Vol. 36
The Barbour Collection of Connecticut Town Records, Volume 36 in a statewide series, reproduces the valuable Barbour index to Ridgefield births, marriages and deaths from 1709 to 1850. 167 pages devoted to Ridgefield. A must for any serious Ridgefield researcher. Also includes Redding vitals.  Published in 2000 by Genealogical Publishing Company. 

Brief Historical Notice 
of the Town of Ridgefield, A

Published by the Village Improvement Society in 1906, this 60-page small-form book contains many photographs of the town, its houses, gardens and points of interest, all taken by Joseph Hartmann.  It includes a brief history of the town and of the society. Out of print, but available.

Farmers Against the Crown
Keith Marshall Jones wrote this comprehensive account of the Battle of Ridgefield during the Revolutionary War, revealing much new information and correcting many old mistakes in previous accounts. “This telling will remain the standard account of the battle for a long, long time,” said Christopher Collier, former Connecticut state historian.162 pages, paperback, extensively illustrated. Published 2002. Out of print.

Farms of Farmingville, The
While Keith Marshall Jones calls this book "a two-century history of 23 Ridgefield, Connecticut farmhouses and the people who gave them life," it is really a history of a good part of the town. He has extensively researched a section on Ridgefield that contains a significant cross-section of the community from the 1700s into the 20th Century, and  gives a picture of what life here was like during that period. Published 2001. Hardcover. 509 pages, indexed. Many maps, house plans, photos. Available at Ridgefield Historical Society.

Five Village Walks
Self-guided tours of Ridgefield village history, with more than 50 pictures from the past, by Jack Sanders. 56 pages, indexed, map. Last updated in 2008. $5 price benefits Ridgefield Historical Society.  

Glimpses of Ridgefield

An unnumbered, album-style book of dozens pictures of Ridgefield from the 1890s by a pioneering woman photographer in Connecticut, Marie H. Kendall. Copies rarely appear on the market. Published in 1900.

Hidden History of Ridgefield
A look at Ridgefield’s often unheralded people, places and things,  a sort of sequel to Ridgefield Chronicles, relating little-known pieces of what make Ridgefield a remarkable place in which to live, work, visit—or write history; by Jack Sanders. 160 pages. Dozens of pictures and maps.  Published in 2015 by The History Press.

Historical Sketch of Ridgefield, An

While small of size and only 48 pages, this well-done paperbound book, published around 1920, contains a history of the town and a description of what it was like a century ago, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it was written by Allen Nevins, who went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for history writing. Published by The Elms Inn.  Out of print. 

History of Ridgefield
George L. Rockwell's 583-page classic has been long out of print, but copies become available. Particularly strong on 19th and early 20th Century history, and containing many early birth, marriage and death records. The book has many photos taken by Joseph Hartmann. Cloth and leather editions were printed. Also, in the 1980s, a reprinted edition was published. Out of print.

History of Ridgefield, Connecticut, The
In 1878, the Rev. Daniel Teller of the First Congregational Church published this 251-page book, the first comprehensive history of the town. While much of the content is covered in later histories, the engravings of various Ridgefield buildings and scenes, all based on very early photographs, are both wonderful and valuable. Not indexed. Published in cloth and leather versions. Out of print.

Images of America: Ridgefield
127 pages of finely reproduced pictures of Ridgefield past, published in 1999. People, houses, businesses, scenes of town life, etc. from 1890s to 1950s, produced by Ridgefield Archives Committee, now the Ridgefield Historical Society. Arcadia Publishing. 

Impact: The Historical Account 
of the Italian Immigrants of Ridgefield, CT:  

Extensive history of Italian community of Ridgefield, with many biographies, photos, and interviews; by Aldo Biagiotti; 345 pages, indexed; privately printed, 1990.

Notable Ridgefielders
An 88-page, tabloid-newspaper-sized collection of brief biographies of more than 400 people who made news in Ridgefield during the 20th Century, published by The Ridgefield Press on its 125th anniversary. Also contains extensive timeline. Illustrated, indexed. Published in 2000. Available from The Ridgefield Press, 16 Bailey Avenue.

Proprietors of Ridgefield, The
Glenna M. Welsh's history tells of the early settlement of the town, with particular focus on those who lived on Main Street. Not indexed. Many illustrations. Published in 1976 in paper and cloth editions, the clothbound version is still available at the Keeler Tavern or from the Ridgefield Historical Society.

Recollections of A Lifetime
This is the two-volume autobiography of Samuel G. Goodrich, who wrote more than 100 books, mostly for young people, under the name of Peter Parley. The first 300 or so pages are devoted to his growing up in Ridgefield in the late 1700s and early 1800s and provide a fascinating and rare look at life in the town two centuries ago. Published in 1856 by Miller, Orton and Mulligan. 1,100+ pages, many illustrations, indexed. Used copies available but often damaged and expensive; available in reprint — some reprint publishers will sell only volume one, containing the Ridgefield information, but no index, which is in volume two (note that an abridged edition was also published in 1800s; this should be avoided by anyone wanting his complete account of Ridgefield). 

Remember the Ladies: 
Notable Women of Ridgefield

Profiles of 14 noteworthy women in Ridgefield’s history; also covers organizations they founded or led; 100 pages, illustrated, published by Ridgefield Historical Society, 2008.

Ridgefield 1900-1950
More than 215 views of what Ridgefield looked like during the first half of the 20th Century. Postcard images of homes, estates, inns, street scenes, stores, churches, and more. Over 20,000 words of accompanying history and lore about the locales pictured, by Jack Sanders. 126 pages, bibliography and index.  Arcadia Publishing, 2003. 

 
Ridgefield at 300
Lavishly illustrated, coffee-table book about the town’s celebration of its 300th birthday in 2008, produced by Ridgefield Magazine.  

Ridgefield Chronicles
Offers glimpses into aspects of Ridgefield’s history including interesting people, the things they accomplished, and the way they lived, as well as the town’s varied geography and place names,  by Jack Sanders. More than 60 pictures. 160 pages.The History Press, 2014.

Ridgefield, Conn. 1708-1908 
Bi-Centennial Celebration

Collection of history, recollections, speeches, and photographs in connection with the town’s 200th birthday celebration. 96 pages, hardbound. Published by the Bi-Centennial Committee, 1908. Out of print.

Ridgefield in Review
Published in 1958, the most modern complete history of the town, with many illustrations, old maps, and military records; written by Smithsonian Institution historian Silvio A. Bedini. 396 pages, indexed. Out of print.

St. Stephen's Church, 
Its History for 250 Years 1725 to 1975
Written by Robert S. Haight, this book tells the story of the church and its place in the community. 220 pages, indexed and illustrated, published 1975. A supplement by Dirk Bollenback, Saint Stephen's Church Reaches the Millennium, 114 pages, indexed and illustrated, covers 1975 to 2000. Sold by the church, 351 Main Street.

We Gather Together… Making the Good News Happen: 1712-2012

This is an extensively illustrated survey history of the First Congregational Church, by its then pastor, the Rev. Charles Hambrick-Stowe. 68 pages. 2011.

Where is Ridgefield Heading?

This 26-page, large format booklet was published in 1950 by the League of Women Voters and suggested possibilities for Ridgefield’s dealing with future growth, including bypasses for the village, and complete reconstruction of commercial blocks in the village.

Wicked Ridgefield
A historical assortment of bad guys and bad times including thievery, bigotry, murders, missing persons, arson, book-banning, and other assorted man-made misery. “This look at the darker side of Ridgefield history points out some heroes, offers some lessons, and provides even a little humor,” says author Jack Sanders in introduction.  160 pages, many pictures, indexed. The History Press, 2016.

Dirk Bollenback: 

Saintly Inspiration

Some teachers are respected. Others are beloved.  Dirk Bollenback was both.

A history teacher for 38 years, Bollenback chaired the Social Studies Department at Ridgefield High School, fought local “book burners” in the 1970’s, and inspired countless students.

He was also a singer, leader, and historian at St. Stephen’s Church.

A native of Evanston, Ill., Dirk Floyd Bollenback was born in 1931, graduated from the Deerfield Academy and received a bachelor’s degree in 1953 from Wesleyan University (where, for a

year, he was a member of the Pre-Ministerial Club). He earned a master’s degree from the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins and then served in the U.S. Army as a research analyst and instructor in the Army’s Psychological Warfare School at Fort Bragg, N.C. After the Army, he earned a second master’s at Wesleyan University.

With his wife Beverly, he moved  to Ridgefield  in 1958 when he took a job as a social studies teacher at the high school. He soon became department chair, a post he held for 32 years, a period of tremendous growth in the town. The Class of 1959, his first graduating class at the “old” high school on East Ridge, had only 60 students; just over dozen years later, more than 400 were graduating from the “new” school on North Salem Road.

Over the years he revamped and improved the Social Studies Department’s courses with such success that in 1991, he earned a John F. Kennedy Library Teacher Award for “developing creative and effective curriculum and demonstrating instructional excellence.”

In the 1970s, Bollenback was at the center of the book-banning controversies that involved the high school’s Social Studies and English Departments and some of their book selections, including Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” and Mike Royko’s “Boss.” — both of which some school board members and parents wanted removed from elective courses as inappropriate for high school seniors. In the end both books were retained, but not without bitter confrontations that resulted in national media coverage.

“We were under a lot of pressure,” he told The Ridgefield Press a quarter century later. “It was the hardest time I went through in Ridgefield. It all got very personal and I remember being called a Communist at one meeting. In retrospect it was really farcical; I’m a very conservative guy.”

He was, in fact, a member of the Republican Town Committee for four years.

Over the years countless students sang his praises as an inspiring teacher. 

“Mr. Bollenback was simply the best among that group of exemplary career educators,” said Dave Jenny, Class of 1968. “I will always cherish the climactic conclusion to his lecture about Hitler’s manipulation of the German people into World War II. He stepped from chair to desk-top, stood and sang just the first stanza of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’ as the Nazis had done over and over to hijack the national anthem and the German nation. It was dramatic but yet natural, seemingly unstaged and therefore totally effective. He gave us goosebumps. He made us feel what the German people must have felt.”

Patrick Wahl, another student in the 1960s, recalled a quotation from a Bollenback essay in the high school’s Chieftain newspaper. “Your life can matter, if you care to make it, if you care,” Bollenback had written. “I kept that essay on my wall, well into the 1980’s, until it became a part of me,” Wahl said. “Dirk Bollenback taught us to become citizens of the republic, for democracy is not a spectator sport.”

The senior class in 1961 dedicated its yearbook to Bollenback, citing “his fairness in dealings with his students; his sympathy and helpfulness with their problems; his honesty and sincerity in his teaching.”

Before retiring in 1996, Bollenback was pushing for a curriculum that focused on citizenship and civility. “Kids today are bombarded with so many different messages from so many different directions that I don’t know how they become civil,” he said in the 2000s.

He won many honors throughout his career. In 1963-64 he was a John Hay Fellow at the Chicago University and won an outstanding teacher award from Tufts University. The League of Women Voters honored him in 1996 for service to school and community and, in 2013, he was the first teacher to receive the Ridgefield Old Timers Association’s annual Distinguished Educator award. 

In the community, Bollenback volunteered as a patient’s representative at Danbury Hospital and for more than 25 years sang in the choir of St. Stephen’s Church, where he was a member of the vestry and served in other posts.

He was also the church’s historian, which sparked a “second career” as a writer. To mark St. Stephens’ 275th birthday in 2000, he spent nearly three years researching and writing a book that picked up where Robert Haight’s 1975 history had stopped.

“He has done a marvelous job of incorporating the history of the parish with the national events that were unfolding,”  Rector Richard Gilchrist said at the time.

Bollenback died in 2017 at the age of 86. His wife, Beverly, who had been active in the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association and had been president of its predecessor District Nursing Association, had died in 2004. Artist/illustrator Jean McPherson, who became his partner in 2009, died in 2016.

Teachers should instill values by example, not by preaching, Bollenback once said. “We don’t overtly teach values. We have to set an example, be people for [students] to look up to.” 

For Stephan Cheney, who graduated in 1970, “Dirk was, by far my favorite teacher. I think I was taught more in his class than any of my high school classes.” 

Cheney said in a 2012 remembrance that Bollenback was better than any other high school teacher or college professor he’d ever had.

“If I had the authority to canonize,” he said, “Dirk Bollenback would be my first.”

Jean and Harrison Horblit:

Philanthropic Collectors

Jean and Harrison Horblit were collectors and philanthropists who made often incalculably valuable contributions to many organizations — including those interested in the history and conservation of Ridgefield. 

A widely known and respected collector of antique books and manuscripts, Harrison D. Horblit was born in Boston in 1912, graduated from Harvard in 1933 and became a textile executive. But his avocation as a collector made him known around the world. His specialty was antique books and manuscripts related to the history of science, mathematics and navigation, and his own book, “One Hundred Books Famous in Science,” is still considered a bible in its field. 

Much of his collection of rare books and manuscripts, including many items from the 1400s and 1500s, was donated to Harvard's Houghton Library.  

After his death, Jean Horblit catalogued and then gave his large collection of 19th Century photographs, including 3,141 daguerreotypes and 3,100 paper prints from as early as 1839, to Houghton where it is now The Harrison D. Horblit Collection of Early Photography. 

Mr. Horblit was also interested in local history. In 1973, when a group of Ridgefielders tried to buy a 1780 English print of the Battle of Ridgefield at a Sotheby's auction, they quickly ran out of money. Mr. Horblit stepped in and eventually paid $16,000 for an item Sotheby's had valued at under $2,500. “This print belongs in Ridgefield if it belongs anywhere,” Mr. Horblit said at the time. 

Three months after his death in 1988, Mrs. Horblit donated the print to the Keeler Tavern Museum. 

Jean Mermin Horblit was born in 1910 in New Haven, where she grew up and was the 1927 Connecticut High School shorthand champion. She studied at Columbia University and became the head of fabric designs for a division of Marshall Field & Company. It was there that she met her husband; they were married in 1952.

She was a collector of antique Japanese woodblock prints, illustrated books and maps known as Ukiyo-e or “images of a floating world,” which cover scenes from everyday life of the people. Her prints and books have been exhibited at the Hammond Museum, Princeton University, and Katonah Gallery, and a rare 17th Century map of Tokaido was shown at the New York Museum of Natural History. 

She also donated pieces of their collections to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Mrs. Horblit had been a major benefactor of the new Ridgefield Historical Society and its efforts to restore the Scott House as its headquarters.

She also donated 22 acres of her estate bordering Round Pond to the Land Conservancy of Ridgefield.

The Horblit home itself, a magnificent English Georgian-style mansion that had been meticulously maintained by Mrs. Horblit, is an important piece of Ridgefield history. Built in 1930 from limestone imported from France, “Oreneca” was all but abandoned by its owner, Philip D. Wagoner, after the death of his wife a few years later. When the Horblits bought the place in 1965, the property was so overgrown they did not know the house overlooked nearby Round Pond. 

Avid yachters, Jean and Harrison Horblit sailed the Maine Coast for two months every summer for many years. Jean Horblit moved to Stonington in 2004 and died in 2009 at the age of 98.

E. P. Dutton: 

A Devout Publisher

E. P. Dutton has left the world with countless books and Ridgefield with one of its finest mansions. The founder of the publishing company that bore his name for more than a century also contributed considerably to bringing the Ridgefield school system into the 20th century.

Born in New Hampshire in 1831, Edward Payson Dutton grew up in Boston, graduated from Boston Latin high school, and was supposed to enter Harvard when, dreading having to study more Greek, he convinced his father to bring him into his dry goods business. 

He worked there a couple years when a friend who had a book store introduced him to bookselling. 

When only 21, he and the friend formed Ide and Dutton, booksellers. They did well and decided to move into publishing as well as selling; their first book was Horace Mann’s lectures on education, which became a big seller. In 1858, Dutton bought out the business, which became E.P. Dutton & Company, and which in 1869 he moved to New York. 

In 1923, shortly after his death at the age of 92, Dutton was called by The New York Times “the dean of a daring group of leaders of the book industry” who had made New York City the literary capital of America. He “was a link between a half-forgotten day when Boston held up her queenly head as the mistress of letters on this side of the Atlantic, and these new times when a writer’s door of fame is planted firmly in the rocky soil of Manhattan.” 

When Dutton came to New York, there were only two publishing houses in the city; when he died, there were 1,200.

In addition to the longstanding E.P. Dutton imprint, he had early on bought Ticknor & Fields, a Boston publisher, and acquired American rights to the British series, Everyman’s Library, under which his company turned out scores of affordable titles. 

Dutton published more than 10,000 different titles during his life. When he died, there were 4,000 active titles in his company’s catalogue. 

Many of his authors were leading writers of their era, including G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, John Dewey, and Algernon Blackwood.

He led his company for 71 years; “probably no other publishing house in the country was under the direct guidance of its founder for so long a period,” The Times reported.

In the early 1890s,  Dutton decided to build a house on High Ridge, and hired Ridgefield's top builder to do it. “Big Jim” Kennedy spent two years carefully erecting the place, which still stands at 63 High Ridge. (In the 1970s, reported historian Dick Venus, someone did a surveyor's sighting from the front door to the back door of this house and found less than a quarter inch difference, despite the huge weight of the mansion whose roof alone is nearly the size of a football field.) 

Venus remembered as a young boy seeing Dutton riding his buckboard, pulled by a beautiful mahogany bay. Dutton had a wide leather belt across his lap. “I learned later that the strap was to prevent him from falling from the wagon,” Venus wrote, “for even at his advanced age, he drove at a very fast pace. Come to think of it, he must have pioneered in the use of the seat belt.”

Venus also told of races down Main Street that Dutton would participate in around the turn of the 20th Century, along with his friends, George Haven, Barton Hepburn and Dr. Edwin Van Saun. “Like his friends, Edward Dutton was an avid horseman and his horse were considered to be among the very best.”

A deeply religious Episcopalian who was a benefactor of St. Stephen’s,  Dutton would often drive his horse and buggy into the woods  where he would park, meditate, and read prayers in his breviary.  

In 1912, he joined others in contributing the money to buy the East Ridge land on which the

big, brick Benjamin Franklin Grammar School, later to be Ridgefield High School, was built in 1915. In her autobiography, “Memories,” Laura Curie Allee Shields tells how her first husband, Dr. William Allee, approached Dutton for a contribution, explaining the need for a modern school in Ridgefield. “Mr. Dutton was most enthusiastic and sympathetic, and he turned to Doctor and said, ‘Suppose we take it to the Lord.’ Doctor told me he knelt down by the couch and made a most beautiful prayer for direction and wisdom. Rising from his knees, he went to his desk and made out a check for $1,000 and, giving it to Doctor, told him, ‘Here, my boy, go to it!” ($1,000 then was worth nearly $25,000 in today’s dollars.)

Dutton’s firm continued on until the 1990s when it was acquired by Penguin Putnam, which still uses the Dutton imprint on about 40 books per year, half of them fiction and half non-fiction.

Hans P. Kraus: 

Dachau Survivor Who Cherished Books

 When Hans P. Kraus came to this country as a refugee escaping the Nazis, he had only $500 and a handful of books. By his death in 1988,  Kraus was one of the world’s most renowned rare-book dealers — a man who had owned one of the three Gutenberg Bibles still in private hands and whose collection included a copy of the Declaration of Independence and a first printing of the U.S. Constitution. 

He was also a major benefactor of the Library of Congress. In 1969, he donated 162 historical documents spanning 300 years of colonial Spanish America, including a narrative by Amerigo Vespucci of his four voyages to America between 1497 and 1502. The gift made the front page of The New York Times, accompanied by pictures of both Kraus and Vespucci. 

“This is a modest token of my gratitude and sincere thanks to the United States, a great nation whose hospitality and spirit of freedom and equality have made it possible for me, once a poor refugee, to attain a decent place in free human society,” Kraus said at the time.

The son of a professor who was also a bibliophile and noted stamp collector, Hans Peter Kraus was born in Austria in 1907. As a young teenager, he began collecting — and selling — books. “He frequently picked up an honest krone by buying an old book at one antiquarian shop and selling it at a modest profit to a dealer a block or two away,” said   John T. Winterich in a 1960 profile in Publishers’ Weekly. 

 After working for a couple of antiquarian book dealers, Kraus established a rare-book business in Vienna in 1932. Six years later, after the Germans annexed Austria, he was arrested as a Jew and interned at the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald for more than a year before friends were able to obtain his release, provided he abandon his homeland. He had to leave behind a collection of 100,000 books.

He arrived in New York on Columbus Day, 1939. That happened to be also his birthday, “which he felt was a very good omen,” said his daughter, Mary Ann Kraus Folter. 

With the help of friends and family in this country, he started a new dealership, H.P. Kraus, in a two-room flat in Manhattan. His business grew to the point where, in 1960, he had 16 employees and was world-famous for his vast inventory of rare publications. 

Over the years he acquired some of the most famous books and manuscripts in the world, and helped raise the nature of the business to a more sophisticated level. 

“Dealers are scholars,” he said in 1967. “We are not tradesmen.” 

One biographer called him “without doubt the most successful and dominant rare-book dealer in the world in the second half of the 20th Century.”

He set a world record for the highest price ever paid for a book when, in 1959, he spent $182,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars) for a 13th century St. Albans Apocalypse, a very early movable type edition of the last book for the Bible.

Kraus’s Gutenberg Bible, acquired in the early 1970s, was sold in 1978 to the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, for $1.8 million ($6.7 million today).

Kraus wrote many books and pamphlets, including “Sir Francis Drake: A Pictorial Biography.” His autobiography, “A Rare Book Saga,” has been called “a rare-books version of the memoirs of Casanova.” 

In 1966, he and his wife, Hanni Zucker Kraus, bought the former home of Henry and Clare Boothe Luce on Great Hill Road. Kraus died at the age of 81 and Hanni Kraus soon moved away, but kept the rare book business on operation until her death in 2003.

The Krauses made a number of significant contributions to libraries. Among their gifts to the Library of Congress is the Hans and Hanni Kraus Sir Francis Drake Collection, which contains early books, manuscripts, maps, and memorabilia related to Drake's explorations.  

Kraus was once asked by The Washington Post whether he ever read the rare books he owned.  “Read them?” he replied. “Books are to be admired. To be studied. To be cherished — not to be read. The worst thing you can do to a book is to read it. That’s what paperbacks are for.”

Glenna Welsh: 

Immersed in History

Among Ridgefield’s fairly sizable collection of historians is one who is often forgotten, despite the fact that she owned and lived in two of the town’s most famous historic houses, and wrote a book of Ridgefield history. 

However, Glenna Welsh would probably not be surprised at that — she was never one to seek publicity about herself. Even when she died, there was no obituary.

Welsh spent a decade digging into town hall records, old genealogies, and historical papers of every sort to produce “The Proprietors,” a 200-page book about the founders of Ridgefield and their descendants. The book traces the origins and destinations of the 25 people who purchased land from the Indians, founded the settlement, and then saw to it that Ridgefield survived, and even prospered.

“I wrote it really for the people of Ridgefield,” she said in 1976. “I hope the people of Ridgefield enjoy it.”

Welsh literally lived in history. She and her husband, Vernon, owned the town’s two most significant 18th Century houses: The Keeler Tavern and the Hauley House.

The couple became acquainted with antique houses when they bought an early 19th century home in Pound Ridge just after World War II. They lived there 14 years until 1956 when they bought the “Cannonball House,” as the Keeler Tavern was called then. They restored portions of the building and lived there until the early 1960s when they purchased the Thomas Hauley House, built for

Ridgefield’s first minister around 1713, at the corner of Main Street and Branchville Road. They sold the Cannonball House to the Keeler Tavern Preservation Society.

Her first research was sparked by her first house.

“I started out doing research more or less for the fun of it and to find out the correct date for   Cannonball,” she said. Until her study, the Keeler Tavern had been variously estimated to have been built in 1733 or 1748, but Welsh determined that the building was even older than suspected, revealing in her book that it was built by Benjamin Hoyt around 1717 as his home.

Glenna M. Welsh was born in 1913 in New Hampshire, and had lived in New York City before moving to Pound Ridge and then Ridgefield. Her husband was an executive with General Dynamics and after Glenna died in 1978, he moved to another antique house in Old Lyme, where he became active in the Historic District Commission and the local library.

Glenna Welsh’s “Proprietors of Ridgefield,” which a Press reviewer called “at once a scholarly and a very readable and entertaining narrative,” is still available for sale at the Ridgefield Historical Society.