were friends to the end — toiling together at the Toronto Daily Star, gallivanting about Paris — until a fateful boxing match between the two men in 1929 put an end to their friendship. The problem? The referee in what was supposed to be a chummy bout was none other than the frequently boozy F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lost track of time, allowing Callaghan to trounce Hemingway. It was said that the two never spoke again after that. Callaghan’s son came to Bauman’s New York store with some letters. “He asked if we would be interested in purchasing his father’s correspondence with Ernest Hemingway. Of course, we said yes. He brought it in and it just knocked me out — it was probably 25 or 35 letters when both Hemingway and Callaghan were 25, both working for a Canadian newspaper based in Paris, both struggling to begin as writers, just two really good writers at the beginning of their career, and there are 25 letters, all hand-written. You don’t get letters anymore, nobody writes them, they’re all e-mail.”
Have You Ever Found an Old Pillowcase Stuffed With Pamphlets? Please Read This Before Discarding A man and his wife walked into Bauman’s Philadelphia shop carrying a pillow case filled with pamphlets. They’d just returned from an auction, where they had been offered $35,000 for the musty contents of the pillowcase. “They put it on the table, and my wife took a look at the first pamphlet and she said, ‘I can get you $250,000 for this one pamphlet.’ That one pamphlet was Thomas Paine’s ‘Common Sense,’ the most beautiful copy I’ve ever seen. But not only that. This copy could be traced back to 1776, because these people had lived in what’s called the Germantown section of Philadelphia forever.”
J.D. Salinger and the College Professor Who Needed Money “We had a copy of Catcher in the Rye that was signed to a college teacher. It came with a letter from the teacher. It was very weird to get that. Salinger was a real recluse. People would fake accidents in front of his house to get him to come out.” DC J U L Y / / A U G U S T 2 0 1 0 D e s e r t C o m p a n i o n 79