Bancroftiana, Number 118 Spring 2001: Bernard Rosenthal, the Antiquarian, Scholar, and Friend of The Bancroft Library

Bernard Rosenthal, the Antiquarian, Scholar, and Friend of The Bancroft Library

Bernard Rosenthal is one of the great, long-time friends of The Bancroft Library. Barney gives graciously of his time and expertise to help with the acquisition of rare books, teach classes, and offer sage counsel as a constant Friend of The Bancroft Library.

Barney comes from a long line of antiquarian book collectors and dealers. "In the aristocracy of bibliophiles, Barney's family is royalty," notes Bancroft Director Charles Faulhaber.

Barney Rosenthal, Berkeley, California, 1999. As an eightieth birthday present to Barney, his wife, Ruth, donated funds to the Bancroft to acquire a volume in Barney's honor. The Ursperg Chronicle, Strasburg: Crato Mylius, 1549, is a wonderful tribute to a great book dealer, collector, and friend. This work is the second edition of a work first printed in 1515. The 1549 edition is the first edited by the German humanist Caspar Hedio and contains an additional 162 pages, extending the historical coverage to 1549. The white-on-black medallion portraits of the Emperors make this a striking Renaissance illustrated book.

Barney is somewhat guarded in revealing his literary passion, annotated Medieval and Renaissance volumes. However, he cannot hide the care and pride he has for his "inventory," in particular a six-inch thick, perfectly bound volume in the original boards and leather, by Erasmus of Rotterdam, Adagiorum Chiliades, Basel, Hieronymus Froben, 1541. This volume sits prominently atop an elegant lectern. Barney continues to study the book's annotations, scripted in elegant calligraphy along the margins of this beautiful volume. "Adagia" is a collection of sayings, proverbs, folk wisdom, commonplaces and the like, drawn from classical and biblical sources — a sort of forerunner of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. It was enormously successful and went through a number of editions that Erasmus regularly improved and augmented until his death in 1536.

Barney's father collected illuminated manuscripts and had a marvelous aesthetic eye. Barney has always preferred annotated manuscripts and the thrill of finding the sources and explanations for their annotations. "I buy books because they appeal to me aesthetically but also because of a scholarly appeal. I try to put my own blood into the book to make it more valuable to people who value scholarship."

Over the years Barney has also developed a fascination for printed books with manuscript annotations, or "books with marginalia." This new discipline, really a "history of reading," began to receive renewed scholarly recognition in the 1960s, a time when Barney was gathering material for a catalog of books on this topic. The Beinecke Library of Yale University, which subsequently published the catalog in 1997 as The Rosenthal Collection of Annotated Books, purchased Barney's entire collection.

When Barney discusses the great libraries and book collections, like the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Plantin Museum in Antwerp, or the Vatican Library, there is a special tone to his voice. Bancroft gets high praise too. "I'm very proud of our local library," as he refers to it.

Barney was born in Munich in 1920, one of Erwin Rosenthal's and Margherita Olschki's five children. On the Rosenthal side his grandfather, Jacques, was one of the three Rosenthal brothers, all leaders in the nineteenth century German and French antique book trade. Margherita's family had been printers and book dealers in the German province of East Prussia, now Poland.

All this came to an end with Hitler's rise to power. Erwin moved his family to Florence and then to France. As the political situation was clearly deteriorating in Europe he decided to immigrate to the United States where relatives in New York anxiously waited. Barney finished high school in Paris and an Italian friend who had spent a year at the University of California in Berkeley convinced him to apply there. His early memories of Berkeley are vivid, "International House, where I lived for almost a year after my arrival, was a friendly community into which someone of my background fit easily. When I noticed that part-time jobs were available, I applied for one and, to my great surprise and joy, was hired as a bus-boy working in the I-House cafeteria for a few hours every day." In describing his first job, Barney observed, "The first day I reported for work the manager, Mrs. Wilson, asked my name, 'Bernard Rosenthal, Madam,' I replied." Her response, "OK, we'll call you Barney," provided a nickname that has remained to this day.

Drafted into the United States Army in 1942 he was assigned to an Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon. He became a U. S. citizen in May of 1943. Barney arrived in Normandy six days after D-Day and in 1945 he was stationed in Germany. Discharged from the army in 1946, he immediately returned to Berkeley.

After brief stints as a chemist and an interpreter Barney decided that he, too, would try the antiquarian book business. In 1949, his relatives were booksellers in England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Argentina, the United States and Italy. His father thought he had gone mad. "I've already got a son who's in the business," he said, "and besides, there really are no more good books—and the few that are left have insanely high prices."

Not discouraged, Barney served an apprenticeship at the firm l'Art Ancien in Zurich, Switzerland, which had been founded by his father back in 1920. In 1950 he married his wife Ruth (their son, David, is a musician). In 1951 Barney returned to New York to work as a cataloguer for the Parke-Bernet Galleries, later Sotheby's. In 1953 he opened his own antiquarian book shop in New York with the intention of moving back to the Bay Area within a few years but this did not occur until 1970. He operated a bookshop in San Francisco until 1989, at which time he relocated across the Bay to Berkeley. Barney proudly says "My hometown in the United States since 1939 has been Berkeley."

—Arlene Nielsen
Friends of the The Bancroft Library