R.I.P. Madeleine B. Stern, 95 (rare book dealer & Louisa May Alcott biographer)

(BTW, if you like, this was posted along with Rostenberg's obit at
alt.obituaries.)

Also, you can see much more about her life here (it's what I posted on
her birthday):

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.c...13d618efa814aa

Lenona.


Madeleine Stern, 95, Book Dealer, Literary Sleuth
BY STEPHEN MILLER - Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 23, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/61155


Madeleine Stern, who died Saturday at 95, was a leading Manhattan rare-
book dealer and one-half of a team of literary sleuths that discovered
the secret "blood-and-thunder" writings of Louisa May Alcott.

Stern was the author of more than 30 books on feminists and American
history. She and her business and life partner of more than a half-
century, Leona Rostenberg, operated Rostenberg and Stern Rare Books
from their Upper East Side apartment.

Acting on a tip from another Alcott scholar in the early 1940s, the
pair jointly uncovered evidence that the revered author of "Little
Women" had an earlier career writing racier books that featured drugs,
transvestitism, and murder. Although the secret was disclosed in
Stern's 1950 biography of Alcott, it did not become general knowledge
until Stern published "Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa
May Alcott" (1975).

In addition to monographs on several other authors and on the rare
books trade, Stern published volumes of memoirs written with
Rostenberg, who died in 2005 at 96. The last of these was "Bookends:
Two Women, One Enduring Friendship."

The pair always insisted that they shared a deep spiritual bond, but
that their relationship did not have a sexual component. They
occasionally referred to each other as "Watson and Holmes" and were
photographed in deerstalkers, wielding magnifying glasses.

Their partnership dated from the 1930s, when they were undergraduates
in Manhattan. In 1944, Stern backed Rostenberg's entry into the book
trade, and after World War II, the pair traveled to Europe to buy
books from dealers. They later became founders and mainstays of the
Antiquarian Book Fair in New York.

A play based on their lives, "Bookends," is currently running at the
New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, N.J.