Madeline Bettina Stern

Madeleine B. Stern, Bookseller and Sleuth, Dies at 95 TWITTER LINKEDIN SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS PRINT REPRINTS SHARE

By MARGALIT FOX Published: August 25, 2007 Madeleine B. Stern, a prominent rare-book dealer, biographer and literary sleuth who helped bring to print Louisa May Alcott’s long-lost Gothic tales of murder, sexual subjugation, opium dens and other things simply too dreadful to mention, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.

"United States Social Security Death Index," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VSSL-X6K : 20 May 2014), Madeleine Stern, 18 Aug 2007; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing).

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Madeleine B. Stern in 1995. Ms. Stern’s executor, Richard Koch, confirmed the death.

With her companion and business partner of many years, Leona Rostenberg, Ms. Stern presided over Rostenberg & Stern Rare Books, run largely from their apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. For more than half a century, the two women were an institution in the world of antiquarian bookselling, scouring the United States and Europe for printed treasures. Ms. Stern was also a founder of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, held annually since 1960.

In 1942, Ms. Rostenberg, following clues sprinkled in Alcott’s correspondence and other writings, found evidence that Alcott (1832-88), best known for sweet novels like “Little Women,” had also written racy potboilers. Published in popular magazines anonymously or under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, the stories were the pulp fiction of their day, awash in deceit, depravity and death. “Blood-and-thunder tales,” Alcott dismissively called them.

Starting in the 1970s, Ms. Stern oversaw their publication in assorted volumes. These included “Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott” (Morrow, 1975); “Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott” (Morrow, 1976); and “Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers” (Northeastern University, 1995), all edited and with introductions by Ms. Stern.

The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Ms. Stern wrote or edited dozens of books, among them “Louisa May Alcott,” published in 1950 by the University of Oklahoma Press. (The biography was issued in a new edition by Northeastern University in 1999.) Her other biographies include “Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie” (University of Oklahoma, 1953), about the wife of a 19th-century publisher of illustrated periodicals, in which many of Alcott’s clandestine works first appeared.

With Ms. Rostenberg, Ms. Stern wrote several joint memoirs of their heady lives amid dust, morocco and gilded edges: “Old & Rare: Thirty Years in the Book Business” (A. Schram, 1974); “Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion” (Doubleday, 1997); and “Bookends: Two Women, One Enduring Friendship” (Free Press, 2001).

A stage musical version of “Bookends,” written by Katharine Houghton with music by Dianne Adams and James McDowell, is playing through Sunday at the New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch.

Madeleine Bettina Stern was born in Manhattan on July 1, 1912. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Barnard College in 1932, followed by a master’s in the field from Columbia University in 1934.

Ms. Stern and Ms. Rostenberg met in 1929, when both worked as teachers at the Sabbath School of Temple Emanu-El, in Manhattan. They regarded each other with mutual disdain: Ms. Stern was a lowly college freshman, and Ms. Rostenberg, a senior at New York University, was not Ivy League.

But a few years later, when the women met again as Columbia graduate students, a warm friendship blossomed, based on their mutual desire for a life of the mind. They eventually took up residence on East 88th Street, amid glass-fronted bookcases, worn silk upholstery and a stately succession of dachshunds.

In 1943, Columbia rejected Ms. Rostenberg’s doctoral dissertation. (It was on the role of the printer-publisher in influencing public discourse in the 16th century.) To console her, Ms. Stern gave her a box of stationery embossed with the intoxicating words “Leona Rostenberg — Rare Books.” With a $1,000 loan from Ms. Stern, Ms. Rostenberg opened her business the next year. Ms. Stern joined her in 1945.

Ms. Rostenberg died in 2005, at 96. Ms. Stern leaves no immediate survivors.

In interviews over the years, the two women were asked — often — whether their relationship was romantic. They always demurred, for in the end, they implied, what did the answer really matter? As they wrote in “Old Books, Rare Friends,” “Our partnership in business is also a partnership in life — the partnership of ‘Faithful Friends’ who share ‘a deep, deep love.’ ”