Let's be honest: something like that shouldn't be in an educated house. In Ruth Bader Ginsburg's private library, which is now being auctioned off at Bonhams in New York in 166 lots, the classics of older European and more recent American literature stood back to back, from Homer to Thomas Mann ("Doctor Faustus", 1948) and from Salinger to Tom Wolfe ("I am Charlotte Simmons", with author's dedication). The US Supreme Court Justice, who died on September 18, 2020, had heard Vladimir Nabokov's lectures at Cornell; a bundle of five titles is offered by him, two volumes of these lectures, two editions of "Lolita" and "The Defense", not a court novel but a chess novel. But thrown together with Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" (released in 1951,but presumably not the extremely rare first edition, unfortunately also without a dust jacket) there is also a work from 1959 that would have gone straight into the grabbable box of digital bibliophilia had it been anonymous: "Preposterous Papa" by Lewis Meyer.
An inserted business card reveals how the book (with dust jacket) published by the World Publishing Company in Cleveland ended up on the shelves of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her husband Martin.
It was a gift from a fellow judge, Robert Henry, Chief Justice of the Denver District Court.
The book was almost exactly fifty years old when it was gifted, as Henry only served as chief of appeals from 2008 to 2010. One might speculate that the reason for the gift might have been Ginsburg's 2010 visit to Colorado Springs, where she had made a speech to the bar at Henry's court.
But this speech was written by Martin Ginsburg, a lawyer specializing in tax law, who said wittily that
Giving away an antiquarian book that is not valuable in a financial sense: That's what you think of when you want to consider friends whose library is, if in doubt, better sorted than your own. Henry also wrote that he had thought long and hard about the right book. He chose Meyer because "laughter is good for body and soul". Lewis Meyer was a journalist and bookseller in Oklahoma, Henry's home state; his "silly father" Max Meyer was a lucky guy who found 32 oil wells on the barren land of his ranch. In his note, the donor did not have to indicate why this out-of-print memoir could become a source of never-ending pleasure for the Ginsburgs. Max Meyer was the only Jewish farmer in Oklahoma and founded a synagogue.The adventurous story of this American original is about advancement and integration under the most unlikely of conditions.