FIRST-CLASS PASSENGER Charles Emelius Lauriat Jr., a Boston bookseller, carried several items of particular value. Lauriat, forty, was a good-looking man, with an attentive gaze and well-trimmed brown hair. Since 1894 he had been president of one of the country’s best-known bookstores, Charles E. Lauriat Company, at 385 Washington Street in Boston, several blocks from Boston Common, this at a time when a book dealer could achieve national recognition. It was “the golden age of American book collecting,” according to one historian, when some of the nation’s great private collections were amassed, later to become treasured libraries, such as the Morgan in New York and the Folger in Washington. Lauriat was an accomplished swimmer and yachtsman who played water polo and regularly raced his 18-foot sailboat and served as a judge in regattas that took place off the New England coast each summer. The Boston Globe called him a “born boat sailor.” Something of a celebrity himself, at least in literary circles, he dined regularly at the city’s Player’s Club, often with one of the foremost critics and poets of the age, William Stanley Braithwaite.
The store, originally situated directly opposite Boston’s Old South Church, had been founded by Lauriat’s father and a partner, Dana Estes, in 1872, under the name Estes & Lauriat, which also published books. Three years later, the two partners divided the business into two companies, with Lauriat taking over the retail side. By the time of the split the store had already become a Boston institution, “as much a debating society as it was a bookshop,” according to one account. It served as a meeting place for writers, readers, intellectuals, and artists and included among its regular customers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The elder Lauriat was said to see himself as a “guide, counselor and friend” to his customers and produced in the store an atmosphere that one newspaper writer called “homeness.”
The store was long and narrow and jutted far inward from the street, more mineshaft than showroom, with books shoring the walls all the way to the high ceilings and stacked on counters down the center. A flight of stairs led to a balcony full of collectors’ books and “association books,” those made valuable because their owners had been famous or otherwise noteworthy. One attraction for book aficionados was the store’s Old Book Room, in the basement, filled with “great gems” that, according to a privately published history of the store, had come into the marketplace mainly “through the breaking up of old English country house libraries.” The display windows on Washington Street drew crowds of onlookers at lunch hour. Rare books were displayed in the windows on one side of the front door, new books on the other, including those with the most garish covers known even then as “bestsellers.” (One popular American author who turned out a bestseller every year was named, oddly enough, Winston Churchill.) The store was one of the first to sell “Remainders,” stocks of once-popular books that remained unsold after the initial surge of sales and that publishers were willing to sell to Lauriat at a deep discount. He in turn sold them to customers for a fraction of their original price, a side of the business that grew so popular the store began printing a “Remainder Catalog,” released each fall.
But the thing that set Lauriat apart from other booksellers, from the beginning, was the elder Lauriat’s decision to make an annual trip to London to buy up old books and sell them in America for far higher prices, leveraging the differential in demand that existed on opposite sides of the Atlantic, while also taking advantage of the falling prices and faster speeds of shipping brought by the advent of transatlantic steamships. Lauriat made his first trip in 1873 on one of Cunard’s earliest steamers, the Atlas. His purchases routinely made news. One acquisition, of a Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or “Breeches,” Bible—so named because it used the word breeches to describe what Adam and Eve wore—drew nearly a full column in the New York Times. By century’s end, the store had become one of the country’s leading sellers and importers of rare books, manuscripts, and illustrations, its bookplates destined to be treasured by future bibliophiles.
Charles Lauriat Jr. continued his father’s transatlantic harvest and in that last week of April 1915 was preparing to set out on his next buying trip. As always, Lauriat planned to stay in London for several months while he hunted for books and writerly artifacts to acquire, these to be crated and shipped back by sea to Boston. He transported his most valuable finds in his personal baggage and never thought to insure them against loss, “for the risk,” as he put it, “is practically nil.” Nor did the war prompt him to change his practice. “We considered the passenger steamers immune from submarine attack,” he wrote.
He bought his ticket, No. 1297, from a Cunard agent in Boston, and while doing so asked whether the liner would be “convoyed through the war zone.” The clerk replied, “Oh yes! every precaution will be taken.”