Emile Offenbacher
…. By the end of 1933 the dispersion of our family began. One year later, my parents had found a new home in Amsterdam and with them my youngest brother and my only sister, who both settled later in Palestine. My brother Eric had left for America, and I started to build myself a new existence in Paris. With money provided by my father I was able to buy a section of Mrs Halle’s stock. These were all books in the exact and occult sciences together with some medicine, which determined the direction of my business up to this day. My office was a hole in the wall on the ground floor of an apartment building near the Madeleine. It consisted of two bookshelves with a small desk in between, and very little space to move around.
Anne had already moved to France several months earlier after she had found a job in an orphan asylum near Paris. By the time I arrived, she was living with a French family where she took care of the two children. In August 1934 we were married by the mayor of the current 8th arrondissement in Paris, followed by a religious ceremony at my parents’ house in Amsterdam a few days later. We rented a modest apartment in a modern building in Vincennes, a suburb of Paris whose population mostly consisted of people with small incomes. Its greatest attraction was its situation near the famous woods, the Bois de Vincennes, and its proximity to the centre of Paris, which could be reached in a 20-minute subway ride. We were very poor in the first years of our marriage, but we were happy. I have always been grateful for the fact that I was poor when I was young instead of being poor in old age, after having witnessed the contrary in the generation which preceded us. It also helped that all our friends were in the same situation at that time.
One day an Englishman of about my age appeared at my office and asked if I had any early books on alchemy. This was one of my specialties at that time. I eagerly took one book after another from my shelves. The customer looked at them shortly and piled them up on my desk. When I had shown him everything I had, he asked: “Any more?” and then said: “Please send them to me as well.” He gave me his card which showed that his name was Denis Duveen and that he lived in one of the elegant new apartment houses near the Invalides. It turned out that he was a chemist from a rich English family who was doing some work at the Sorbonne at that time. While he was sick, somebody had given him John Read’s book Prelude to Chemistry to read, which contains many attractive illustrations from early books on alchemy. These pictures had appealed to him and he asked Maurice Ettinghausen, the only English book-seller in Paris he knew, whether these books were still available for purchase. Ettinghausen sent him to me and thus he became my first substantial customer. It was also the first time that I had the opportunity to build up an important collection from its beginnings. Denis was extremely generous to me: he never bargained and also let me work on the catalogue of his collection. This meant, of course, an enormous change in our financial situation as it relieved us from our constant worrying about money.
