Marguerite Arnold Cohn (31 October 1897- 9 August 1984). Pioneering bookseller in the field of modern first editions. Founder along with her husband Louis Henry Cohn (1888-1953) of the House of Books, Ltd. in New York.
For a brief sketch of the House of Books and the scope of Cohn's career, see the record description of the House of Books Ltd. archive at Columbia University; see also the notes on the collection description of the Louis Henry and Marguerite Cohn Hemingway collection at the University of Delaware. See also Donald C. Dickinson in the Dictionary of American Antiquarian Bookdealers (Greenwood Press, 1998).
(NB. While the Columbia University finding aid gives the year of Cohn's birth as 1887 and Dickinson supplies 1898, the Social Security Death Index supplies a birth date of 31 October 1897. English probate records supply the death date of 9 August 1984.)
Cohn wrote in her address to the Annual Dinner of the A.B.A.A. in April, 1980 (as found in the The Professional Rare Bookman (later the Professional Rare Bookseller) issue number 1, 1980 (this issue for some obscure reason unpaginated):
“Louis and I met in 1928 and when we planned our marriage we fully expected to live in Paris at leisure. Like my husband I had also been a Francophile. Nineteen twenty-nine burst that bubble and finally we decided that Louis's avocation must become our vocation and in 1930 HOUSE OF BOOKS, Ltd. was born. . . . We began without a customer in the midst of the depression but somehow we survived, though at times it was difficult.”
Known familiarly as Margie Cohn. (Cohn's 1980 address notes that among the “younger writers” who had become friends with her she numbered Tom Stoppard, whose presentation inscription on her copy of his Dirty Linen read “For Margie Cohn a clean girl - a dirty book.” Cohn comments, “He is one of the most thoughtful persons I know.”)
Bookseller Larry McMurtry wrote in a New York Times column “Lost Booksellers of New York” on 10 May 2014:
“The other powerful woman on the New York book scene at that time [ca. 1965] was the redoubtable Marguerite Cohn, of the House of Books Ltd., the first New York bookseller to focus on the condition of the books she sold and of the collections she built. Margie, as her friends called her, was explosive. I believe she once flung a copy of Three Stories and Ten Poems at someone: her husband, who was Hemingway’s first bibliographer; one of her husband’s mistresses; or Edmund Wilson. The record is not clear, but the book is currently worth maybe $75,000. Margie, on a buying trip to London, looked the wrong way, stepped off a curb and was killed by a truck. She may have had more disciples in the trade than any other dealer, the most impressive perhaps being Peter B. Howard of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, Calif. Both shop and shopkeeper are now gone.”
