Home Page

Mary  BENJAMIN

Maria Benjamin ha avuto una tale autorevolezza nel suo campo che per decenni ha in pratica stabilito il valore dei documenti autografi degli americani importanti. Mary era talmente nota che i collezionisti degli Stati Uniti le scrivevano indirizzando semplicemente: "to  Lady autograph".

Nata nel 1905 a Yonkers sulle rive dell'Hudson ed alle pendici del Mt. Vernon, si graduò al Barnard College e lavorò per oltre 13 anni a fianco del padre, quel Walter Benjamin, reporter del New York Sun, che nel 1887 fondò a Manhattan quella che oggi è l'agenzia di commercio di autografi più antica della nazione.

Dotata di una memoria fotografica fuori del comune, la sua competenza divenne tale che solo guardando un documento, poteva dire se era autentico o meno e addirittura, nel caso non lo fosse, poteva dire chi l'aveva falsificato.

Mary era un'appassionata giocatrice di Bridge e sosteneva che l'emozione che provava quando riceveva una mano di Bridge era simile a quella che la rapiva quando apriva una autentica lettera antica.

All'età di 40 anni si sposò con Harold G. Henderson, un professore  di arte giapponese della Columbia University che aveva servito per il personale generale MacArthur e presto lo coinvolse nel suo lavoro investigativo scientifico.

Rimasta vedova si trasferì ad Hunter una cittadina ad una sessantina di km. da Albany dove continuò a gestire la sua impresa fino al 1995 assieme al nipote Christopher Jaeckel, che divenne il suo assistente nel 1971 e che la ereditò alla sua morte avvenuta il 30 novembre del 1998.

Mary Benjamin, an autograph dealer with such an authoritative eye for authenticity and such a sure sense of value that for decades she virtually dictated prices United States collectors paid for the writings of Presidents, poets and other prominent people. 

As a daughter of Walter R. Benjamin, a onetime New York Sun reporter who founded what is now the nation's oldest autograph dealership in Manhattan in 1887, Miss Benjamin, a native of Yonkers who graduated from Barnard, did not so much inherit her expertise as absorb it by osmosis during a 13-year apprenticeship at her father's elbow.

By the time she took over Walter R. Benjamin Autographs in 1940, Miss Benjamin had become so familiar with the handwritings of Presidents, cabinet secretaries, signers of the Declaration of Independence, Civil War generals and American and European composers, literary figures and the like that she could often tell at a glance not only if a document was authentic but which master forger had produced it if it was not.

Her expertise was so respected that once, when an auctioneer at a leading Manhattan gallery announced to the assembled bidders that the next item would be a George Washington letter, an audible snort of derision from Miss Benjamin was enough to cause the auctioneer to withdraw the document from the sale on the spot. As her snort had indicated, she had gotten a quick look at the letter moments earlier and recognized it as a forgery.

At a time when there were only a handful of dealers who handled autographs -- a term, meaning ''self-writing,'' that applies to anything, not simply the signature, written in a person's own hand -- Miss Benjamin's standing tended to overshadow her role as the only woman in the field.

Because of her reputation, experienced collectors and those with trunks full of old papers tended to seek her out, but Miss Benjamin was never satisfied with walk-in trade.

When it came to tracking down valuable documents, she was very much the daughter of the man who catapulted himself into the first ranks of his field in 1907. Learning that the Customs Service had sold 140 tons of old documents to a junk dealer, he persuaded the man to let him go through the refuse and ended up paying 25 cents each for thousands of documents signed by Presidents.

Similarly, when Miss Benjamin learned that the publishers of ''The Dictionary of American Biography'' had cleaned out its files of questionnaires filled out by 25,000 prominent Americans over two decades, she tracked down the junk dealer in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., who had picked them up and ended up acquiring hundreds of them, including three separate intimate questionnaires that had been filled out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Aside from a photographic memory that allowed her to recognize a handwriting she had not seen in years and to rattle off obscure biographic details of more than 10,000 notable figures of the previous 500 years, Miss Benjamin, who bought and sold between 5,000 and 10,000 documents a year and maintained an inventory of some 50,000 documents in her office vaults, had an uncanny sense of their value in the market of the moment.

A woman whose passions could be inflamed by a surprise discovery, Miss Benjamin, a crack bridge player, once likened the thrill of opening a trunk of old letters to the feeling of anticipation she felt at picking up a hand at the bridge table.

In her 40's when she married Harold G. Henderson, a Columbia professor of Japanese art who had served on General MacArthur's staff and composed Emperor Hirohito's renunciation of divinity, Miss Benjamin soon drew her husband into her scholarly detective work. On weekends the couple, wearing kimonos, would sit in the backyard of their Manhattan town house reading old manuscripts.

They also became famous for dinner parties whose regular guests included the likes of Georgia O'Keeffe.

A boom in autograph collecting in the 1960's brought her more competition, but Miss Benjamin, whose oft-revised 1946 book, ''Autographs: A Key to Collecting,'' has been regarded as a standard in the field, remained a figure to be reckoned with.

After her husband's death, she moved her business to Hunter, about 40 miles southeast of Albany, in 1974 and continued to be active until 1995. It is now operated by her nephew Christopher Jaeckel, who became her assistant in 1971.

She died on Monday at her home in Hunter, N.Y. She was 93 and had been so widely recognized as the nation's leading document authority that she regularly received mail addressed simply to ''The Autograph Lady'.'