Word: lowdermilk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Walter Clay Lowdermilk, 85, land and water conservationist; in Berkeley, Calif. As a forestry professor in Nanking, China, in the 1920s, Lowdermilk concluded that the vast wastelands of northern China were a product of careless exploitation of agricultural resources. In a vigorous lifelong crusade to combat what he termed "man-induced erosion," Lowdermilk oversaw numerous U.S. conservation programs over the years and served as consultant to the governments of Mexico, Japan and Yugoslavia. His pet project was the early agricultural development of Israel, where his suggestion that water from the Jordan River be diverted to irrigate the desert...
...Grant used to stop at Low-dermilk's bookstore in the afternoon to browse, and Teddy Roosevelt ordered volumes on wildlife there. The more literate Congressmen and Senators prowled among its shelves. Sometimes their own books found their way back into Lowdermilk's massive stocks. The store in downtown Washington had volumes bearing the senior Henry Cabot Lodge's bookplate, the Ex Libris of Speakers of the House, even that of Davy Crockett, the Tennessee Congressman who died at the Alamo...
...year-old Lowdermilk's, oldest of the nation's great secondhand bookstores, was a print fancier's Golconda. In a pre-paperback age, the books themselves, passing through Lowdermilk's from one owner to another, acquired histories and characters of their own. Roaming among the shop's six miles of shelves, the browser might have come upon a 1702 edition of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, a signed first edition of John Brown's Body or a mint copy of Agricola's De Re Metallica signed by the translators...
...Boston, the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago, Howell's in San Francisco and Dawson's in Los Angeles. They are survivors of a fading American scene. More than a year ago, Leary's closed in Philadelphia, and last week an auctioneer sold Lowdermilk's 200,000 volumes and documents for a total of $110,000. Among the items were 52 glass negatives made by Mathew Brady...
...Lowdermilk's was a wonderfully archaic place redolent of the 19th century, with its air of oddity and discovery. Ralph Newman, owner of Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, observed: "It was like going to your favorite tavern-you could always find things there, like a first printing of the Gettysburg Address." Newman will keep his own store open as long as he can. "We're one of the few bookstores left where you can get a drink in the back," Newman smiled. "Try that on the Book-of-the-Month Club...