Treasures: Dublin Comes to Delancey

IN A BRICK rowhome on a street full of such homes, in a part of Philadelphia full of such streets, an unassuming man spends his days shuffling among dusty books and curiosities.

There’s nothing outwardly strange or peculiar about No. 2010 Delancey Place, or about the keeper of its treasure. There’s no bright shingle hanging over the door, and no one walking past to see it anyway. Few people, then, find the place or the man without a search.

“Welcome!” Michael Barsanti greets me, at the front door. The home’s former residents — the dashing Rosenbach brothers — are long dead and gone, and now their house is called the Rosenbach Museum & Library. I am the only visitor.

Barsanti starts a tour of the home on its first floor. The initial clue to the home’s unusual nature comes in the very first room, with a photograph of the real Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Abraham Rosenbach bought the original manuscript that became Alice in Wonderland, and later — why not? — invited the real Alice to his home in Philadelphia for tea.

Abraham and Philip Rosenbach were a pair of rakish millionaire bachelors who traveled the world acquiring unusual objects for their clients. Philip focused on paintings and antiques, and the younger brother, Abraham, specialized in books and manuscripts. By the time he died, in 1952, he was the most influential bookman in the world.

These days, the museum serves as a monument to the brothers’ eccentric tastes. Barsanti shows me a photo of Albert Einstein, whose letters to Abraham Rosenbach are kept upstairs. There are notes and outlines by Bram Stoker, who wrote part of Dracula in Philly. A lock of Charles Dickens’s hair. This plain rowhome, it turns out, is the modern equivalent of an unplundered Egyptian pyramid. And Barsanti, the keeper, guards its artifacts.

On the first floor, there’s a parchment decree by England’s Charles II, authorizing women to appear onstage in plays. And on the second, a literary double shot: an edition of Moby Dick inscribed by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I am disappointed, for reasons I refuse to confront, to hear that No. 2010 Delancey no longer houses its weirdest prize: Napoleon’s penis.

We climb carpeted stairs to Abraham Rosenbach’s third-floor personal library, to the top of the pyramid, to see its greatest jewel: one of the finest works of art in Philadelphia, and one of the most valuable. It’s the reason Barsanti first came to this city, the object to which he has devoted his life.

Barsanti brings it from a glassed-in bookcase to a table in the center of the room. “Here it is,” he says, laying out a sheaf of papers. On the first page, in what looks like a schoolchild’s No. 2 pencil, it calls itself:

Ulysses
by
James Joyce

It’s the handwritten manuscript of the novel often regarded as the most important piece of literature in the past century. The novel is enigmatic, almost impossible to read without the proper key; then it rises up, clear and beautiful. Relatively few people know this manuscript’s history, or its location. Those who do know, I would learn, form a sort of parareligion, with this as their sacred text.

The reaction to seeing — ­touching, even — the manuscript is wonderment: to wonder why such a thing calls Philadelphia its home. To wonder how it came here. And to wonder why it inspires such passion in its adherents.

The answers to all those things, in time, would also rise up, clear and beautiful.