Miss Bender's Ten Nights

When Janet Bender, school librarian for the town of Stroudsburg, Pa. (pop. 6,300), first heard of the strange bequest, she scarcely knew which way to turn. Where ever would she get hold of ten copies of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, and What I Saw There--the 19th century's gruesome lost-weekend tract? Unless she did, her two school libraries might never be able to profit by the $25,000 left in trust by the eccentric old ex-schoolteacher, Samuel Schoonover. An ardent, lifetime Prohibitionist, Schoonover had stated, in effect, in his will: no Ten Nights, no bequest.

Miss Bender soon learned that the book had gone out of print, that not a bookstore around had seen a copy in years. Her best hope was probably to get her problem into the papers. But that, she soon found, was a risky business. In upper New York State, a garbled story made each copy of the book worth a flat $2,500. After that, Librarian Bender's phone began to ring incessantly.

Calls came from Buffalo, Rochester and Utica, with each caller offering to sell'her a copy of Ten Nights for $2,500. "That night," says Miss Bender, "I couldn't even eat my dinner." Next day the confusion grew worse. Letters began to pour in by the hundreds, and finally Miss Bender had to get a secretary to handle them all. Meanwhile, "things at school were just at a standstill--everybody was so busy answering the phone."

As the days passed, events took a turn for the better. Townsfolk began rummaging through their own attics and libraries, and six found that they owned copies of Ten Nights. The Wilkes-Barre Little Theatre Group, which had performed a play version of the book in 1933, discovered that it still had three copies lying around. Other copies came from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana. Though some owners wanted as much as $1,000 for their copies, there were plenty of others willing to hand theirs over free. Finally, last week, Miss Bender was able to announce that she had collected 28 copies of the book without spending a cent. At week's end, she was also able to count on the libraries' share of the first installment from Samuel Schoonover's will --a check for $3,422.56.

*Written in 1854 by Pamphleteer-Editor T. S. Arthur, Ten Nights made almost as big a sensation as Uncle Tom's Cabin, quickly became the bible of temperance lecturers, was made into a play, set a whole nation singing "Father, dear father, come home with me now!" The lurid lessons of Simon Slade's saloon, the Sickle & Sheaf, eventually produced more laughter than fears, more vaudeville jokes than pious homilies. But their spirit lived on, to bring national prohibition, 1920 to 1933.

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