Goldsmith, Alfred F.

Alfred Francis Goldsmith was born in Atlantic City, N.J. and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He opened his shop, At the Sign of the Sparrow, in the Gramercy Park area of New York City in the early 1920s. His primary interests were Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman. Goldsmith helped Carolyn Wells acquire her major collection of Whitmaniana, which she later left to the Library of Congress. Their descriptive bibliography of Whitman's works appeared in 1922. Wells later used Goldsmith's shop as the scene of her mystery novel, Murder in the bookshop (1936). Goldsmith died in 1947.

Goldsmith helped Edward Naumberg, Jr., a New York City stockbroker, pursue his interests in authors of the 1920s, the work of Ford Madox Ford, and unusual association and non-book items. Naumburg was part of a family that became patrons of music in New York City through the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts they established in 1905. A graduate of Princeton Univerity, Naumberg was an accomplished violinist and a member of the Grolier Club and the Century Association. He died in 1995 at the age of 92.