Madeleine Bettina Stern, born in New York City on 1 July 1912, and Leona Rostenberg, born in New York on 28 Dec. 1908, first met in 1929 while teaching Hebrew School at Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El. At the time, Stern was a freshman at Barnard College, and Rostenberg was completing her undergraduate studies at New York University. Four years later, after Stern received her Master's Degree in medieval English literature from Columbia University, the two women met again and began a lifelong friendship and companionship. In 1939, the rejection of Rostenberg's Ph.D. thesis (a decision that would be overturned decades later) led her to accept a position with the rare book dealer, Herbert Reichner. With personal and financial support from Stern, Rostenberg announced the opening of her own rare book business five years later in the fall of 1944. Within a few months, Stern left a tenure-track teaching job to join her friend as partner in the firm.
Over the next several decades, Rostenberg and Stern would firmly establish their reputation in the antiquarian book business. Amid running the business out of Rostenberg's family home at 152 East 179th Street in the Bronx (later moving to Manhattan's Upper East Side) and taking annual European book buying trips, both women continued to pursue their individual scholarly interests. The pair's work on Louisa May Alcott, highlighted by their discovery of Alcott's pseudonymous sensational novels in the early 1940s, propelled Stern to continue research on nineteenth-century American women. Meanwhile, Rostenberg helped establish the first New York Antiquarian Book Fair in 1960 on behalf of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), an organization to which she would be elected president in 1972. In addition, the women published several joint memoirs of their life in the trade together, such as Old and Rare: Thirty Years in the Book Business (New York: A. Schram, 1974), Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and their Shared Passion (New York: Doubleday, 1997) and Bookends: Two Women, One Enduring Friendship (New York, Free Press, 2001). Sixty years after the founding of Leona Rostenberg Rare Books, Rostenberg died in New York on 18 March 2005. Her eternal friend and partner, Madeleine Stern, followed two years later on 18 Aug. 2007.
From the description of Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern papers, 1864-2005 ( bulk : 1945-2005) (Grolier Club). WorldCat record id: 746089475
