Hanni Kraus, bookseller; Times of London obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Dealing in magnificent books and manuscripts in New York
BEHIND every great man, they say, is a woman to whom he owes a
debt not to be calculated. Hans Kraus, the dominant New York bookseller from
the 1950s to the 1980s, was never one to conceal the debt he owed to Hanni
Zucker.
He had arrived in New York on October 12, 1939, a refugee
recently released from Buchenwald, with just one small but valuable book in
his bag. Born like him in Vienna, she had escaped with her family to
Switzerland, arriving in New York early in November 1939. She met Hans Kraus
soon after her arrival, and saw in him not just the obvious entrepreneurial
energy, but the qualities that would make a kind and loyal husband. For him,
meeting her was the first stroke of the good luck that seemed to attend him
thereafter, and he recognised at once that he had found not only a wife to
cherish, but also a partner who would be essential to his business.
Together, they brought up five children who became a close-knit family.
If it was her husband who initiated the series of new
enterprises - Russian books, periodicals, reprints - that went along with a
steadily growing trade in old books, it was she who watched over the
accounts and made sure that the money needed for purchases was covered by
incoming revenue. She was a constant companion, in and out of the shop, and
together they decided on the move in 1945 to 16 East 46th Street, where H.
P. Kraus remains. All through the 1950s and 1960s, impressive catalogues of
manuscripts and early printed books kept the firm's name at the forefront of
the trade.
They arranged to go to the opera on February 2, 1970, Hans
stopping off briefly to see the collector Arthur Houghton. To his
astonishment, Houghton wanted to sell his Gutenberg Bible. He named a price
and Kraus agreed at once. It was all over in quarter of an hour, and he
rejoined Hanni and his daughter, telling them "I have bought the book of
books". When the following year he persuaded the French national library to
part with its "duplicate" copies of the still rarer Psalters of 1457 and
1459, it was with Hanni that he drove to Princeton to deliver them to the
purchaser, William Scheide.
Through these and many other spectacular transactions, Hanni was
there to encourage and to caution. Her husband had what he called a
"Polycrates complex", after the Greek tyrant who boasted of his good luck
and was struck down by the gods. Each triumph called for appeasement. One
such event was the hours spent, Hanni again by his side, sitting for his
portrait to a Basque painter in Buenos Aires, who promised a copy of the
first printed book with illustrations. It never turned up; and nor did the
Gutenberg Bible that they had been told was in the library at Blandings
Castle, Shropshire.
But disappointments were few and their happy partnership ended
only with Hans's death in November 1988, just short of their 50th wedding
anniversary.
Hanni's appetite for work was undiminished. She set up a fund in
memory of Hans at the Beinecke Library at Yale. She continued to go to the
annual congresses of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie, and she
continued to go into the shop, now in the hands of her daughter Mary Ann and
her husband Roland Folter. She was as watchful over its fortunes as ever, up
to the week before her death.
The many friends she made inside and outside the trade will miss
the familiar form, her hair always immaculately coiffed, the large
spectacles, and the friendly greeting in that voice that never lost its
Viennese accent. Her part in building up the firm her husband founded was no
less important than his, and its greatness today is their joint achievement.
She is survived by a son and four daughters.
Hanni Kraus, bookseller, was born in Vienna on March 30, 1919.
She died in New York on January 14, 2003, aged 83.
