A couple of days ago, I was doing some searches in my email, as I often do, to call up old correspondence or scripts I may have saved in drafts, and somehow I came across some messages from Edward Sargent.
Sargent was an old customer of mine from my Philadelphia bookshop days. At a point, he intuited that I would be interested in his record collection, which he was in the act of digitizing or converting to reel-to-reel or something. Maybe he knew who I was from listening to the radio. I don’t remember. In any case, it wasn’t unusual for used bookstores to have LP sections, back in the day.
As you can imagine, I had a lot of garbage dumped on my doorstep in the night, boxes of textbooks and self-help and dog-eared paperbacks and musty records. What was salvageable I would toss out on a shelf in front of the store for a dollar. So I was about as cynical as any used bookdealer you’ve ever encountered. An interesting side-post might examine the question of whether owning a bookstore makes one cantankerous, or if cantankerous people are attracted to the trade.
Be that as it may, Sargent didn’t fit the profile of someone who just wanted the Hefty bags out of his garage. The man radiated quiet intelligence and discernment. I confess I was always a little intimidated by him. He spoke softly, kept his lower face wreathed in white whiskers that ran right up to and obscured the lip, and peered through coke-bottle glasses with a steady gaze that suggested he could see into your inner fool. I knew I wasn’t exactly an idiot myself, but I found him unnerving. He seemed to me the very caricature of a philosopher. I could imagine him drawing on a long-stemmed pipe while cogitating over abstractions in an isolated cottage in the woods, like something out of James Stephens’ “The Crock of Gold.”
Perhaps I flatter myself that he somehow wound up taking a shine to me. He did maintain the utmost formality in his emails, addressing me as “Dear Ross Amico” and signing-off “Edward Sargent.” No “Warmly,” no “Regards,” not even “Best.” More likely, he found himself in the position I’m in now, having reached an age when he was starting to wonder to whom he was going to leave all this stuff. Anyone could discern from how well I curated my inventory that I at least had some awareness and refinement. Whatever the case, he proposed giving me his records. When he handed me his card, I noted “Pohjola” was part of his email address. If you know your Sibelius, then you know I’d connected with a soulmate.
But because of his unnerving quiet or my own insecurity, or some combination of the two, we were never as friendly as we could have been. In fact, I went out of my way to avoid him. I never ignored him if he tried to contact me, but sometimes I’d hold back until I could find the courage to follow-up. I was also very busy, remember, working seven days a week, between the shop and my radio shifts. On more than one occasion I’d arrive to open the shop and find that Edward had already been there and left a handful of records behind the bars. Once, I happened across some boxes of rare classical LPs at a rummage sale being held at a church on the corner. These, of course, were further cast-offs from his collection. While everything I had gotten from him so far was free, I shelled out for these immediately and added them to my hoard.
Eventually, after five years, I closed the shop (my second location in Philadelphia), and we lost touch. On the one hand, I really, really wanted his records; on the other, I feared to have them, as they would have just required so much storage and so much effort to collect (you try to find convenient parking in residential Philadelphia), including having to haul them up the stairs to my third-story walk up (which was more like four, because of the high-ceilinged art gallery at street level), all the while risking a hefty ticket for having to park in the bike lane with my four-ways flashing.
In the end, I estimate I wound up with maybe half of his collection. If he hadn’t still been in the process of cataloguing and transferring audio when he first offered it to me, perhaps I would have just taken everything. It was the most amazing record collection I’d ever seen, not so much for the size as for the diversity of offerings, which stretched back decades. Highly-collectible Louisville and Mercury recordings that never made it to compact disc; 10-inch LPs pressed on colored vinyl; Melodiya releases with jackets in Cyrillic; rarely-heard Scandinavian composers; composers of the Antipodes and Latin America. I don’t even know how he accumulated it all in the era before the internet. They were not the kinds of things that would have been in the regular inventory of most record stores.
He also slipped me a bootleg of the U.S. premiere of Hindemith’s then recently-rediscovered “Klaviermusik mit Orchester” (a performance now easily accessible on YouTube), with Leon Fleisher and the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Simon Rattle. (A few years later, I would attend the East Coast premiere.)
I remember googling Edward once before, a few years ago, and came across an interesting article about him, written in 2013. It doesn’t surprise me that he was related to the painter John Singer Sargent. Here’s the link.
https://www.chestnuthilllocal.com/stories/related-to-americas-premier-portrait-painter-grew-up-with-celebs-hiller-exhibits-art-in-mt,4342
Sadly, when I did a search for him after coming across his emails the other day, I discovered he died in December 2024. The obituary didn’t read like much, but I found this more flavorful reminiscence by a friend.
https://www.chestnuthilllocal.com/stories/edward-sargent-most-unorthodox,31239
Rest easy, sir, and thanks for the records.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Edward Sargent and three selections from his jaw-dropping collection: Dean Dixon conducting Howard Hanson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Symphony No. 4; Norman Dello Joio’s “New York Profiles” on red 10” vinyl; and Philadelphia composer Paul Nordoff’s “Winter Symphony,” one of the legendary Louisville Orchestra series of world premieres, never reissued on compact disc
