Karp’s collecting was also helped by his geographic relocations. As a rabbi, he served congregations in Swampscott, Massachusetts (a suburb ten miles north of Boston), Kansas City, and Rochester, New York. Each community served as a base for book acquisitions.

Sometimes Karp traded volumes with the librarians of local Christian theological seminaries. More often, he went on buying forays into the countryside. A visiting professorship at Dartmouth College made accessible the small towns of New Hampshire and Vermont. Thirty years back, recalled Karp, each New England town still housed its local antiquarian book shop. A nineteenth century Jewish marriage contract; a newspaper carrying a front-page obituary of Mordechai Noah, whom Karp called America’s first Zionist; an advertisement from Haym Solomon’s loan company – these were examples of overlooked collectibles that Karp’s innocent queries or enterprising searches would ferret out.

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May the devotion of this pioneering grassroots collector spur our curiosity in the Jewish printed book.

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Ron Rubin is the author of several books including “A Jewish Professor’s Political Punditry: Fifty-Plus Years of Published Commentary” and “Anything for a T-Shirt: Fred Lebow and the New York City Marathon, the World’s Greatest Footrace.”