Born in Austria in 1895, Fred Rosenstock was brought as a boy to Rochester, New York, where his father was a tailor. He feasted on the holdings of the local tailors' guild library, devouring books about the American West written in Yiddish. The West was frequently on his mind and in 1920, suffering from exhaustion and respiratory problems, he got on a train west. His employer in Washington, D.C., was paying for six months of R&R in California, but Fred lost his glasses on the train and got off in Denver to obtain another pair. He never got back on the train. "Buffalo Bill! Gold! Rocky Mountains!" went through his mind, he recalled years later.

His entry into the book business came in fits and starts but eventually he and his store reached landmark status. In his 1931 Americana catalogue he offered a "nice copy" of Joseph McCoy's Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, for $60. William French's Some Recollections of a Western Ranchman in New Mexico, was $3.75. A.S. Mercer's 1894 Banditti of the Plains was offered in the 1934 catalogue for $115. He described the contents, compared it to other books on the subject and finished with the Rosenstock touch: "Brought $260 in Thomas sale."

Evidently he lost interest in cataloguing and thereafter dealt on a personal basis in letters and in the store. As much as he enjoyed a sale, he liked buying books more. He traveled extensively, persistently tracking down even the faintest hint of a great collection. He bought entire libraries and let the chips fall where they might. "Good things," he told me, "sell themselves." At the age of eighty he agreed to sell his store inventory-seven semi-trailer loads-and was supposed to retire. But his young assistant Steve Good convinced him that he would enjoy the art business, in which he had dabbled for years. In the remodeled store, surrounded by Russells and Remingtons, Fred did. Even after he suffered a stroke in 1981 he came to the store a few hours a day until shortly before his death in February, 1986. Besides the vast Rosenstock inventory, even now being dispersed, Fred's Old West Publishing Co. published 28 books now considered Western classics including the reprint of Hiram Latham's Trans-Missouri Stock Raising, edited by Jeff Dykes and designed by Carl Hertzog. How he enlisted Hertzog is a story for another day.

(Linda Lebsack worked for Fred Rosenstock and Steve Good from 1980 until 1990 when she took over the book portion of Rosenstock Arts and made it Linda M. Lebsack Books, specializing in Colorado and Western history, American art and artists, railroading, and photography. The historic store on Colfax Avenue in Denver was sold in the year 2000, thirty-eight years after Fred Rosenstock bought it, and the books moved to 32 Broadway.)

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It is not unnatural, nor should anyone be surprised that, in my 43 years of hunting for rare books, original historical manuscripts, diaries and ephemera, I am able to relate a few incidents that bordered on the miraculous. Some of these unusual happenings have been completely accidental, or unexpected. Others, however, might more properly be considered as miracles, since they were almost direct answers or realizations of dreams, hopes, or intense desires in the ‘shall I ever find’ class. I have been fortunate, these many years, in retaining the health and vigor which have made it possible for me to constantly pursue my hunting and scouting pleasures—to go hundreds or thousands of miles on short notice or rumor—many times on what turned out to be wild goose chases or false alarms. However, in a way I feel that this ‘chase’ has kept me young. At this date I am 69, but I still have much of the old energy and, truly, the only difference I notice in myself is, I can no longer put in 20 hours a day—I have had to cut it to 18.

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A funny incident, as I look at it now, was when I tried to buy Judge Ben Lindsey’s house on Ogden Street, in Denver, after he had moved to California. That is, I was willing to buy the rather ungainly old house if I could also buy the Judge’s books that were housed there. What a library that was! Countless books with presentation inscriptions from famous authors—to the Judge!

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Let no one suppose that I never sell any of these exceptional things. My vocation is to sell as well as to buy; and I have taken great delight in placing fine items where they are utilized and esteemed.

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Following are excerpts from Linda Lebsack’s obituary of Fred Rosenstock written for the Denver Post (with thanks to Philip Panum, Special Collections Librarian, Denver Public Library, Western History Collection):

For years Fred had collected the works of Charles M. Russell, eventually sending the paintings, drawings, sculpture and ephemera to auction at Sotheby’s in New York in 1972. He told the story of the sale and how little it had netted him so often that eight years later, on Fred’s 85^th birthday, Mike Koury of the Old Army Press commissioned Dale Crawford to draw a cartoon of Russell with his arm around Fred. The caption was “Don’t fret none, Fred. You got a whole lot more for those pictures than I ever did.” It was true: Fred had recognized the greatness of Russell’s work during the 1920s and thereafter spent as much of his hard-earned money as he could on his beloved Russells.

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Although he worked with the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and the Yale and Princeton Libraries, most of the choice lots over the years that weren’t sold or donated to BYU were similarly offered to the Western History Department at the Denver Public Library. Alys Freeze, who was head of the Western History Department for many years, told Bower (Fred’s biographer), “Never had I entered his store but that some facet of history has become more vivid because of his knowledge of historical events. Each item is a part of his being. He is a gentle man with a slight old world courtesy.... A great void will exist when he is no longer in the book business.”

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Finally, from Donald E. Bower’s able biography, Fred Rosenstock: A Legend in Books & Art (Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1976):

From the introduction to Rosenstock’s 1934 “Western Americana” catalog (introduction by L. J. Davidson—professor at University of Denver): ‘Had there never existed the collector’s passion, much of the source material for American History would have been permanently lost and many great libraries would lack their choicest possessions. The collector not only satisfies his own desire to possess rare and interesting works, he also builds up a legacy for those who, with increasing interest and in greater numbers, are turning to the study of our past as a means of enriching our present. This especially is true in regard to Western Americana; for, as has often been noted, the frontier has been the most American thing about America, and the story of the Indian adds a unique element to American history and literature.’” (Bower, p. 115)

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J. Frank Dobie, while not a collector in the technical sense, put together, says J. E. Reynolds, a noted bookseller, “with loving care the greatest collection of books on the range livestock industry ever assembled by a private individual in this country.” Dobie bought books from the Rosenstocks for many years, usually writing a letter and attaching a list of the titles he was looking for. In 1952 Fred arranged a lecture tour for Dobie that included the University of Colorado, the University of Denver, Colorado State University and Colorado State College at Greeley.... After Dobie returned to Texas he wrote an article for the San Antonio Light, in which he referred to Fred Rosenstock’s Bargain Book Store: “It is crammed with old books, some very rare.... A person can learn an enormous amount by looking through books that he does not actually read. I incline to judge the civilization of a city by its bookstores—or by their absence. A genuine bookstore is far more than a house of merchandise. As an asset of civilization, it is in the same category as public libraries” (Bower, pp. 138-39).