Not counting restaurants, my favorite room in Baltimore is on the top floor of the downtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It doesn't look like much from the outside -- just a nondescript blue metal door with "Mencken Room" painted on it -- but I love it anyway. The Mencken Room is the place where I unearthed the long-forgotten manuscript of an unpublished book America's greatest journalist.
On the inside, the Mencken Room looks like the library of a slightly seedy men's club: book-lined walls, aging chandeliers, reasonably comfortable chairs. But you don't have to dig very deep to realize that appearances are deceiving. The books, for example, are from H. L. Mencken's personal collection. Some are first editions effusively inscribed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser and a dozen other now-legendary American authors of the '20s. Others are the original manuscripts of Mencken's own books: "Prejudices," "The American Language," "Treatise on the Gods," "Newspaper Days." All were left to the Pratt by Mencken on his death in 1956, along with the battered portable typewriter on which he rapped out many of them.
The Mencken Room is a magnet for anyone interested in the life and work of Baltimore's favorite son: scholars, buffs, sworn enemies. There has never been a more complete collection of the private papers of a major American author. Even the closet is full of surprises. A cross between the Smithsonian Institution and the archives of Fibber McGee, the closet of the Mencken Room houses such unlikely-sounding items as the schoolbooks Mencken used as a child and a boxful of letters sent to him by insane women after he became famous. The top shelf, appropriately enough, is where I found the manuscript of "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."
The story of "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy" begins in 1943, when H. L. Mencken first discussed with Alfred Knopf, his friend and publisher, the possibility of bringing out "a sort of Mencken ,, Encyclopedia, made up of extracts from my writings over many years, arranged by subject and probably with additions." Four years later, Mencken went to work in earnest on the book that ultimately became "A Mencken Chrestomathy," a jumbo anthology containing his endlessly quotable thoughts on everything from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (good) to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (bad).
From the title (a Greek-derived word meaning "a collection of choice passages from an author or authors") to the salty author's notes that introduced each selection, "A Mencken Chrestomathy" showed off the Sage of Baltimore at his best and most typical: witty and abrasive, self-confident and self-contradictory, sometimes maddening, often engaging, always inimitable. Not surprisingly, the "Chrestomathy" made the best-seller lists as soon as it was published in 1949. It's been in print ever since, a permanent monument to the lasting relevance and readability of its author.
The success of "A Mencken Chrestomathy" is a matter of record. What didn't get into the record is that Mencken planned from the outset to publish a sequel. Though a few scholars were aware that the manuscript materials for "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy" were left by Mencken to the Pratt as part of his huge collection of private papers, it was universally assumed that they were too disorganized to salvage. Two months after delivering the first "Chrestomathy" to Knopf in the fall of 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke that left him unable to read or write for the rest of his life. How could he possibly have made any headway on a second volume?
This is where I came in. Shortly before starting work on a biography of Mencken, I read his diaries (unsealed in 1981 and published eight years later), which contain numerous references the editing of the first "Chrestomathy" and to Mencken's plans for a sequel. These references suggested that Mencken might well have gotten farther along in his work on the "Second Chrestomathy" than was commonly supposed. I filed this bit of information in the back of my head for future reference.
In the spring of 1992, I unlocked the closet of the Mencken Room, unfolded a stepladder and started hunting for buried treasure.
It was a daunting task. The contents of the closet are fully catalogued, but nothing is easy to find. The closely packed shelves go all the way up to the ceiling, and the only light is an ancient bulb that could have come out of the refrigerator of a dollhouse.
I figured I might as well start with the top shelf and work my way down. Perched unsteadily on the highest rung of the stepladder, I spotted five fat letter files whose typewritten labels were barely readable by the feeble glow of the closet light: "Material Collected by H.L.M. for a proposed second volume of A Mencken Chrestomathy."
Intrigued, I blew off a quarter-century's worth of accumulated library dust and unlocked the first file. It was full of unsorted newspaper clippings, some dating as far back as the early 1900s. No treasure there.
I pried open the second file and found a thick sheaf of typescripts, each one held together with a rusty staple. Most bore scribbled corrections in Mencken's near-illegible handwriting.
They ranged from a waspish essay on John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" ("A shrill falsetto of enthusiasm for 'The Grapes of Wrath' is passing through the pink weeklies and other such heralds of the New Deal") to a "New Constitution for Maryland" drawn up in 1937 for the amusement and edification of readers of the Baltimore Sun ("No person shall be eligible [to serve in the state legislature] who is or has ever been a minister of the gospel, or who has ever been under guardianship as a lunatic").
All told, the second file contained 250-odd passages culled by Mencken from his uncollected newspaper and magazine articles and from ten of his books, totaling some 150,000 words. This was consistent with what Mencken had said about the "Second Chrestomathy" in his diaries: "There is an excess of copied material [for 'A Mencken Chrestomathy'] about equal in bulk to the matter now in the book. Thus, if the 'Chrestomathy' has an encouraging sale I'll be ready to produce a second volume."
The more I read, the more excited I got. I knew at once that I'd made an important discovery: H. L. Mencken, contrary to the assumptions of earlier scholars, had actually gotten within arm's length of finishing the "Second Chrestomathy" before his stroke.
A spot check of the Mencken bibliography revealed that more than half of the passages had never appeared in book form. Most were new to me, and all were vintage Mencken. All I had to do was sort them into chapters and edit them for publication. There was no doubt about it: this was a book, and a good one.
I got in touch with Ashbel Green, the Knopf editor in charge of Mencken's posthumously published books, and told him what I'd found. He immediately entered into negotiations with the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which serves as executor of the Mencken estate, and we soon signed a contract to publish "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."
Since Johns Hopkins University Press would be bringing out Mencken's "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work" in the fall of 1994, Knopf put the "Second Chrestomathy" on ice, scheduling it for publication in 1995. It comes out tomorrow, 39 years and one day after the death of H. L. Mencken.
That's why, not counting restaurants, my favorite room in Baltimore is the one on the top floor of the downtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. You never know what you'll find when you unlock that blue door and start nosing around.
TERRY TEACHOUT is arts columnist of the New York Daily News and associate editor of The New Dance Review. He is the editor of "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy" (to be published Monday by Alfred A. Knopf) and the author of "H. L. Mencken: A Life" (to be published in 1996 by Simon & Schuster). His other books include "City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy," "Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture and Politics" and "Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959."