Hans Neukmann, Habana Splendid poster (no date)

Systematically and endlessly, Arents carefully acquired items of every imaginable variety and use. There are 18th century snuff vending machines and tobacco pouches, as well as storing and carrying containers of many varieties from numerous periods in history. Sheet music, with allusions to smoking, art prints from the Renaissance to Monet and Van Gogh, picturing every aspect of smoking and chewing and sniffing tobacco, abound. The collection contains many thousands of cigar box labels and bands, as well as letters, manuscripts, and everything related to tobacco and smoking that delighted his fancy - and now ours.

As curator, Virginia Bartow, along with every curator since Arents' death in 1960, has added to the Collection, keeping it current. "Every work must have some link to tobacco," she indicates. And this relation is apparent, for instance, in a series of photographs portraying smoking writers, artists, and musicians, such as Peggy Lee and Bob Dylan.

Original Honus Wagner baseball card

The front reading room at the New York Public Library was in fact designed to complement the library in Arents' Westchester home, and was constructed in 1943 when the collection came to the Library. The walls are lined with bookcases, and a number of objects are displayed as decoration. They include the aforementioned cigar store Indians, and a rare figure of a Scotsman holding a snuff box, which had originally been a street sign. The figure is rare because most such signs were destroyed in 1745, during the Scottish Rebellion. There are European and American tobacco pots, rasps, drying forms, humidors, pouches, and a plethora of pipes. There is one of 40 or so meerschaum pipes once owned by the writer Amy Lowell, although she herself was only known to smoke cigars. Less exotic, but more expensive, is an original Honus Wagner baseball card. A pristine example of the same card fetched over $450,000 at auction a few years ago, when purchased by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and then Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall. These cards were originally given out as premiums in packs of Sweet Caporal cigarettes. And there is a quaint little brass box which opened, several centuries ago, at the drop of a penny, to dispense a pinch of snuff. Speaking of snuff, we also find the pewter snuff box that Charles Dickens carried with him on speaking tours.

That Shakespeare never mentioned either tobacco or smoking (although the pipe was already flourishing in his day), was a fact that proved initially frustrating to Arents. However, he was more than able to satisfy himself with the countless allusions to the happy habit occurring in other literature. While it would be impossible to list even a fraction of these works, Arents purchased many unique items, such as James the First of England's "Counterblaste to Tobacco," of 1604 (a copy of which took Arents 30 years to find). There are thousands of examples in general and fictional literature in both printed and manuscript form. The collection includes both the handwritten manuscript and original typescript of Oscar Wilde's, The Importance of Being Earnest, which contains the wonderful scene between Worthing and Lady Bracknell, where she grills him unmercifully to determine his matrimonial suitability for her daughter. Questioned about whether or not he smoked, Worthing replies in the affirmative. "I am glad to hear it," she counters. "A man should always have an occupation of some kind." It's perhaps one of the most famous, and surely one of the funniest, literary allusions to smoking. Additionally, there are works by Shaw and Waugh and Faulkner, among others, representing the literature of this century. The collection now contains over 10,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts of every conceivable variety and interest - all with mentions of tobacco or smoking.

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