Henry Frank: pioneer American Hebrew publisher.

The sudden death of the pioneer American Hebrew publisher, Henry Frank, at Saratoga Springs, N. Y., on July 31, 1868, went unnoticed by the non-Jewish press of New York. Indeed, it was apparently only in the Hebrew Leader that his productive life was summarized, the editor remarking that, "during his long career in t h s country, which brought him in contact with persons of all creeds and nationalities, he quickly convinced them of his many noble qualities both as a man and a scholar." Then nearly a year after Frank's death -his biography and his portrait were blazoned forth in one of New York's most unlikely media, the American Phrenological Journal. There, under the hyperbolic caption HENRY FRANK, THE FIRST HEBREW PUBLISHER IN T H E UNITED STATES, three columns were devoted to his life and work, and a large portrait was accompanied by a phrenological analysis of his faculties and temperament.= The publisher of the American Phrenological Journal, Samuel R. Wells, was, of course, a student of phrenology or the science of the mind, the nineteenth century's equivalent of psychoanalysis. As such, he was deeply interested in so-called "national types," among whom the Jew, standing "at the head of the Semitic sub-races," always found a place in his ethnological analyses. As an example of a race characterized by a "lofty coronal arch, . . . breadth above the ears, and . . . broad; arched, and prominent nasal bone," Henry Frank may have engaged the attention of the phrenologist-editor Wells. At all events, the American Phrenological Journal was apparently the only periodical that carried Frank's portrait and gave his career the space it deserved. As a German-Jewish-American publisher, Henry Frank had indeed supplied the needs of a growing,