Leonard L. Mackall

Whenever Leonard Leopold Mackall made one of his frequent visits to New York from his Savannah home, he always installed himself at the Century. He became a member in 1920, but the impression conveyed to his Club associates—he seemed to know all of them personally—was that he belonged to the Club and had always been a part of it. Fellow-Centurions would encounter him in the office, in the reading-room, in the library, at the southeast corner table in the dining-room. He was everywhere in the Club-house; but anyone who met Mackall would stop to exchange ideas with the Centurion of the serious face but cheerful manner, who himself was always ready to match impressions on whatever subject.

Mackall, however, had one life purpose of his own; the discriminating collection of rare books, concerning which his knowledge was unusual. He knew the pedigree of books published as far back as the Sixteenth Century, not always by well-known writers of the period. He knew where every rare edition of them could be obtained, and had accumulated by his own assiduous effort twelve to fifteen thousand of such volumes. But Mackall was more than a single-minded bibliophile. He knew intimately all the great masters of literature; in American history he was deeply versed. His own state of Georgia had not only made him librarian of the largest Savannah library, but had chosen him for president of the Georgia Historical Society. His extraordinary library is left to Johns Hopkins, but he remembered the Century also, bequeathing it $1,000 for additions to the Club’s own library, to be purchased “gradually and carefully.” He had, indeed, already enriched our present book-shelves, and perhaps the clearest memory which the Club-house will have of Mackall is of his interested examination of books on the third-floor library table over which he leaned, and his ready suggestion of what others ought to be added.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1938 Century Association Yearbook