Brother Neff

      I first heard of Brother Neff in the mission field.  I was serving in Cheju, “Korea’s Hawai’i.”  I had to take the plane to Pusan for a meeting and returned with stacks of recent church magazines, et cetera for all the missionaries on the island.  In the first issue of the Church News for September ’97, I read an article about a man with long white whiskers who owned a bookshop in Nauvoo.  The gentleman was a great-great-great-grandson of Catherine Smith,¹ Joseph’s sister, who stayed in Illinois while the bulk of the church went west.  The years and miles let the family drift from church membership, but they never forgot the connection.

      Throughout his life, Brother Neff collected books pertaining to Mormonism, and finally decided to open a bookstore.  His store is currently in a prime location just across Mulholland from the temple lot.  Old House Bookstore.  Nice place.

      When I arrived in Nauvoo January 4^th, I had forgotten Brother Neff’s name, but I certainly had not forgotten him.  How often, after all, does a hoar-headed descendant of Joseph Smith Sr’s left-in-the-East progeny get baptized?  It’s a point of interest!

      Even before my first trip to his bookstore, Brother Neff had made his presence known.  He donated to the school a bunch of little pocket calendars for us to use.  Not being a terribly organized person myself, I used mine mostly to trace the outlines of the states I have visited in red, and those I’ve merely flown over in a nice metallic turquoise color.  By the end of the semester I would also be able to trace in red Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario (not technically a state I realize, but it sure helps fill out the continent).

      I didn’t get to the Old House until my second Friday in Nauvoo, and all I did that first time was wander around a bit, ho, hum and leave.  At that time, I think all I really wanted to do was see the bearded man and compare prices.

      But I would come back to Brother Neff’s again and again.  My two main Mulholland habits would be to purchase postcards from the antique store and thumb through books at the Old House.  The best part of Brother Neff’s store is the really old books.  Wacky books about Mormons, some favorable, some ludicrously anti, with titles like The Mormon Menace (George Whitfield Phillips, 1885), The Mormon Massacre at Nauvoo (Thomas L. Barnes, 1897) or He whakaaturanga tere—apparently a book of spiritual quotations (1893).²  He has a back room, and there he keeps the majority of his out-of-prints.  I poked around:  There are books Grandma has . . . there’s a couple classics I’ve heard of before . . . oh yeah, guess he would have to have that . . . and here is—OMEEGAROLLEE!!!  It can’t be!

      Here, before me, was a copy of Hosea Stout’s diary, both volumes, as edited by Juanita Brooks.  It had a different dust jacket than the one I was familiar with, but it was certainly the same couple of books.  And having a different dust jacket was nothing short of a wonderful blessing.

      My whole childhood Hosea Stout stared down at me with his dark, sunken eyes, his green and purply splotched face oversized and horrific.  The books were designed so that the spines each carried a piece of his face as painted by someone who apparently thought that the man had every dermatological disease ever known to man—as well as a host of ones not known (a big host).  The effect was of pocked and falling flesh in a psychotic rainbow of ugly.  It was scary.  It would stare at me and I would whimper as I creeped by.

      Brother Neff’s copy of the diary was much more pleasant.  The face still peered out from the spine, but rather than being grotesquely oversized, it was arguably closer to “normal,” and instead of contagious greens and purples, the jacket was done in tasteful parchment browns.  Almost pleasant.  Or so I thought.

      “My word, that’s scary!”  Jeff exclaimed when I first showed it to him.³  “I’ld hate to have that thing staring down at me some night as I straggle to the bathroom!”

      Some people just don’t know what they’re missing.

      I checked the price; $80.  Definitely worth it.  Not very many were ever printed, so even this second edition is in high demand among the descendants of Hosea Stout (which, it is only fair to mention, I am one).  My aunt and uncle found a copy of the diaries in a glass case in an Idaho bookstore, and the proprietor wouldn’t even let them touch them until he was sure they were serious about purchasing, and even then he breathed down their necks while they examined them.  That was some years ago too, and they paid more than I did, so I knew I had found a bargain.  (The only problem of course, was that the purchase about zapped my resources for the semester.  I brought little money and would come home with approximately nada, so eighty bucks was quite the zap indeed, but it was worth it.  There is nothing as worth it as books.  I bought slugfulls of books while I was sojourning in history that semester, and what better to bring home from history, than history?)

      My only other purchase from Brother Neff was Parley P. Pratt’s Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt.  It was all the rage at the JSA.  Evvveryone⁴ was reading it, and loving it, and recommending it.  So I figured I had better pick one up too.  And sure enough, it’s quite the ride.  But that’s another story.

[ill—the one that may or not be Brother Neff’s beard]

      Some people will remember Brother Neff’s beard and others will remember that he has an 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon locked away in a bank.  Some people likely remember his well-cared for but longish fingernails⁵ and others remember this or that or whatever.  The most notable thing about Brother Neff in my own mind though, is his incredible heart.

      Before we left on our final weeklong field trip, I slipped by the Old House Bookstore for a faretheewell.  I was accompanied by a trio of girls who also wanted to wish the gentleman adieu.  When we arrived, Brother Neff was in conversation with another local JSA lover, Gene; we asked Gene to take our picture with Brother Neff.  Brother Neff then invited us behind the counter, and there we posed.  We stayed and chatted for several now treasured minutes, then we left to get our picture taken sitting in the La-Z-Boy window display in the former Expositor’s place of publication. (If you don’t know what the Expositor is, don’t worry—you will, you will.)

      The following morning, Brother Neff did not open his store at the regular time, but instead came to the JSA to see us off.  He gave us some of his fancy, folding business cards and wished us well.

      You know, even though I gave him a copy of the photograph when we passed back through Nauvoo on our way home, I seriously doubt that if I bumped into him on the street today that he would remember me.  But I’ll remember him.  And not just because of the beard.  And not for the reason I remembered him from the Church News—that he was a descendant of Catherine’s.  And not even because of all the great books he has out on display (to say nothing of the enigmatic one that’s not).  No, the reason I’ll remember Brother Neff is because of his immense capacity to care for people he couldn’t possibly know very well.  I’ll remember him as an example of charity.⁶

[ill]