According to David A. Randall, Harzof's father decided to emigrate to America after he and his family were pushed off the sidewalk and into the gutter by a group of soldiers.
Harzof attended grade school in the city until he was twelve years old and then obtained a job as an office boy with the booksellers F.W.
Harzof replied, "That could be, but I have never heard it said that a bookworm made any distinction between a ten-thousand-dollar book and a ten-cent one".
According to Harzof, Royce's "main virtue was that he could be implicitly trusted with bags of uncounted gold".
One was Melville's personal annotated copy of Thomas Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (London, 1839), which was found in a collection of miscellaneous maritime books brought into Harzof's shop.
[10] In 1932, Harzof found Melville's personal copy of Owen Chase's Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, of Nantucket; Which was Attacked and finally Destroyed by a large Spermaceti-Whale, in the Pacific Ocean (New York, 1821), which included eighteen pages of notes in Melville's writing in which he said that "the reading of his wondrous story upon the landless sea ... had a surprising effect upon me".