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STEPHANIE BLALOCK,"Go to Pfaff's": The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon.Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014. Online at The Vault at Pfaff's (pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu). 100 pp.The past several years have seen a flourishing of interest in the history of bohemianism, and especially in Walt Whitman's relationship to it. Daniel Cottom's International Bohemia: Scenes of Nineteenth-Century Life (2013), Justin Martin's Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians (2014), Joanna Levin's Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (2009), and Levin's and Edward Whitley's collection Whitman Among the Bohemians (2014) are just some of the recent publications on the topic. Something about that brief stint in Whitman's life-he was immersed in New York bohemianism for less than two years, in 1859 to 1860-is appealing to us in the twenty-first century. The circle of New York artists and writers was one of the first groups of Americans to embrace liberal social and sexual values that resemble our own-women were full participants in American bohemianism, free love abounded, and the social circle seemed to have presented a relatively safe space for Whitman to have explored his attraction to other men. The bohemians gathered almost nightly at Pfaff's beer cellar for bonhomie even as their nation was becoming increasingly politically divided, and that image might offer a tantalizing alternative to contemporary Americans, who cope with national turbulence mostly through digital surrogates for the kind of community the bohemians enjoyed.Stephanie Blalock's book, "Go to Pfaff's": The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon contributes to the body of scholarship on bohemianism by fleshing out the specifics of Charles Ignatius Pfaff and the beer hall that served as the bohemians' home base. Blalock, who holds a PhD in English as well as an MLS and is currently working as a digital humanities librarian, brings a librarian's skills to this impressively researched, brief book. Pfaff's cellar has until now been a murky setting for much of the scholarship on antebellum bohe- mianism, but Blalock has filled in that background with rich detail. Drawing on a stunning array of sources, including immigration and census records, auction listings, and numerous historical newspapers, Blalock presents the story of a German immigrant who worked as a waiter in Switzerland before immigrating to New York and establishing his own beer hall with the help of his wife before her early death. The rotund, hairy, jolly Pfaff waited on his customers in those early years with his toddler son tucked under one arm, and sometime in the late 1850s hit it off with the local art crowd. The likeliest account of Pfaff's relationship with the bohemians-Blalock is always careful to show us her research and make the tentativeness of her conclusions clear-is that Henry Clapp, Jr., the editor of The New York Saturday Press, took a liking to Pfaff's because it reminded him of the bohemian halls he had frequented in France before importing the term "bohemianism" to the United States. Clapp brought his bohemian followers with him to Pfaff's, and he and Pfaff enjoyed a mutually beneficial arrangement in which Clapp advertised the beer hall in his newspaper and Pfaff extended courtesies and generous lines of credit to Clapp and the other bohemians. …

Blalock, Stephanie. “Go to Pfaff’s”: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon [review]