Edition: U.S. / Global

A Prospector Among the Stacks

Published: January 10, 1999

David Shulman's blue eyes glistened as he showed off his most topical prize: an unused ticket to the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson dated April 21, 1868.

He picked it up at an auction in 1960 for $13 and thinks it may be one of the only unused tickets still intact. He thinks it may now be worth a lot of money.

But after suffering a heart attack five years ago, Mr. Shulman, 86, gave it away to the place he loves the most, the New York Public Library. He gave away almost everything else he valued to the same institution -- a spelling primer from Colonial America, 20,000 century-old postcards, and Bowery Boys novels the library did not have. Thousands upon thousands of things. Years before, he gave the library his cryptography collection, which included a book about secret writing published in 1518 and comic books from World War II.

These are only possessions. What Mr. Shulman, who wears blue jeans and sneakers, lives for is the mental adventure the library represents. It was there he ferreted out the earliest use of more than 5,000 words and phrases for the Oxford English Dictionary, which paid him to print the additions or modifications. It was also at the library that he built a plausible case that baseball's first game was played in Manhattan, not in New Jersey -- and certainly not in Cooperstown.

He is a member of one of the city's most inclusive and distinguished clubs: regular readers in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts, at the library's main branch on Fifth Avenue at 42d Street. The price of admission is filling out an application attesting to a serious purpose. Users range from people designing coffee table books to poets seeking inspiration in fraying Latin tomes.

Virginia Bartow, curator of rare books, says Mr. Shulman is both an important contributor of material and one of the library's most frequent users. ''David is what we're all about,'' she said. ''He collects books, he researches endlessly and he writes for publication.''

His current campaign is to revive the reputation of Steve Brodie, the man who declared he was the first to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge and live. The New York Times, in its 1901 obituary, told of how Mr. Brodie, ''upon the strength of this imaginary feat,'' went on to become a saloon owner on the Bowery and start an acting career.

But Mr. Shulman believes that Mr. Brodie's feat was not imaginary at all.

The other day, Mr. Shulman spread out scores of old newspaper stories on a library table to make the case. He had arrived by subway from the St. Nicholas Adult Care Center in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he now lives.

His motivation is to nail down another phrase for the Oxford dictionary. ''To do a Brodie'' has long meant to take a dive, a phrase sometimes applied to the stock market. But Mr. Shulman insists that if the man did not dive, the phrase must go.

''I believe in running everything down to primary sources,'' he said. ''In other words, if you pursue the truth as far as you can, you'll find out many times that it ain't so.''

Painstakingly, through The National Police Gazette, The Brooklyn Eagle and other sources, he sifted evidence against the assertion that Mr. Brodie, a newsboy, conned reporters into believing him. He noted that witnesses, including a police officer, testified they saw Mr. Brodie leap in 1886. Mr. Shulman asked, ''If he was carrying a dummy, wouldn't anybody have noticed it? A dummy's a big thing.''

He concluded: ''Everything is alleged. No concrete evidence. I think he did it.''

Until he retired in 1956, this self-described ''Sherlock Holmes of rare books'' designed puzzles for newspapers. In World War II, he deciphered Japanese codes. He was long one of the world's top Scrabble players. He never married, saying he never had the time. His said his only relatives are two nieces whom he has had no time for since they tried to stop him from giving his treasures to the library.

''I hate to say it, but your relatives can be predators,'' he said.

The library is different. There, he can show friends his impeachment ticket, or have millions of potentially fascinating intellectual treats delivered to him. He can time travel in the manner of his mentor, Norbert Pearlroth, the chief researcher for ''Ripley's Believe It or Not,'' who pored through hundreds of books virtually at random in search of odd facts.

But Mr. Shulman, who carries myriad scribblings on index cards in a plastic bag, came to see his mentor as less than rigorous. ''Instead of believing it,'' he said, ''I believed it not.''

Then he bubbled happily off on a kaleidoscope of things. Did you know there is no difference between a split finger fastball and a forkball? Or that the Marquess of Queensberry did not personally write the rules of boxing that are named after him?

Photo: David Shulman, 86, is a regular at the New York Public Library's rare book room, which has received some of his assorted collections. (Jack Manning/The New York Times)