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Consider Don Vincente, a former Spanish monk who robbed and murdered at least eight people to create his personal library. Or Richard Heber who filled eight houses -- four in England, four on the continent -- with his books. Or Thomas Phillips whose collections were so vast that in 1929, fully six decades after his death, "thirty thousand items still remained in crates and boxes" waiting to be sold. Then there's Ruth Baldwin who refused to let kids come near her books -- one of the finest collections of children's literature ever gathered together. And Forrest J. Ackerman, whose Ackermansion houses a vast assemblage of science fiction and fantasy, as well as "hundreds of old movie props, ranging from dinosaurs and mummies to vampires and flying saucers." These are not normal people. William Scheide, the son and grandson of book collectors and possessor of perhaps the finest privately owned library in the world, describes his Gutenberg Bible like this: "Now, one of the fun things I enjoy about this book very much is the hyphens, though the margins are wonderful too." We're definitely not in Kansas any longer, Toto.
In fact, A Gentle Madness is chock-a-block with such strange and appealing characters, each more wonderful than the last. David Karpeles collects manuscripts. At the marriage of his daughter he displayed the original handwritten scores for two of the most famous pieces of music in the world: Wagner's wedding march from "Tannhauser" and Mendelssohn's wedding recessional from "A Mid-summer Night's Dream." Aaron Lansky has devoted his entire adult life to rescuing Yiddish literature from, literally, the dustbins of history; he received a MacArthur grant for his work on the National Yiddish Book Center. Louis Daniel Brodsky built the finest Faulkner library in the world, in part out of revenge: As a college student his Faulkner first editions lost a book-collecting prize to a collection of railway time tables. On nearly every page [Nicholas A. Basbanes] neatly profiles similar dreams, dedication, and sometimes sheer biblio-lust. Stephen Massey, chief of rare books at Christie's auction house in New York, once sent away a rich collector who rudely demanded to examine a lot prior to a sale. "I wasn't worried about losing him because if the book's good enough, they will always call back -- they will crawl -- if they really want the book."
A GENTLE MADNESS; Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes,
And the Eternal
Passion for Books
By Nicholas A. Basbanes
Henry Holt. 638 pp. $35
ARE BOOK collectors crazy? But, of course. Oh, there may be the half-hearted rationalizations -- some day scholars will bless my name, my heirs will make a fortune at Sotheby's -- but deep inside a still, small voice is constantly whispering: "This is insane. You are wasting your time, the college tuition of three children, and increasingly large areas of the house on stuff nobody will ever want. For God's sake, why don't you just go to the library?" The true collector ignores these fretful pipings and pleas. Carter Burden once spent nearly $20,000 to acquire a first edition of Sinclair Lewis's children's book Hike and the Aeroplane. Actually, as Burden later explained, "I already had a copy of the book. It was the dust jacket I needed." Collectors of modern firsts will salute a champion. Others will simply shake their heads.
In A Gentle Madness Nicholas A. Basbanes writes, "I wanted to show that however bizarre and zealous collectors have been through the ages, so much of what we know about history, literature and culture would be lost forever if not for the passion and dedication of these driven souls." Certainly, the monks who preserved our classical heritage, the Renaissance book hunters who dug up forgotten manuscripts, the first printers like Aldus Manutius, and the pioneering builders of libraries merit our unending gratitude: We live in the world they helped create. All these earn appropriately respectful accounts in this leisurely and capacious survey of bibliomania. But the pages that really spring to life are not the chapters devoted to potted book-history, but those that embrace the deranged or visionary individuals who have exchanged the common pleasures of the merely human for the collector's exalted and insatiate passion.
Consider Don Vincente, a former Spanish monk who robbed and murdered at least eight people to create his personal library. Or Richard Heber who filled eight houses -- four in England, four on the continent -- with his books. Or Thomas Phillips whose collections were so vast that in 1929, fully six decades after his death, "thirty thousand items still remained in crates and boxes" waiting to be sold. Then there's Ruth Baldwin who refused to let kids come near her books -- one of the finest collections of children's literature ever gathered together. And Forrest J. Ackerman, whose Ackermansion houses a vast assemblage of science fiction and fantasy, as well as "hundreds of old movie props, ranging from dinosaurs and mummies to vampires and flying saucers." These are not normal people. William Scheide, the son and grandson of book collectors and possessor of perhaps the finest privately owned library in the world, describes his Gutenberg Bible like this: "Now, one of the fun things I enjoy about this book very much is the hyphens, though the margins are wonderful too." We're definitely not in Kansas any longer, Toto.
In fact, A Gentle Madness is chock-a-block with such strange and appealing characters, each more wonderful than the last. David Karpeles collects manuscripts. At the marriage of his daughter he displayed the original handwritten scores for two of the most famous pieces of music in the world: Wagner's wedding march from "Tannhauser" and Mendelssohn's wedding recessional from "A Mid-summer Night's Dream." Aaron Lansky has devoted his entire adult life to rescuing Yiddish literature from, literally, the dustbins of history; he received a MacArthur grant for his work on the National Yiddish Book Center. Louis Daniel Brodsky built the finest Faulkner library in the world, in part out of revenge: As a college student his Faulkner first editions lost a book-collecting prize to a collection of railway time tables. On nearly every page Basbanes neatly profiles similar dreams, dedication, and sometimes sheer biblio-lust. Stephen Massey, chief of rare books at Christie's auction house in New York, once sent away a rich collector who rudely demanded to examine a lot prior to a sale. "I wasn't worried about losing him because if the book's good enough, they will always call back -- they will crawl -- if they really want the book."
After its somewhat perfunctory historical sections, A Gentle Madness happily settles down to catalogue these and other 20th-century American bookmen (and women). To those who follow the literature of collecting, it is a relief to note that Basbanes tells new stories: The wily booksellers who have written autobiographies or been subject to scholarly study -- for example, A.S.W. Rosenbach (who helped build the Folger and Huntington collections) or David Randall (who developed the Lilly Library), as well as H.P. Kraus and the notorious Texas bookman John Jenkins -- appear only in supporting roles. Instead, Basbanes reports, at New Yorker profile length, on the bibliomania of three exemplary modern figures: the vain, enigmatic and New Age-mystical Haven O'More, who claimed to be the greatest collector alive before suddenly, unexpectedly selling off all his books; the charismatic and determined Harry Ransom, who established the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the finest repository in the world of modern literary manuscripts; and, most fascinating of all, Stephen Carrie Blumberg, who created an astonishing Americana collection by stealing 23,600 books from 268 libraries in 45 states, two Canadian provinces and our own Washington D.C. To anyone of a bookish nature the long sections devoted to these three empire-builders are quite unputdownable.
Though Basbanes superbly evokes o'erweening ambition, usually supported by fat bank accounts, and talks occasionally about stewardship (the notion that a collector is merely a custodian, bound to pass on his books to future generations), I do wish he had expatiated a little further on collecting as a way of honoring the writers one loves. For isn't this the reason most ordinary people assemble the works of Patrick O'Brian or tough-guy detective fiction or Silhouette romances? Reynolds Price touches on the reverence we feel for favorite authors when, having survived a crippling cancer, he acquires a copy of Paradise Lost that had belonged to Milton's daughter, the very daughter to whom the blind poet had dictated his biblical epic: "For me, it was like the apostolic succession. I was touching the hand that touched the hand that touched the Hand."
Ultimately, the secret and irresistible appeal of book collecting is simply this: It makes you happy. One may establish an admirable purpose -- as did A.A. Schomburg when he took to preserving unjustly forgotten African-American literature -- but you spend your weekends, evenings and spare pennies only on something that you love to do. Ask a collector how he or she feels when entering a used bookstore for the first time: Like the speaker in "The Song of Songs" whose heart leaps at the sight of her beloved. Book people may be greedy, shrewd and devious in the cause of their obsession -- and usually are, but their joy remains unclouded and pure.
Nicholas A. Basbanes has compiled a wonderful gallery of modern eccentrics, isolatos, charmers and visionaries. He can be a little shaky at times in his literary history, relying as he does largely on secondary sources: The Decameron is not a poem, Solomon Eagle is actually the pen name of J.C. Squire, and Lord Chesterfield was hardly a good friend of Samuel Johnson. But these details are just a bit of foxing on an otherwise ingratiating and altogether enjoyable book. Collectors should note that bright copies, mint in dust jacket, are currently available at the published price. Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for Book World.
Credit:
ILLUSTRATION CAPTION: "The Book Fool," by Durer.; Caption:
Copyright The Washington Post Company Jul 30, 1995