A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  A terse press release announcing the sale in the fall of 1989 gave Haven O’More full credit for having “conceived and formed” the collection. However, a new player, a “private investor” named Michael Davis, was identified as the person who had “funded” it, to the great surprise of the book community. How such an unusual arrangement had come about, and what happened to break it up, remained a mystery. The right to mount the lucrative sale, moreover, was given to Sotheby’s, the archrival of Christie’s. Massey said this devastating turn of events came to pass because of a controversial innovation that became a major part of the auction business in the 1980s. “Sotheby’s wrote a large check in advance,” Massey said. “We valued the collection at nine million. That appraisal was accepted by everyone— including Sotheby’s—but the lawyers for the Garden parties were lured in by a large check, a rather sizable advance of money in anticipation of the sale. I heard it was four and a half million dollars, half the appraisal.”

  Christie’s had not offered an advance on the sale. At the time, it was against company practice. “I believe if we had been asked, we should have been prepared to do it, but we went out of the starting block advising against it, which was our policy prior to 1989. Our feeling had always been that if you have a capital involvement with the goods that you sell, it’s potentially damaging to the sale. That is the argument we made. We even brought Lord Carrington over from London for this proposal. We were received by a battery of lawyers in Boston from both sides. I was shocked when Sotheby’s got it.”

  Up to that time, Massey had never heard anything about a man named Michael Davis. “But we heard about him pretty quickly,” he added. “Up to now, the Garden was Haven O’More.”

  Added to the mystery of the man who “conceived and formed” the Garden library were the many ironies that emerged from the auction itself. Most remarkable, perhaps, was that the only time these great books were ever united as a collection was when they were about to be sold at Sotheby’s. Prior to those few exciting days, when the collection was displayed for the examination of prospective buyers, all items had been kept in two bank vaults in Boston.

  Only two sentences about O’More’s financing partner appear in the Garden Ltd. sale catalogue: “Michael Davis is a private investor. He is the sole limited partner of the Garden Ltd., and provided the funding for the Garden’s collection of rare books and manuscripts.” The three lines were printed on an otherwise blank page. Haven O’More, by contrast, submitted a lengthy statement that provided some clues about his personality, and a few facts about his life. At the top of the page set aside for his statement was the photograph of a bronze sculpture. It was a face of Haven O’More. The eyes were closed, but not relaxed in sleep; the skin was taut, the lips drawn down, as if the person was engaged in deep mediation. Beneath the photograph appeared the following:

  Haven O’More was inspired from almost the very beginning of his life by learning history, the Bible, and that he is a direct descendant of three of the most illustrious men of all time. Early readings, even before starting school, of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible, especially the New Testament in Greek with his father and mother, trained O’More to think and to feel in terms of high endeavor and noble service. His great aunt on his father’s side was the family genealogist. She taught O’More as a child that he descends through his father from Haven O’More the 4th century Celt king, poet-scholar, and warrior. Later he learned from her he also descends through his father from the saint and martyr, Sir Thomas More. Through his mother, he learned, he descends from General Thomas Jonathan (“Stonewall”) Jackson.

  O’More did not name his mother, his father, or the great aunt who served as family genealogist, and he did not say where any of them are from or where he was raised. He did not indicate where he went to school, though he did stress that for much of his life he had studied and mastered yoga, a practice which he described in some detail. He also explained that in his unremitting pursuit of knowledge, he had lived, worked, and traveled throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East, the Far East, and Mexico. He stated that he had served two tours in the United States Army, one in Europe, another in Asia, and that he not only had worked at conceptual levels in the fields of higher mathematics and the general sciences, but in the analysis of linguistic structures as well, with special attention focused on Celtic, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern philosophical foundations. Without naming any companies or institutions, he claimed to have worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry developing sophisticated programs of advanced computer design, logic, and general systems analysis, under the auspices of the Department of Defense.

  More specifically, O’More stated that he was the founder and director of research, education, and publishing for an organization called the Institute of Traditional Science, a non-profit foundation specializing in the transmission of “pure” knowledge. He also founded SADEV, a publishing company based in New York and affiliated, he stated, with the Aperture Foundation, the well-known and widely respected publisher of art and photography. O’More emphasized that he was the originator, co-founder, and General Partner of the Garden Ltd. partnership. The name Garden, he added, comes from the Hebrew Et-HaGaN, meaning “The First Garden” (“The Enclosure,” literally), a place where “all possibility is transcendent and equal to activity,” and thus an appropriate designation for his library. O’More emphasized that from the beginning of his collecting activity he concentrated on acquiring material of the greatest rarity, in the most superb possible condition, and with the widest and most consequential influence on the endeavors of men and women everywhere, embracing noble accomplishments from the earliest civilizations to the present.

  Celestial motives, O’More implied, energized his scheme from the beginning. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said he

  tried never for an instant to forget that … such works are imbued with life-giving forces and intelligence: being intelligent, they stand most in the future while giving form and passion to the present, and sending a living light to the past … For many years O’More has labored to … open up the way to build a new sacred city which would serve all mankind from this time forward … O’More’s intention has always been to place the universal treasures he has collected … in a great research library. Haven O’More has … aimed that, through the library’s mind-awakening holdings and activities, mankind would be newly inspired and illuminated in the necessary and all-important-way for the coming movement toward the stars.

  Davis’s and O’More’s starkly contrasting biographical statements appear at the back of the catalogue, though O’More had his say at the front as well in the form of a ten-page prefatory essay titled “On the Mystery of the Book.” There, he quoted freely from John Milton, Thomas Aquinas, Paul the Apostle, José Ortega y Gasset, John the Apostle, and Ecclesiastes. “Great or supreme works of the mind,” he intoned, are the “spiritual heart pumping a life-giving blood through the veins of mankind, a higher blood before any physical blood, a spiritual blood providing purpose and continuity of meaning.” Only by “touching, handling, reading, looking into, smelling—feasting on” the primary versions of these works is a person able to live and be one with the “very thing itself.”

  O’More proclaimed in summary that the collector of great books and manuscripts is the custodian of a family of “spiritual children,” and that these blessed offspring are not merely beings of flesh and blood, but progeny conceived in the “Image of God.” These cherished treasures, he declared, constitute the most precious inheritance of all mankind, as well as their “greatest hope and guide sent from the future.” And how does one become such a collector? “More than anything, the collector is a lover,” he concluded. “The collector is in love with reality or essence.”

  Apart from what one might surmise from his pomposity, his pretension, and his shaky diction, these two statements, written on the eve of the dissolution of a magnificent collection, raised in the minds of most collectors many more
questions than they answered about Haven O’More. His “family of spiritual children,” the “great love” in his life, was being broken up; privately, he had told a number of acquaintances that “they are forcing me to sell my children into slavery.”

  The morning of the sale, November 9, 1989, the late Robert L. Nikirk, librarian of the Grolier Club, and I took a cab to Sotheby’s for a look at the books to be sold that night. As we moved through heavy East Side traffic, Nikirk speculated about the Garden collection. “There’s something very fishy about this sale,” he said. “What everyone is hearing is that Mr. Davis paid the bills but he never saw the books. Mr. Davis paid out millions of dollars, and he was never allowed to see his own books. How this happened nobody seems to know, but what I hear is that he was beguiled. Have you read what Mr. O’More says in the catalogue? That all these books were going into his cosmic library? The man obviously is a nut, but people who are crazy can also be very bright, and nobody denies that this man O’More has a feeling for books. But what was it? Something religious? Hypnotism? Brainwashing? Too many diet pills? These are the things people are asking, and they are quite serious. Nobody knows except Sotheby’s, and they’re not talking to anyone. It’s unique in the history of book collecting.”

  Inside the huge auction house that occupies a full block between Seventy-first and Seventy-second Streets on York Avenue, the first session was still eight hours away, yet no fewer than thirty people were already in the third-floor exhibition hall, looking over the books. Though everything was locked behind glass doors, prospective buyers could ask to see certain items, and attendants would take them out for inspection. By themselves in Case 10A were the Shakespeare folios of 1623, 1632, 1664, and 1685, described aptly in the catalogue as “together the greatest books ever printed in English,” and to be sold that night as one lot. Elsewhere were gorgeous incunabula, breathtaking illuminations, and sturdy classics; the first recorded printings of Boethius, Cicero, Euclid, and Plutarch; splendid editions of Copernicus, Ptolemy, Erasmus, Thomas à Kempis, Andreas Vesalius, John Milton, and Montaigne; the editio princeps of Plato and Dante, an exceedingly scarce first issue of Proust, a presentation copy of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, a “great vellum notebook” kept by William Butler Yeats, a James Joyce manuscript, a journal kept by John Locke, an unpublished diary maintained by Vaslav Nijinsky, and a 1522 edition of Martin Luther’s “September Testament,” a superb folio bound in contemporary German pigskin and the only one to be offered at auction in the twentieth century. Everything was there, and it was dazzling.

  David R. Godine, a Boston publisher and enthusiastic collector of early printing, sat at a table delicately holding a fragile quarto. He had removed his suit jacket, loosened his necktie, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was scribbling notes on a pad of paper with a short stubby pencil. I caught his eye and we chatted briefly. “You know, if you haven’t met Haven, there he is over there,” he said softly, and nodded toward a corner where a well-dressed man stood alone with a dark-haired woman. I immediately went over and introduced myself. “A central thrust of my project is to demonstrate how collectors through history have been responsible for the preservation of knowledge,” I said. “Without Robert Cotton, there would be no Beowulf or Lindisfarne Gospels; without Poggio Bracciolini there is no Quintilian.”

  Haven O’More looked me hard in the eyes as I spoke. “You know about the pharaohs and their libraries?” he asked. I do indeed, I told him; they are mentioned in my book. “The Greeks at Alexandria?” Of course, I replied, such a study would be incomplete without them. “Books to me are very alive, and very necessary in human existence, and what goes beyond human existence,” he said, and I nodded. “I love these books very much. I have written about the collection and I will write more. But my statement is in the catalogue.”

  At that point, three Sotheby’s officials stepped up. They were quite agitated. “We told the press no interviews,” one of them said. “We were clear on that.” Before complying with their demand to leave the table, I shook hands with O’More. He gave me his card and suggested that I write him. In the weeks and months that followed, I pursued him but he never responded, and we had no further contact. I did speak once with his wife, who informed me that her husband had not been well and had been undergoing therapy for an ailment she did not specify.

  Later that evening, two hours before the first lot was scheduled to be sold, people began arriving for an elegant reception that Sotheby’s had arranged for booksellers, preferred customers, and assorted bibliophiles, a festive event that allowed everyone to loosen up with a couple of cocktails before business got under way. “Fireworks are at hand,” David Redden said confidently as the opening drew near. “There is tremendous excitement, the mood is absolutely electric. All the right people are here and we have some wonderful left bids.” (“Left bids” are bids on various lots entrusted to the auctioneer by people who choose not to attend the sale or to bid anonymously by telephone; the auctioneer will make offers from the podium in their behalf up to the maximum amounts they have specified.)

  A revolving dais had been set up on a small stage at the front of the gallery to showcase book lots as they were announced; above the stage an electronic tote board kept track of the bidding in seven currencies: the American dollar, the British pound, the French franc, the Japanese yen, the German mark, the Swiss franc, and the Italian lira. Several television cameras were poised to record the proceedings, and twenty-three telephones were in place to handle the outside bids.

  One level above the gallery, in a cubicle that overlooked the proceedings, Haven O’More sat behind a tinted window and watched as his “family of spiritual children” was sold off. At the front of the hall, just a few yards away from chief auctioneer John Marion, a young man—Michael Davis— kept a running log of the results as they were displayed on the scoreboard.

  Sotheby’s had projected gross receipts of $9 million, but those giddy estimates were rendered irrelevant in fewer than sixty seconds. The very first lot that came up, an Egyptian papyrus scroll containing three chapters from The Book of the Dead and featuring a stunning illumination of Osirus, sold to H.P. Kraus, Inc., of New York, for $187,000, almost four times above the upper estimate; O’More had bought the three-thousand-year-old panel from Colin and Charlotte Franklin of Oxford, England, in 1982. In lot after lot, similar contests were joined, with similar results. David Redden’s optimism had been justified; there was tremendous enthusiasm and the mood was, indeed, electric.

  The four Shakespeares were sold for $2.1 million to the New York collector Richard Manney—a million dollars above the upper estimate. Enthusiastic rounds of applause broke out as that gavel and the one concluding the auction sounded. In each case, Michael Davis stood in the front row and led the ovation. Later that night, he celebrated by throwing a party for his friends high above Manhattan in the elegant Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center.

  Four hours after the final lot was sold at Sotheby’s on November 10, 1989, the thirteenth annual Boston Antiquarian Book Fair was admitting a long line of waiting customers, a good number of them booksellers and collectors who had rushed up from New York to make the 7:30 P.M. opening. Richard Manney, the proud new owner of the Garden Shakespeare folios, was searching through various stalls for less costly finds. Booksellers Anne and David Bromer, buyers of several lots in the final Garden session, arrived at their booth with fifteen minutes to spare. “The glamour of a big sale is wonderful,” James Cummins, Richard Manney’s agent, said while tending his stand, “but this is the meat and potatoes of the business.”

  Though the gross receipts for the Garden sale were about half the numbers recorded for either Doheny or Martin, Stephen Massey considered it “by far” the “more perfect” sale. “You get it in July and you sell it in November,” he explained with brisk precision. “You do it in two sessions, one at night, one the next day; in and out, one catalogue, gone. With Doheny and Martin you had thousands of lots. If you examine those
catalogues, you will certainly see some extraordinary items, but added to those extraordinary items are the real cement-around-the-ankles kinds of things, tons and tons of bulk. And those tons of bulk cost time and money. Now look at the Garden. Three hundred [remarkable] lots. Everything the best, just giant. A magnificent collection.”

  Massey shrugged. “Say what you will about Haven,” he said, “but he bought only the best.”

  Colin Franklin, a prominent publisher in London for twenty years with Routledge and Kegan Paul before deciding to become a full-time antiquarian bookseller in 1970, has written extensively on printing and fine-press works. Unlike most booksellers, he collects for his own pleasure. “Everything I sold Haven, except for one Yeats manuscript which he asked me to get for him at an auction, I had owned privately,” Franklin told me.

  As O’More bought more and more material from him, a friendship developed. Franklin recalled that Haven and Lorea O’More were “very kind” to him and his wife, Charlotte. “We enjoyed their hospitality in Acapulco, and at their home in Arkansas.” He had taken note of O’More’s philosophical aspirations. “It was important to him to project that, and I have no doubt that his greatest satisfaction would have been to be accepted as a man of deep wisdom,” Franklin said. “The interesting thing about him was that, as we now know, he was a man who pretended to some extent. Though I’m not dismissing him as a pretender in philosophy because I’ve had many talks with him—philosophical talks, if you like to use a grand phrase. I would find him stimulating but totally exhausting, and so vain as to be totally impossible and ridiculous. But of course it was very important for him not to seem ridiculous. To be taken totally seriously was very important in his life.” Yet Franklin was always willing to give O’More the benefit of any doubt. “From his conversation you would imagine that he read Plato in the original with some ease, and Homer, and so on,” he said. “Now, it would not surprise me at all to learn that he didn’t know Greek at all. But I may be wrong,” he hedged.