In 1988, while Davis vs. O’More was being argued in Judge Izzo’s court, an “unrestricted” grant of $221,142 was made by the Institute of Traditional Science to the Leonard and Sophie Davis Foundation of West Palm Beach, Florida, an entity of considerable assets and numerous philanthropic activities, chartered in New York State in 1961 for the purpose of helping Jewish charitable, religious, and educational organizations. Mr. and Mrs. Davis, and their son, Michael Davis, were listed in federal tax documents as officers. The transfer, apparently, was part of some overall settlement between the Davis family and O’More. In 1991, the Institute of Traditional Science elected new officers. That year, too, properties owned by the Dolphin Realty Trust in Cambridge were offered at a public auction, and the large lot of open land once intended as the site of O’More’s “great research library” was sold for $1.2 million. Michael Davis was permitted to withdraw from the Garden Ltd. partnership, and was replaced by Lorea O’More. The fabulous Garden sale would be just one intermediate act in the severing of the financial, if not the spiritual, bonds between Michael Davis and Haven O’More.
Haven O’More craved books in the most flawless condition, books of the greatest consequence. But just as much, according to the people who came to know him, he craved recognition. For many, it was his least endearing characteristic, even to his closest bookseller friends—his insistence on being recognized as the greatest book collector alive. He had declared as much, often, in the company of collectors who were undeniably great, people like William H. Scheide, Arthur Houghton, Jr., and Sir Geoffrey Keynes. “That is precisely why Arthur Houghton found him so insufferable,” Stephen Massey said.
O’More routinely sought the company of the rich, the famous, and the eminent. Nicolas Barker, longtime editor of The Book Collector and for many years deputy keeper of rare books at the British Library, wrote in a four-page foreword to the Garden Ltd. catalogue that he was introduced to O’More at the house of Sir Geoffrey Keynes sometime around 1979. The late Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982), the younger brother of John Maynard Keynes and an honorary fellow of the British Academy, was the son of a Cambridge don, a bibliographer, and the world’s leading authority on William Blake.
He was also a great collector, with a library, now at the University Library, Cambridge, that is “matchless in the history of science and medicine,” according to Barker. Both O’More and Keynes “were excited” by their common interests, Barker wrote. “It was as if they had been conversing, without knowing it, for a long time, and … their first [meeting] had released a fund of enthusiasm that both found compulsive.” O’More’s “excitement was almost tangible … the idea of the collection itself, the idea of a reliquary, a shrine, that should preserve and at the same time divulgate all that these writers had stood for and brought about by their words—this clearly electrified him.”
During the first of two interviews I had with Barker for this book, I asked him to elaborate on this published statement. “I met O’More just that one time, at the home of Keynes,” he said, and explained that he wrote the foreword not as a gesture of friendship, but after being telephoned in England by Sotheby’s officials with an urgent plea for help. “The essence of the conversation was that they couldn’t send out a catalogue of some of the greatest books in the world without an introduction that their customers could understand. They asked if I could do it, and I agreed. Everything I know about the man is in that catalogue.” I asked Barker to rank the Garden Library. After some thought, he said, “It’s a collection of great books. I don’t think it’s a great collection. It doesn’t seem to me to have anything that I would call a focus at all other than this vague concept of greatness, which obviously means something to Mr. O’More. It’s what’s called ‘high-spot’ collecting.”
The New York bookseller Justin G. Schiller was introduced to O’More during the first Arthur Houghton sale after they had competed for a hand-colored copy of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, one of only three copies known. “Blake is my passion,” Schiller explained. “As a child, I learned many of the songs of innocence, and it was a book I never dreamed of owning.” Schiller had gone to England in June 1979 to operate a booth at the London Book Fair, not to buy at the auction. “I did go to the viewing a few days before the sale, though, and came across the Blake quite by accident. I didn’t want to look at it because I have this internal passion that drives me, and I can be a very possessive book person. So I resisted looking at it, but when I did, I went bonkers. When I got back to my hotel room, I began to reconstruct on paper all the rare books I own, and to put them under the categories of certain customers. Then I stated making transatlantic telephone calls. I was able to get pledges from three of my customers against things that I own. I figured my absolute top bid could be sixty five thousand pounds, one hundred sixty thousand dollars, which is more than I ever spent on anything.”
The estimate for the lot was £30,000, which gave Schiller what he thought was adequate breathing room. He engaged the services of Quaritch Ltd. to bid for him, and stayed away from the gallery. “I was manning my booth at the fair when I was told it went for £70,000. First, they told me we didn’t get the book; second, that they now had a terrible situation that had developed because there was this man Haven O’More who was the buyer of the book, and he was outraged at being pushed to pay £70,000. He was a good customer of theirs, and he was demanding an explanation. He wanted to know why they were bidding him up. He would not believe there was an underbidder, and Quaritch needed permission to tell Haven my name.” Because Schiller agreed to this, he was invited to a cocktail party, where he met O’More. “By then, he was all gusto and bluster. Now he was saying he would have paid anything to get the book.”
Their mutual interest in William Blake brought both Schiller and O’More in contact with Keynes. Schiller said he learned that O’More had “ingratiated himself” with the aging bibliographer by offering to underwrite the publication of some Blake facsimiles, which in fact took place. That statement is corroborated by Keynes himself in his 1981 autobiography, in which “Dr. Haven O’More, founder of the Institute of Traditional Science in Boston,” is identified as the “main benefactor” of the Blake project. There is no hint of warmth or friendship in either of the two references Keynes makes to “Dr. Haven O’More.” The last time Schiller saw Keynes, Keynes said to him, “Let me show you something special,” and led him to “a couple of Blake oil paintings on copper that left me speechless. Then he said, ‘Your Dr. O’More will never see these.’ It turned out that he despised Haven. Geoffrey couldn’t stand a braggart, particularly a braggart who tried to outbrag him.”
Another New York City bookseller, Fred Schreiber, a dealer in early printed books, told me about an April day in 1979 when Haven O’More called to ask if he could see two items that were listed in his recent catalogue. “I was working out of my house in the Bronx at the time,” Schreiber said. “Everyone in the business was talking about this man, and I agreed to meet him.”
About six hours after O’More said he would arrive, the doorbell rang at Schreiber’s house. A woman said, “Dr. O’More is outside in the limousine. Can he come in and see the books?” Schreiber said he could, and the woman, O’More’s wife, Lorea, returned to get him. “O’More came into the house holding my catalogue, rolled up, and slapping it in his palm. He then started jabbing me in the chest with it. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he said, ‘I am Dr. O’More,’ and he was emphasizing the Dr. ‘Do you know what I do?’ he went on. ‘You are a book collector,’ I answered. ‘I am not just a book collector, I am the book collector.’ ”
Schreiber then showed O’More the books he had requested. One was the first printed edition of Aristotle’s works in Greek, 1495, which he had listed in his catalogue for $4,500; the other was a second edition of Plato, 1534, printed in Basel, for $1,500. O’More said he wanted them, but insisted on a 40-percent discount. Schreiber refused and reached out to retrieve the books from O’More. “It was
like a tug of war,” he said. “I’m holding them, he’s holding them, we’re pulling back and forth. Then he said, ‘All right, all right 30 percent. Give me 30 percent, and you also get my good will.’ I asked him what that meant. He said, ‘I am the greatest book collector in the world. My good will is important to you.’ Finally, against my better judgment, I agreed to give him 10 percent.”
When their business was concluded, O’More asked to see Schreiber’s stock of books, which was kept in a converted attic. The Ph.D. diploma in classical philology Schreiber received from Harvard in 1970 was hanging on the wall. “ ‘Oh, Harvard,’ O’More said when he saw it. ‘I’ve gone beyond Harvard; I’ve got three Ph.D.s myself.’ I was mildly curious about this, and I asked him what his degrees were in. He said the classics, physics, and some other field that I can’t remember. Then he said that he spoke twenty languages fluently. Being a philologist, I was interested in this as well, and I asked him which languages. ‘Which ones do you know?’ he said. When I replied, ‘Naturally I know Greek and Latin,’ he interrupted me and said, ‘I never studied those,’ and changed the subject. When I heard that, I knew something wasn’t quite right because a Ph.D. in classics presupposes fluency in Greek and Latin.”
Ten years later, when Schreiber read O’More’s preface to the Garden Ltd. catalogue, he was amused to see his suspicions confirmed. O’More’s opening sentence involved a “contemplation of three words”—the Latin phrase magnae mentis opera—which he translated as “great or supreme works of the mind.” O’More called it the “underlying principle controlling the inception and guiding of the formation” of the Garden collection. The only problem is that he got the Latin wrong. “What the phrase actually means is ‘works of a great mind,’ ” Schreiber said.
Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, a slim book of poetry written by Haven O’More, was published by SADEV, the imprint of the Garden Ltd., in 1987, and distributed by the Aperture Foundation. (The Aperture Foundation was established in 1952 by a group of leading photographers, Minor White, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams among them, to publish their works and to serve as a forum of ideas.) It amounts to a preface, seventeen compact poems, and a coda. It had been offered for sale in several Aperture catalogues as a SADEV book under a New Age category. Printed in Verona, Italy, by the noted firm Stamperia Valdonega, and with type designed by Giovanni Mardersteig in an edition of 750, O’More’s modest collection of verse is a handsome production, flush with revealing, if rather disturbing, poetic sentiments.
Man, he declared in his preface, “must submit to sacrifice” in order to have “existence in the first place.” Elsewhere, he asserted that to “taste death’s full sweetness” there “must be life’s fire on blood and flesh.” In the coda, he declared that only “by killing all that is appearance and dying to it is death fully tasted.” Life, he insists, must “be chewed to the limit” in order to “possess death—the gateway to eternal life.”
When SADEV published the poems, it also issued a nineteen-page pamphlet entitled Delighting All Who Pay: An Essay on Haven O’More’s “Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions,” by David Waxman. The essay gushed with praise for O’More the poet. “It is hard to resist poetry of such sinuous elegance,” Waxman wrote. “We are dealing with a mystery: poetry at once dense and fluid, a synaesthetic breath-canvas f lashing with the spectrum of tone and mood and color— but focusing to what?” The collection is “deeply pensive,” “nobly high-minded,” “thoroughly oracular,” “totally original,” filled with “charm and genius,” “triumphant,” and “transcendent.” It is, Waxman asserted, a “textbook of Sacrifice” in which “we are necessarily forced to energy.” Understanding the message is difficult but challenging nonetheless: “If you would really get at Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, then memorize it ! Inscribe its pattern in your bone; let its poetry dwell and speak within you.” Extracts from the essay were printed in Aperture catalogues and appeared on the dustjacket of the book.
The other SADEV publications mentioned in Aperture’s New Age backlist were two books of photographs. One, by Marilyn Silverstone, an ordained Buddhist nun, was described as “visions of India and the Himalayan Kingdom.” Titled Ocean of Life, it was issued in 1985 with the help of a grant from the Institute of Traditional Science. Markings, published the following year, featured “sacred landscapes from the air” by the noted aerial photographer Marilyn Bridges. Haven O’More wrote prefaces for both.
David G. Waxman is a bookseller in Great Neck, New York, whose business card once stated his specialty as “the best minds in the best editions.” He acknowledged in an interview with me that he wrote the essay at the request of O’More, but his “only regret is that I didn’t make it stronger, that I might not have done the work sufficient justice.” Waxman’s friendship with O’More began in the early 1970s, when he was a student at Brandeis. He said he knew Michael Davis during that time as well, having “had some interaction with him,” but knew nothing of his partnership in the Garden Ltd. “One should not think that O’More was a man without accomplishment prior to this partnership,” Waxman stressed. “It was my understanding that he was an accomplished man, and he was a book buyer in advance of this partnership.” He said he believed O’More lived “somewhere in the Midwest” before moving to Massachusetts in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Waxman acknowledged that SADEV is Vedas—the ancient ritual and philosophical treatises of India written between 1500 and 500 B.C.—spelled backward. Regarding the given name of Haven O’More, Waxman said: “I would say that what is essential here is not the personal details; what is essential is what he tried to do in forming this library, and the great intellectuality which lies behind it. Now, you can get caught up in gossip mongering, but all that is basically irrelevant. What is important is the fact of his collection, the fact that he was trying to set an example for the book-collecting public and what it means to be a book collector, the kinds of things it is important to get involved in.”
Despite all the unexplained contradictions that subsequently surfaced about O’More, Waxman said he still “cannot emphasize too much that I consider him a very great writer,” even though O’More had published only one book and written a few forewords for photography collections that have been underwritten by the Institute of Traditional Science. “People apparently don’t really understand where he is coming from, what he is trying to do. Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, let me say, for those who will work with it, evidences the very highest level of intelligence. It is not what it may seem on first reading. It is really exquisite, and poetry of the highest intelligence”
Waxman was not the only person who regarded O’More as a man of brilliance and accomplishment. Arthur Freeman, an American who taught for fifteen years at Boston University and Harvard before moving to London to work as a bookseller for Quaritch Ltd. in the 1970s, had been acquainted with O’More in both the United States and England. The first he heard of O’More’s financial partner was at the announcement of the Garden sale. As for O’More’s background, he said, “There is a ‘Dr.’ before his name, you know, and it was earned.” I asked Freeman where O’More had earned his doctorate. “It could have been Brandeis or Berkeley, or maybe Oklahoma,” he suggested. But officials at these schools—as well as universities in Arkansas, North Carolina, and Texas—carry no record of a Haven Moore or Haven O’More.
The whiff of New Age guru in O’More’s available writings was also confirmed in part by a native New Yorker who was then working for an antiquarian bookseller in London, and from 1977 to 1987 was office manager for the bookseller John Fleming. She agreed to discuss what she knew of the man on condition that her name be withheld from this work. We talked over lunch one day at a pub on Jermym Street not far from her office in Westminster. She recalled frequent visits to Fleming’s shop by O’More. “Haven was quite a character,” she said. “We always kept a bottle of his favorite Greek brandy on hand, and whenever he came, he’d drink the whole thing. There were times when he’d spend the nig
ht, but that was no big deal, because we were used to putting up with a lot of eccentric people. John Fleming’s place was famous for that.”
O’More wore an unusual ring, “a big chunky ring, like a class ring,” the woman recalled. “I asked him what it was, and he said it was the symbol of his Institute of Traditional Science. I asked him what traditional science was, and he didn’t say anything.” Whenever O’More spent the night, he would begin each morning with elaborate yoga exercises. “He had this dark blue robe he would wear, and he’d sit in the middle of the floor. John had the kind of place where all kinds of people were always passing through, people coming and going. One time Benny Goodman came in and began to rehearse. He was playing the clarinet while Haven was doing his yoga, and it was like Haven didn’t even know he was there. I also remember that when he wasn’t doing yoga, he was staring at himself in the mirror. The guy was a real kook.”
Around 1984, O’More gave the woman instructions to send all future invoices for book purchases to the Garden Ltd. in Cambridge. “We were buying a lot of books for him and he was paying enormous prices,” she said. “And that was when I saw Michael Davis’s name on something he gave us about the Garden for the billing. I couldn’t believe it because I knew Michael back in the sixties. We were both in our late teens then, early twenties, and we moved around in the same group, a Park Avenue crowd.” The woman recalled that Davis was “quite the party animal” in those days, so “amazing” that his friends gave him the nickname Falstaff. “He was a pretty stocky guy, and he loved parties. I remember him as very shy, but he loved to party.”
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