Sometime early in the 1970s Michael Davis “dropped out of sight. It wasn’t unusual for people in the group to move around, but he didn’t call anyone. Then we heard he had gone completely straight; people said he had lost a lot of weight, he was into macrobiotics and meditation, and he wasn’t going to parties anymore.” After John Fleming’s death in 1987, the woman lived in Italy for a year, then moved to England, and “lost touch with a lot of what was going on.”
Michael E. Hoffman, for many years the executive director of the Aperture Foundation, told me that he allowed the Garden Ltd. to use Aperture’s address in Millerton, New York, as a “courtesy” to O’More. Though now based in New York, Aperture was formed in the rural town, and continued to maintain an office there on Elm Street. Hoffman made the oblique comment that the nature of O’More’s business in Millerton probably was “a banking interest.” In addition, “Mr. O’More supported several extraordinary Aperture books and wrote a text for one or two of them.” But there was “no formal relationship” between the two groups. The foundation depends to some extent on contributions, he said, and by financially supporting some of its projects, O’More was able to get his SADEV books distributed by Aperture.
Hoffman added that he had known O’More for at least twenty-five years, and he had “a remarkable record of doing some rather significant work, and we certainly knew about him and his collecting, and we knew about some of his accomplishments.” For example, through the Institute, O’More had supported the scholar J. A. B. van Buitenen’s new translations of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad-Gita, later published by the University of Chicago Press, and had appeared in a film about transcendental meditation, Hatha Yoga Darshana. “These are some of the most important things that have been done anywhere,” Hoffman said, though he was unable to say where a copy of the film could be located.
Though Hoffman said he was familiar with O’More’s “incredible background,” he declined to describe it. “I’m not sure what he’s willing to put into print. He’s an extremely discreet person and is not very happy with notoriety. This of course has led to misunderstandings regarding him in the past,” he added mysteriously. “You’re going to find yourself getting into things that may surprise you, and are over most people’s heads, frankly,” he warned. “And that’s one of the reasons he doesn’t explain himself.”
What, I wondered, about O’More’s autobiographical statement to Sotheby’s? “I think that Sotheby’s thing was a smoke screen,” he replied. “I don’t think he has any interest in exposing himself. I can’t say that’s a good thing to do, but that’s how he did it. But if you are able to find his actual work, and if you look at the books he supported of Aperture’s alone, the text he wrote, you’ll see you’re dealing with some person of considerable ability.” O’More was the “kind of person who just hates gossip and hates rumors and doesn’t particularly want to be talked about,” especially since he was “involved in a lot of esoteric work” that consumes most of his time. “It’s not ordinary work. And it has taken him outside the realm of ordinary life. So he operates in a very different way than most people. And it’s very hard to comprehend it partially for that reason.” He added that anyone unfamiliar with hatha yoga “can’t deal with O’More on any level, you can’t comprehend what he is doing.” Haven O’More “is one of the most accomplished yogis in the West.”
Thus trying to explain O’More’s professional activity in straight-forward terms is a pointless exercise. “Certain works are there and available for people who understand them and not available for people who don’t,” Hoffman said. “It’s that simple. He’s not out looking for the press. He’s not out looking for praise. He’s not out looking for students or disciples. He’s doing a very special kind of work which requires his full attention. And that’s a very traditional way of working in the higher areas of certain esoteric practices.”
Hoffman offered the opinion that Leonard Davis, the father of Michael Davis, was behind the breakup of the Davis-O’More partnership. “He was attempting to really blaspheme O’More and destroy his credibility and character in order to win the allegiance of his son, who had become allied with O’More over a multiyear period. There was a great deal of money involved and the father decided that he was going to try to destroy O’More, who had become a sort of father figure for his son. It was a very outrageous suit without any justification which was eventually settled and that was the end of it. But O’More was totally blameless in this and there was never any proof of wrongdoing whatsoever.”
I mentioned to Hoffman that Michael Davis had executed a power of attorney to Haven O’More that turned over complete authority of a family fortune that totaled more than $17 million. “I don’t know all that,” he said. “But Michael Davis was a free agent and O’More literally saved his life many years ago. This guy would have been on the street somewhere.” Michael Davis would have been on the street, homeless, even though he was worth millions? I asked.
“That’s right. His whole life was given purpose by his work with O’More.”
It is said that the most lasting legacy of a great private library, especially one that is broken up and dispersed at public auction, is the carefully compiled catalogue that documents its existence. Treasures assiduously gathered over so many years by such luminaries as George Brinley, Robert Hoe III, Jerome Kern, Thomas W. Streeter, Estelle Doheny, and H. Bradley Martin made their way to thousands of new repositories when they went on the block. When the books and manuscripts found new homes, all that remained to confirm that they once were cherished components of a focused plan were the catalogues that described their attributes, identified their provenance, and paid tribute to the passion and judgment of their former owners.
By that standard alone, the Garden Ltd. will endure as a hallmark of American book collecting in the late twentieth century, particularly since so little is known about the man who “conceived and formed” it. Handsomely bound in black cloth, embossed with gold-stamped lettering, and illustrated with dozens of lavish color photographs, The Collection of the Garden Ltd. Magnificent Books and Manuscripts, published by Sotheby’s and distributed worldwide, is a reference work of the first order for students of bibliography and collectors of fine books.
Just as significant, perhaps, is that it provides the clearest window currently available into the personality, character, and aspirations of Haven O’More. “Loving the book, the only reason to collect—how could there be another?—holds the collector in a grip far stronger than steel,” he wrote in the preface to the Garden Ltd. catalogue, a sentiment that few bibliophiles at any level of sophistication would dispute.
How this enigmatic man came so close to building a great library on Garden Street a stone’s throw from Harvard Yard with somebody else’s money is still a mystery, and as long as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts keeps the contents of Davis vs. O’More sealed, it will remain so. In the end, Haven O’More was to “have no more” of his “spiritual children.” The “universal treasures” he once hoped to place at the “heart-core” of a “sacred city” ultimately did move on to other places and to new owners.
The four folios of Shakespeare, lauded in the catalogue as “perhaps the finest set in private hands,” have changed custodians three times since selling for $2.1 million on November 9, 1989; now, it is said, they reside in the home of an anonymous collector known only to the Los Angeles bookseller who arranged the transfer by a coded name. The exquisite copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, on the other hand, inscribed on the title page in 1543 by the astronomer’s disciple and acknowledged to be the “most important copy in private hands of the first edition of the most significant publication of the sixteenth century,” entered a notable European collection, where it is likely to remain for some time.
Meanwhile, the property near Arsenal Square in Cambridge that Haven O’More once intended as the site for his library was sold to a developer who promptly erected a cluster of condominiums, markin
g yet another sad turn for a man who wanted so keenly to be proclaimed the world’s greatest book collector.
As the 1980s became the 1990s, and as the new century approached, book collecting continued along steadily. The lengthy recession that consumed most of the country at the beginning of the decade had an impact on how much money some people were willing to spend on material that most observers would regard as nonessential, but highly desirable items continued to appreciate in value nonetheless; collectors just became more selective.
Other concerns began to mount, some involving the impact modern technology will have on how printed books will function in the twenty-first century, if indeed they are to be produced at all. In the fall of 1995, eleven months after he paid $30.8 million for a seventy-two-page notebook compiled in the early 1500s by Leonardo da Vinci, William H. Gates III obtained for an undisclosed sum the Bettmann Archive, a massive assemblage of sixteen million historical photographs that offer a sweeping visual record of the twentieth century. The purchase was merely the most dramatic in a series of systematic moves made by the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation to acquire the electronic rights to thousands of images—mainly works of art from the National Gallery of London, the Philadelphia Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia—through a small company he owns in Bellevue, Washington, known as the Corbis Corporation.
Exactly what shape books will take in the future is by no means clear, but everyone concedes that changes are inevitable. One telling sign of things to come was the opening in early 1996 of the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL for short) of the New York Public Library at Madison Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, a $100 million center of specialized function designed “to serve as a prototype for a whole new level of computerized access” for libraries worldwide. There are some books in the building, to be sure, but the real research at this facility will be conducted by other means. “There are about 250 computers on the premises, as well as 500 work stations equipped for visitors with laptops; the main reading room is really a vast computer docking system,” architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in the New York Times. “It unites all of the library’s various collections of scientific, technological, mathematical, and business material, which has been divided between Forty-second Street and the library’s West Side annex, and places them in a new environment that is itself a showpiece of technology.”
On February 11, 1996, the New York Times Book Review devoted eight full pages to critical notices of newly released CD-ROMs, the first such concession the influential journal made to the relentless compression of words and images into digitized data and what it bodes for tomorrow’s readers. Of particular interest to bibliophiles was a review printed under the headline “Good Heavens” and written by Dr. Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, who is a book collector of consequence. The specific subject of his review was the Hubble Space Telescope CD-ROM Archive, although his conclusion anticipates tomorrow:
I predict that these disks will become collectors’ items. They are incunabula of an age when CD-ROMs are still in their cradles, exuberant and growing, but generally lacking in the maturity and sophistication of anything that might replace the printed medium. They will be a joy to computer buffs who want to download the images for other purposes. And they will be historical trophies of a wonderful starting effort that didn’t quite make it, stepping-stones to much better astronomical archives.
7
Infinite Riches
And thus me thinkes should men of judgment frame
Their meanes of traffique from the vulgar trade,
And as their wealthe increaseth, so inclose
Infinite riches in a little roome.
—Christopher Marlowe,
The Jew of Malta (1.1.34–7)
The third-generation bibliophile slid a clamshell box, a special container for preserving fragile documents, out of a steel vault and carried it carefully over to a reading table in the middle of his library. There, he opened the case to reveal a bulky folio with hand-tooled ornamentation and brass clasps on the outside. “That’s the original binding,” William H. Scheide said softly, and rapped his knuckles on the precious book. “Pigskin on an oak board.” Tucked inside the front cover, a yellowed sheet of paper dated February 10, 1873, carried the heading “Invoice of Merchandise Shipped by Steamer from Liverpool.” Written beautifully in longhand by the famous expatriate American bookseller Henry Stevens, it documented the sale of a Biblia Latina to George Brinley of Hartford, Connecticut, for £600, plus £37 15s. for commission and insurance. Stevens also had written a postscript for the benefit of customs inspectors in New York; and a few of the curious are privileged enough to get a peek at it now:
Pray ponder for a moment to fully appreciate the rarity and importance of this precious consignment from the Old to the New World. It is not only the first Bible, but a fine copy of the First Book ever printed. It was read in Europe nearly half a century before America was discovered. Therefore, in view of these considerations, please to suggest to your Deputy at the Seat of Customs to uncover his head while in the presence of this First Book, and never for a moment to turn his back upon it while the case is open. Let no ungodly or thieving politician lay eyes or hands upon it. The sight can now do him no good, while the Bible may suffer. Let none of Uncle Samuel’s Custom House officials, or other men in or out of authority, see it without first reverentially lifting their hats.
If there is a Holy Grail among collectors, it is without question this book. The volume containing the first printed text of the Old Testament lay open before me, and its owner was inviting me to touch it. William Scheide brought forth many treasures from his preserves that spring day, but the highlight of the visit was the half hour we spent discussing the finer points of his Gutenberg Bible.
A few months before his death in 1991, Edwin Wolf 2nd, the great Philadelphia librarian and noted biographer of A. S. W. Rosenbach, had told me unequivocally, “Bill Scheide owns the finest private library in North America and one of the finest in the world.” The late John Carter once suggested that Scheide is not a book collector at all, “but an institution.” Regardless of how the cognoscenti describe him, everyone agrees that Scheide represents the last of a classic breed, a bookman whose treasures rank with those of many nineteenth-century giants. And beyond mere possession is the expertise he brings to bear. Scheide knows his library intimately and with deep insight; he is familiar with every blemish, every detail, every nuance. “I couldn’t have done it alone,” he said, nodding to three portraits that hang over the door connecting his elegant chamber with the rare-book room of the Firestone Library at Princeton University. The likeness in the middle is his; to the left is a portrait of John H. Scheide, his father, and to the right is a painting of William T. Scheide, his grandfather.
When the Firestone Library is viewed from Nassau Street, there is nothing to indicate that the rectangular room built onto the roof exists apart from Princeton University. But in an unusual arrangement worked out in 1959, college officials allowed Scheide to build the addition at his expense, with no strings attached whatsoever. While the Scheide Library is routinely made available to scholars, the books remain an independent collection, curated by Scheide’s personal librarian, William P. Stoneman, on the occasion of my visits in the early 1990s. What will become of them after Scheide’s death will be disclosed in his will. In the meantime, this remains very much a compact, carefully assembled private library where everything has a place.
The life spans of private collections usually can be measured by the life spans of the individuals who build them, which is why the collections of Sir Thomas Phillipps, George Brinley, and Robert Hoe III were especially impressive. Typically, final scores are tallied when the collectors die and catalogues are issued, or when their libraries are dispersed at auction or go off to institutions. The best-known American exceptions to that pattern are the John Carter Brown Library in Providence
and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. In those cases, the succeeding generation not only continued collecting, but created independent research libraries to maintain the treasures that had been inherited. The Scheide Library also reflects the taste, energy, and sensibility of more than one person, but it remains privately owned after 130 years. “There were about four thousand items when I took it over,” Scheide said, “and I have added perhaps a thousand.”
The Princeton University Library Chronicle suggested in 1965, “The uniqueness of this collection as a continuing family tradition is that it is not a miscellaneous legacy of books handed down from one generation to another [but a] living and growing entity.” Scheide once told a group of colleagues how he “grew up with a library which was already two generations old.” His playroom was directly over copies of such works as John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, the folios of Muratori, and the Complutensian Polyglot Bible. “This was the air I breathed, and no one in the family ever thought to question it.” Many years later, he reflected once again on his lifelong exposure to books: “Growing up with, inheriting, and developing such a collection has created for me feelings of humility, responsibility, and love.”
After allowing me a few minutes to appreciate his Gutenberg Bible in silence, Scheide embarked on a detailed introduction to the book, beginning with the binding and the large margins, which have been preserved untouched for more than five centuries. “Because the binding is original, nothing has been trimmed off the sides,” he explained, pointing between the leaves of the book to the fibers that fastened the signatures, or folded sheets of paper, into a “gathering.” “There are threads down in there, string, and what they did was put this filament in so the string won’t cut the paper.” He proceeded deliberately, knowing exactly where he wanted to go.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 33
