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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  When I first interviewed William Scheide, he said that the 1457 Psalter was his “favorite” book in the collection, not only because it was something that had been considered “unprocurable,” but also because of what it contributed to his collection of early printing. A few months later, on November 27, 1991, he took another major step. Barely a month shy of his seventy-eighth birthday, he authorized his agent, Roland Folter, of H.P. Kraus, to bid a little under $2 million at Christie’s in London for the first 36-line Bible printed with Gutenberg type to be sold in more than two hundred years. The identity of the new owner was not announced, but news moved quickly through the book world that the volume known as the Liverpool Copy of the 36-line Bible was coming to North America—the first time that any copy of the book had ever crossed the Atlantic Ocean—and that it would have a new home in the Scheide Library.

  Now gathered under one roof are the five primary incunabula (the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, the two Mainz Psalters, the Durandus, and the 36-line Gutenberg Bible), only the third time ever that a private collector has owned them all; the other collectors were King George III of England and George John, second earl of Spencer. Four of these books— each for many years considered unobtainable—were added by the current owner. “I had always maintained that the Scheide Library was the finest private library anywhere,” Paul Needham said. “But this acquisition made it absolutely extraordinary. What a marvelous way to climax a life in collecting.”

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  Mirror Images

  “Friend and fellow bibliophile, remember your library is the mirror of your personality,” the French collector Maurice Robert cautioned in 1936 as Nazi mobs across the border made bonfires of “offensive” literature. “Tell me what you read,” an old proverb states, “and I shall tell you what you are.” Heartbroken at the loss of his eyesight in old age, the poet, scholar, and scientist Eratosthenes of Alexandria starved himself to death rather than live any longer without the companionship of his books. John Hill Burton told of a retired archdeacon who became so distraught at the dispersal of his library that he left the auction in a panic, returned in the uniform of an army officer, and bought back every lot that remained. Asked once how he possibly could know one title from another in a house weighted down with volumes that looked alike, Charles Lamb responded with a question of his own: “How does a shepherd know his sheep?”

  There is pain to collecting. There is pleasure to collecting. In the early 1900s, the English critic J.C. Squire, writing pseudonymously as Solomon Eagle, published a short article titled “Moving a Library” that described the dreaded exercise of relocating to new quarters.

  Night after night I have spent carting down two flights of stairs more books than I ever thought I possessed. Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a train round the Inner Circle; upstairs empty-handed, and downstairs creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging column of books wedged between my two hands and the indomitable point of my chin. The job simply has to be done; once it is started there is no escape from it; but at times during the process one hates books as the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments. A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled, illiterate Superman?

  Even more intimidating than mere physical exertion are the “complications of getting one’s library straight” in a new setting, especially if the rooms are “totally different in shape and arrangement,” since knowing where everything is located is what distinguishes the true collector from the hoarder. “That is where I am at this moment,” Eagle concluded, “sitting in the midst of a large floor covered with sawdust, white distemper, nails, tobacco-ash, burnt matches, and the Greatest Works of the World’s Greatest Masters. Fortunately, in Ruskin’s words, ‘I don’t suppose I shall do it again for months and months and months.’ ”

  New York City investor Carter Burden thrilled antiquarian booksellers throughout America by declaring, “You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too many books.” When he made that statement in 1987, he was well into a ten-year mission to gather the full sweep of modern American literature. At that time, some six thousand authors were represented in his collection of books, manuscripts, unpublished screenplays, first appearances in magazines, criticism, ephemera—the entire spectrum. By one estimate, he already had acquired more than seventy thousand volumes. He boasted that books “do not merely furnish my rooms, they engulf them. They are everywhere—in my study, the library, the kitchen, the corridors, the bathrooms, the children’s rooms.”

  Two years later, Burden sold his fourteen-room condominium overlooking the East River and commissioned the noted New York architect Mark Hampton to renovate a smaller apartment on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Burden placed his library into storage and stopped buying books, an abrupt withdrawal that caused considerable anxiety throughout the trade. Some dealers suggested that his sudden inactivity marked the end of an era. “Not having the books around is distressing,” Burden told me at the time. “I love to read my books, but I also enjoy them as objects. I like living with them. I like holding them. I make all my own glassine covers, and I like putting books where they belong. It’s manual therapy for me, and to collect abstractly from a catalogue, without being able to handle them, is not collecting. So now I am in a hiatus.”

  A great-great-great grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt on his father’s side and a principal in the family investment firm of William A. M. Burden Company, Carter Burden had the means to collect virtually anything he desired, world classics among them. But from the start he wanted to form a collection of twentieth-century American first editions that would stand alone by itself.

  “I decided that it could be done for a reasonable amount of money,” he said. “I was buying paintings long before I was collecting books. I started collecting American contemporary art in the sixties, when you could buy a Frank Stella for two thousand and a Jasper Johns for ten thousand dollars. I never paid more than ten thousand for a single picture, but then that quickly got out of my league.” When Burden decided he could build a library of the first magnitude with about the same money it would take to form a middle-level art collection, he began to sell his paintings. “The truth of the matter is that I basically paid for my books with the profits I made on the paintings. But I never considered them investments when I bought them. My family thought I was nuts at the time. Now they think I’m a genius. The whole point is that I wasn’t nuts, and I’m not a genius.”

  Burden grew up in Beverly Hills, California, where his mother, Flobelle Fairbanks, a niece of Douglas Fairbanks, was an actress. According to one account, Burden arrived in Manhattan society in the mid-1960s as a “tall, blond, handsome, rich, and glamorous” man whose “background of great wealth and privilege” placed him “among the ranks of New York’s social elite.” His first marriage, in 1964, to Amanda Jay Mortimer, daughter of the second wife of CBS chairman William S. Paley, Babe Cushing Mortimer Paley, was a highly publicized social event. Carter and Amanda Burden were variously described as the “young locomotives” and “New York’s number-one fun couple.” Vogue promoted the radiant image with a ten-page spread about their life in the Dakota under the headline “The Young-Joyous Life.” By 1972, though, the “young-joyous life” was over, and so was the marriage. “We were just too young,” Burden said. He and Susan Burden were married in 1977. She is a family therapist who respects her husband’s passion to collect but does not share it.

  “I am convinced that the urge to collect is innate,” he told me. “It is not inherited—my kids have no real interest in collecting—but you either have the bug or you don’t. I started collecting toy soldiers and baseball cards when I was six years old. That’s not especially significant, but I think the fact that I have kep
t the toy soldiers all these years probably is.”

  A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, Burden worked as an aide to Senator Robert Kennedy before successfully running for a seat on the New York City Council in 1968, where he served for eight years. Burden’s political ambitions ended in 1978 when he sought the congressional seat vacated by Ed Koch, who resigned to run for mayor of New York. Despite spending $1 million of his own money on the campaign, he lost the general election and joined the family investment firm.

  About the time Burden was approaching his fortieth birthday, in 1981, the idea for a great library took hold. Burden explained why he decided to go after American literature. “Prime material was readily available, prices were reasonably cheap,” and serious competition, with a few exceptions, “was relatively weak.” Having established the scope, he defined his expectations: “I wanted my entire collection to meet the highest bibliographic standards. I insisted on first editions, pristine condition, original dust jackets. I wanted all the rarities and high spots, but more than anything, I sought comprehensiveness and depth.”

  In addition to acknowledged masters like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, he would collect authors such as Booth Tarkington and Pearl S. Buck that “nobody has paid attention to in years,” and along with novelists, poets, and dramatists, his shelves would welcome “critics, humorists, detective writers, science fiction writers, Western writers, black writers, political writers. I was committed to collecting the work of every important writer in depth—proofs, limited editions, variant issues, pamphlets, broadsides, English editions, magazine appearances.” Before long, his large apartment on the East Side was filled with books. They were in every room and hall, in every corner and on every end-table, and they shared space with all the other items he had been gathering for most of his life, a hodgepodge of material objects that included Indian miniatures, drawings, bronzes, glass bells, wooden snuffboxes, even antique English ballot boxes with “Yea” and “Nay” painted above the appropriate slots.

  But as the 1980s drew to a close, there was an abrupt slowdown in his activity. Talk began to spread that Burden had quit collecting, and he was even rumored to be selling his books. He did give a considerable collection of science fiction material to the New York Public Library and consigned an entire run of W. H. Auden material to the book dealer Ralph B. Sipper, owner of Joseph the Provider, Inc., in Santa Barbara, California. There were other murmurs that despite an enormous family fortune, Burden had gone broke buying books and he was being forced to sell not only his collections but his East Side apartment as well.

  A few other insiders, however, saw the situation differently. “I believe Carter stopped buying because he pretty much has everything he wants,” Peter B. Howard, the founder and long-time owner of Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California, told me. “People don’t understand the Carter Burden phenomenon—and it most definitely was a phenomenon— because there has never been anything else like it. I have been in the business since 1965, and it is unique in my experience.”

  When Burden and I first talked, in 1990, he had just moved out of his old apartment. He said the move to Fifth Avenue had been suggested by his wife Susan, who wanted to live closer to Central Park. Even though the newer quarters on Fifth Avenue were smaller, a slowdown in the collecting would have resulted even if they had decided to stay where they were. “I was afraid the floor was going to collapse into the next apartment,” he said. “The fact is that I made a manful effort, but what you quickly learn is that no collection is ever complete. So, yes, I was defeated. The point, I guess, is that I tried. If I were starting today, I certainly would never attempt to be as broad as I was in the beginning. Six thousand authors, in every issue of every book? Periodical appearances and signed limited editions? And uncorrected proofs? That was a mistake, trying to collect all those proofs.”

  An uncorrected proof is a book that has already been set in type from the author’s manuscript but has not been approved for final production. Only a hundred copies or so are produced at this stage of production, sometimes more, sometimes less, and they represent an intermediate phase between what has been written and what is being prepared for general release. Proofs are circulated within publishing houses, and some are sent out to critics in the hope that sufficient lead time will encourage a timely notice. Usually they are bound in plain paper and distributed with a standard caveat stamped inside or on the cover that reads something like, “These are uncorrected advance proofs bound for your reviewing convenience. In quoting from this book for reviews or any other purpose, it is essential that the final printed book be referred to, since the author may make changes on these proofs before the book goes to press.”

  Publisher’s proofs have been around for most of the twentieth century, and as the demand for modern literature grew, collecting them became fashionable, primarily because they represent a “state” that is earlier than the first edition, and in some cases actually can be considered a “variant” form of the text. Many authors—John Updike, Anne Tyler, Philip Roth, and the late Bernard Malamud, to name just four—have revised novels right up to the final typesetting. Changes of such consequence were made in The Witches of Eastwick, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien’s 1994 book, In the Lake of the Woods, that new proofs had to be printed, producing what amounted to two sets of galleys. The earlier versions were of course more desirable. Less dramatic modifications take place all the time; Henry Holt advised critics in 1986 that the names of several minor characters in Louise Erdrich’s second novel, The Beet Queen, had been changed, and to avoid using them in any review.

  Something small like this, prompted perhaps by a publisher’s concern for legal propriety more than a novelist’s sense of artistic purpose, is probably not worth paying a lot of money to own. But consider the matter of a “sampler” prepared in 1988 by a small Midwestern publisher, Academy Chicago, to promote the forthcoming publication of The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever. The sampler contained three of Cheever’s early magazine pieces—“Bayonne,” “Town House,” and “The Habit.” Several hundred copies of the twenty-three page booklet were passed out at an American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, California, over the Memorial Day weekend in anticipation of the book’s scheduled release in the fall. Publication was halted indefinitely, however, when an Illinois judge ruled in favor of the late author’s estate, which had sued Academy Chicago to block the project, and for six years the samplers represented the only appearance of any part of the book. When a sharply truncated edition of The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever finally was released in 1994, only thirteen stories from the original sixty-eight were included, and just one from the sampler, “Bayonne,” was among them. A prophetic disclaimer affixed to the booklet makes it especially attractive to collectors: “This sampler is not authorized by the family of John Cheever.” The few reviewers fortunate enough to receive full sets of the uncorrected proofs before the project was halted possessed an even greater rarity.

  Because proofs are not intended for general circulation, scarcity is guaranteed, intensifying demand. The Viking Press may elect to run off half a million copies of the latest Stephen King horror thriller in the first printing, but the number of proofs it produces will remain fairly constant, thus placing a premium value on copies that make their way into the marketplace.

  Once he decided to document every phase of the publishing process, Burden began to buy proofs by the score, a strategy he told me was a mistake; he said he also wished he had not paid so much attention to signed and numbered “fine-press” editions, books that typically take a story by a well-known author that has not appeared in a hardcover edition and print an attractive little booklet in limited numbers. “Manufactured rarity” and “artificial rarity” are the phrases some collectors use to describe the practice. Many prefer to collect only the first trade editions of books, which more accurately reflect a work’s publishing history. “The only
author I’m still collecting in limited editions is John Updike,” Burden said. “And that’s because I already have five hundred or so items; I can’t afford to quit on him now.”

  Peter Howard described Burden’s original “notion” as audacious but nonetheless quite simple: “Carter had set about collecting all of American literature from Waller Barrett on.” The Clifton Waller Barrett Library, given to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1960, spanned the full range of writing produced in the United States prior to the twentieth century. A founding partner of the North Atlantic and Gulf Steamship Company, Barrett once said that as he became acquainted with such neglected writers as Charles Brockden Brown, John Neal, William Gilmore Simms, Robert Montgomery Bird, and James K. Paulding, he “became fired with the ambition to collect complete sets of their original editions so that this authentic American literature might be preserved for posterity.” He gathered five hundred major authors in depth during a half century of collecting; another five hundred, including many nineteenth-century writers, known only by copies of their books in his library, were sought out as well. He selectively included a number of twentieth-century writers, but his collection through 1900 is comprehensive and without equal. At his death in 1991 at the age of ninety, Barrett’s bequest totaled 112,000 manuscripts and 35,000 books. “I do not know how many writers and scholars owe debts of gratitude to Clifton Waller Barrett,” Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James, marveled in tribute. “He has been a kind of twentieth-century literary Maecenas.”

  Peter Howard said that Burden “overlapped with Barrett slightly,” but that he utilized the same style. “He collected the primary editions, he collected significant inscribed and biographical editions, and he collected representative autograph material. The joy was that Carter wanted one of every book by every serious twentieth-century American author.” This was possible for several reasons, not least of which was Burden’s willingness to commit a significant amount of money to the effort. “This lit up the eyes of booksellers everywhere,” Howard said. “After a while he worked mostly with three or four dealers who were most capable of finding what he wanted in a penetrating way.” In addition to Howard, Burden’s other primary suppliers were Ralph B. “Joe the Pro” Sipper of Santa Barbara, California, Glenn Horowitz of New York City, and the late Marguerite A. “Margie” Cohn, owner for many years of House of Books in New York and a pioneer dealer in modern first editions.