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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Because he had been a printer for more than half a century, Baskin documented various aspects of that craft as well. “We don’t collect bookplates because everybody collects bookplates, but we do collect booksellers’ and bookbinders’ tickets,” he said. “Those are the little tickets they put in books, bound by so and so, sold by so and so. We have a vast collection of them. And we also have a large collection of circulating-library tickets. Why? Because they’re part of the book trade and they’re interesting typographically. There was a time for twenty-five or thirty years when I actually had a plant and a full-time pressman. I had to give that end of it up because I make my living as an artist. I’m not a rich dilettante who pokes around all day with this and that. I work all day. But I work at collecting too.”

  The Baskins stressed that they did not keep everything they have collected. Among the items they have sold was “a great collection” of early colored engraved books. “We also had a great collection of perspective books,” Leonard said. “We had a great collection of emblem books,” Lisa added. “One of our goals was to get every sixteenth-century emblem book that was available,” Leonard explained. “That’s a hard thing to do. Today you can’t even get any from the seventeenth century.”

  The Baskins agreed that parting with books, paintings, and artifacts can be traumatic, but they always found ways to justify the decision. “We took the emblem books as far as they could go,” Leonard said. “It was a finished collection; we couldn’t acquire any more, so we sold them. We had a wonderful collection of Thomas Eakins paintings that today would be worth an incalculable fortune. That was probably the toughest thing we had to do, because that was like opening the bank. Anything was possible after that. Then the color engravings went. We had a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English pottery called Mocha ware, three hundred pieces; we sold those in the early seventies. They’re getting colossal prices now. It’s awful, it’s painful, it can be unbearable, but what are you going to do?”

  “It’s terrible, that’s all,” Lisa said. “But with two kids in school and tuition to pay, this is how we do it.”

  I asked Leonard whether the collections have in any way influenced his own creative activity. “I am sure it is there, though it would be hard to find any direct relationship. I am unable to give you anything specific, but there can be no question but that there is a relationship.”

  He pointed out that through history virtually no artists have been serious collectors. “The most striking exception to that rule, of course, is Rembrandt. He collected paintings, he collected prints, he collected armor, he collected bronzes, he collected Renaissance medals, he collected drawings—he collected everything. Let me refine that: He collected anything that was beautiful. But he pauperized himself in the process. The control of his business and money ultimately was taken out of his hands by his wife and son and creditors. He was profligate, and it was because of his collecting.” The Pop artist Andy Warhol gained additional celebrity after his death when enormous collections of antiques and knick-knacks were found among his possessions, though Baskin said the material gathered by Rembrandt was of “a much higher level; it was truly superior stuff.”

  Toward the end of our interview, I asked the Baskins if picking out favorite items and showing them to interested visitors is one way they enjoy their collections. “It’s fun sharing it with people who love books, but most of the time when we’re in here, we’re by ourselves. We play,” Lisa said.

  “If ever I am bored with anything else, which I never could imagine happening, I would come into this library and start looking at stuff, and I would be enchanted,” Leonard said. “I just love this stuff that we’ve got here.”

  “It’s a madness,” Lisa said.

  “It is, indeed,” Leonard agreed.

  It was six o’clock on a weekday morning, and we had just left St. Louis, Missouri, for Cape Girardeau, a small elbow-shaped town 120 miles to the southeast that gets its marine-sounding name from a spit of sand that juts sharply into the Mississippi River. We had a whole day ahead of us, so I asked the book collector Louis Daniel Brodsky to start at the beginning, and he chose to start almost thirty years earlier, in 1963, when he failed to win an undergraduate book-collecting prize at Yale University.

  “I’ll never forget the trauma,” the man rare-book aficionados know as “L. D.” said in complete earnestness. He told how he had assembled two hundred books by and about William Faulkner, and how he was “shattered” when his entry was awarded second place in the contest. As a member of the soccer and crew teams at Yale—he captained both sports during his freshman year—Brodsky stressed that he appreciates the vagaries of competition.

  “What upset me was not that I had lost,” he insisted, “but how I felt when I learned that first prize went to a collection of railroad timetables. That’s what hurt. This was supposed to be a book-collecting contest. The emphasis is on literature—on books—and I get beat out by a guy with timetables. That’s what stung me.” An even greater indignity followed when Brodsky received his runner-up prize. “They gave me a second printing of A Farewell to Arms, and it didn’t even have a dust jacket,” he said. “First place gets a cash prize, I get this crummy little reading copy of a Hemingway novel. I always had the feeling they were trying to tell me something, that maybe I was a jerk for collecting Faulkner, and here’s the guy I ought to be interested in. Who knows? But the whole thing seemed ironic, and I guess it still rankles me after all these years.”

  The Adrian Van Sinderen Award is one of the oldest undergraduate book-collecting competitions in the United States and among the most prestigious. It was established in 1957 by Adrian Van Sinderen, Yale class of 1910, to encourage students to build their own libraries. Cash prizes are given to first-place entries. Winners over the years have included William S. Reese and W. Graham Arader III, two booksellers with national reputations, and T. Kimball Brooker of Illinois, a noted collector of sixteenth-century books and the sponsor of a similar competition at the University of Chicago.

  For Brodsky, second place only redoubled the intensity of his collecting Faulkner. The result is an archive of books, manuscripts, photographs, journals, letters, and assorted documents so comprehensive that it ranks among the finest collections in America put together by one person devoted to a single author. “I read Faulkner for the first time when I was a freshman at Yale, and I was moved beyond words. I read The Sound and the Fury, and I was Quentin Compson. So on that account I owe my intellectual awakening to Yale. My mind came alive there, and for that I will always be grateful.”

  Though he insisted he bears no grudge against Yale, it is Cape Girardeau’s Southeast Missouri State University that since 1988 has been the permanent home of the Louis Daniel Brodsky Faulkner Collection. During a visit to Yale’s Beinecke Library several months after my trip to Missouri, I mentioned Brodsky’s failure to win the award to Stephen Parks, a curator whose responsibilities included the Van Sinderen Award competition. He shrugged and offered a mild observation: “I know of that railroad collection. It was very clever and it showed a lot of originality.”

  As his skills developed, Brodsky also showed considerate cleverness and originality in his collecting strategy. His vigorous approach would bring him exclusive access to primary materials long before they had a chance to appear on the open market. “I hate buying from catalogues,” he said. “It bores me, to tell you the truth, because by and large it’s too static and too sedentary, and half the time when you see something nice in a catalogue, it’s always gone when you call to get it, no matter how quickly you pick up the phone. So I’ve learned not to get all worked up about what you might see in a dealer’s list. I’m a person who likes being in contact with people anyway. I care about collecting on a personal level. What I enjoy most of all is the fieldwork.”

  Though a number of interesting books came to Brodsky from dealers, his most triumphant acquisitions resulted from locating major pockets of primary material that were still i
n private hands. Sometimes he drove, sometimes he took the earliest flight out of St. Louis; what mattered was getting there first. But that approach would not take shape until 1975. After Yale, Brodsky did graduate work at Washington University in St. Louis and San Francisco State University, earning master’s degrees in literature and creative writing. Disillusioned by several teaching assignments, in 1968 he moved to Farmington, Missouri, and took over the management of a plant that manufactured men’s clothing for Biltwell, which his father, Saul Brodsky, had founded in 1929.

  Brodsky’s passion for collecting returned in 1974, when Margie Cohn of the House of Books, Ltd., offered him nine books inscribed by Faulkner during the 1930s to Hubert Starr, a close friend of Faulkner’s in Hollywood. “It was like putting a glass of Chivas Regal under the nose of an alcoholic,” he said. “I took out my first bank loan to get them. I borrowed eleven thousand, which worked out to something like a thousand to fifteen hundred a book.”

  Later that year Brodsky bought at a Swann Galleries sale two titles that had eluded him from the beginning, The Marble Faun and one of the hundred signed limited edition copies of Go Down, Moses. “At that point I had a complete run of the printed books,” a circumstance that led Washington University in St. Louis to suggest he put on an exhibition. The publicity from that 1976 show brought a letter from Vance Carter Broach of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a second cousin of Faulkner’s who had inherited a sizable cache of presentation copies, correspondence, juvenilia in typescript, and a railroad ledger that had belonged to Colonel W. C. Falkner, the author’s great-grandfather and the prototype of John Sartoris. (William later added the u to his family name.) “When I heard from Vance Broach, I took off and drove straight to Tulsa,” Brodsky said. He had already borrowed money to buy the nine books from Margie Cohn, so he could not offer Broach cash for the collection.

  “Vance Broach loved literature, and he wanted books. So I traded him hundreds of books that we agreed had an equivalent value to his material. Because I had many duplicates, I was able to outfit him with a massive Faulkner collection. What I did not have at that time was a second copy of the one book he wanted most of all, The Marble Faun. Since the whole deal hinged on that, I let him have it, and it was the best judgment I ever made. The beautiful thing is that Vance knew what I was doing. He knew I wasn’t going to sell any of this stuff. He understood that my interest was in scholarship. So we were able to make the deal without any money changing hands.”

  From this experience the scope of Brodsky’s collecting was altered forever. “What I realized was that William Faulkner was not just a great writer, he was a human being. There was a whole network of people out there who had known him—family, associates, Hollywood people, New York people, literary people—and all of them had a piece of the puzzle.”

  Two books influenced Brodsky’s thinking. The first, Each in Its Ordered Place: A Faulkner Collector’s Notebook¸ compiled in 1975 by Carl Petersen, another St. Louis resident who had spent four decades assembling an exceptional Faulkner collection, listed “in one place the sum of a single collection and the direction taken in its assembly.” Petersen hoped to suggest to “younger collectors the varieties of collecting available to unorderly acquisitiveness. Or, more accurately, that some orderliness can be superimposed after the acquisitiveness has gotten out of hand.” Brodsky said he memorized Petersen’s book not only because it was a guide to what Faulkner had published, but for the challenge it presented. “Carl’s book showed me what one man could do, and it told me that if my dreams were high enough, I could do the same thing.”

  Brodsky came to know Petersen, and they were friends for a number of years, though a falling-out left them not speaking with each other. I got together with Petersen the night before I drove to Cape Girardeau with Brodsky—Petersen was willing to see me only on condition that we meet alone. “If you talk to L. D., that’s your business,” he said. “But I will have nothing further to do with the man.” There are any number of theories to explain what happened—the most plausible is that each craved recognition as the most accomplished Faulkner collector in the world—but neither man would say how their once close friendship had broken.

  Petersen provided a model for Brodsky, but the new collector still wanted to know where he could find fresh material. He got it from Joseph Blotner’s landmark biography of William Faulkner, published in 1974, the second book that influenced him strongly. “Blotner was my road map,” Brodsky said. “His book told me who was alive and where I had to go to find them. William Faulkner was a very private man, an elusive man, and what I did was bring the pieces together. I traveled all over the country and met tons and tons of people, and they all had artifacts. I was getting in touch with Faulkner the human being. It was tension that always drove this collection; Carl Petersen was a friend, but I wanted to surpass him. And I did.”

  Brodsky’s travels took him to Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, New York, South Carolina, New Jersey, California, and Oklahoma, as well as Faulkner’s home state of Mississippi. His first major score was material once owned by Phil Stone, an Oxford, Mississippi, lawyer who played an important role in young Bill Faulkner’s literary development and to whom all three volumes of the Snopes trilogy are dedicated. From Stone’s widow, Emily, Brodsky acquired fifteen inscribed books and an archive of unique manuscript material. “She wanted fifty thousand, and I said, ‘Oh Emily, that’s an awful lot of money.’ She was living in Birmingham, Alabama, at that time, and I flew back and forth a couple times, and finally we reached an agreement of thirty-five thousand dollars. I borrowed eighteen thousand dollars and I sold a bunch of antiques for another twenty thousand. My wife and I had some old slot machines that were pretty valuable, and that’s where I got the rest of the money to do it. But I knew what I was getting. ‘Brodsky,’ I said, ‘you’re making a hell of a deal here.’ ”

  Soon thereafter, Brodsky read in Blotner’s biography that a woman named Myrtle Ramey Demarest had been Faulkner’s high school sweetheart. “It turned out Faulkner had given her sketches for a 1913 yearbook that never got made, along with some manuscript poems and drawings, some inscribed books. Blotner mentioned that she had put on a little exhibition of this material in New Jersey. Well, it took me two and a half years to trace the woman down. I looked all through New Jersey, I went through newspaper files there, all sorts of records, and I couldn’t find her. Finally I located some other Rameys back in Mississippi, and they directed me to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where I tracked her down. She was ninety years old and in a nursing home; I negotiated with her daughter. You’ll see the stuff when we get to Cape Girardeau. It’s fabulous.”

  Brodsky said that when he explained what he was trying to accomplish, the woman was pleased to help. “This was 1978, and it was all the money I had. The whole thing cost me sixteen thousand dollars. I got ten inscribed books, including a Marble Faun, I got typescripts, manuscripts, drawings. Today, that Marble Faun alone is about a fifty-thousand-dollar book, but I never looked at it that way. I only offered them sixteen thousand because that was all I could put together. But they were absolutely thrilled to get the sixteen thousand.”

  From Dorothy B. Commins, the widow of Saxe Commins, Faulkner’s editor at Random House from 1936 to 1958, Brodsky acquired an exceptional run of association copies. Among them was a presentation copy of Big Woods, which Faulkner had dedicated to her late husband.

  In 1927, Faulkner wrote a fairy tale about children who have the power to shrink and return to normal size, a light amusement he typed, bound by hand, then presented to Victoria (Cho-Cho) Franklin, the eight-year-old daughter of Estelle Oldham, the woman he would marry two years later when her divorce was final. The Wishing Tree—with the inscription “Bill he made this Book”—was placed on long-term deposit at the University of Virginia, but it remained the property of Victoria’s daughter, a Florida resident also named Victoria, from whom Brodsky acquired a considerable body of material.

  “She had sold me virtua
lly everything else she had—family letters, photographs, everything except that one book that was at the University of Virginia. I told her, ‘Victoria, this is extremely important; it needs to be with the rest of the collection.’ She had some qualms, but then she became aware that if the University of Virginia had really wanted the book, why hadn’t they made her an offer? I had offered her five thousand dollars, you see. So Victoria wrote them a letter, and said simply, ‘I would like the book that my mother put on deposit, please send it back.’ For three weeks she heard nothing. Finally she called them and said she wanted the book, that she was planning to sell it to a collector. I said, ‘Awwhh, Victoria, I wish you hadn’t told them that.’ ”

  The University of Virginia made a counteroffer but went no higher than the $5,000 Brodsky had put on the table. “She called me back, and I doubled the ante to ten thousand,” Brodsky said. To his “profound relief,” Victoria accepted. “I flew down to Florida and was there when the package arrived special delivery. She started to cry and I started to cry. I couldn’t believe I got it, because I was convinced they were going to come up with twenty-five, thirty, fifty grand, who knows; a unique item like that is worth a lot of money. Faulkner typed each page, bound it by hand, stapled it, inscribed it to his step-daughter-to-be. I borrowed five thousand dollars and my mother gave me the other five as a present.”

  Brodsky estimated he has acquired about twenty collections directly from people who were close to Faulkner. “The people who owned these artifacts would never have thought of them as a collection. A lot of this stuff was keepsakes, souvenirs, whatever, kept by the people who knew Faulkner best. So I would go to these people and acquire from them a collection that they had unconsciously collected.”

  We arrived at Southeast Missouri State University about midmorning. There we were joined by Robert W. Hamblin, a professor of English and Faulkner scholar who has worked with Brodsky’s collection since 1979 and has coauthored with him eight comprehensive volumes of bibliography, seven of which have been published by the University Press of Mississippi.