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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  The material was so offensive that sending it to the dump was out of the question. “I am a known person in my village,” Zinman said. “I couldn’t pile it up on the street, it was too much stuff. I couldn’t burn it. I could not dispose of this material. The word would have gotten out and I didn’t want the notoriety.” Zinman called the Kinsey Institute in Indiana and found no interest. “I called Johnny Jenkins in Texas, but he didn’t want any part of it either.” Finally, he persuaded the bookseller Terry Halladay, then working in Texas with another bookseller, Ray Walton, to take the material on speculation. “The deal was that I ship it down to him, I never see it again, and we split whatever he can get for it. It may be trash, I tell him, but it is comprehensive.”

  A year went by, and finally Halladay called Zinman with the news. “I can get rid of it,” the bookseller told him. “Are you willing to give the collection to the University of Texas?” Zinman agreed, and the material was dispatched to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin. “Lyndon Johnson had formed something called the President’s Commission on Pornography and Obscenity in 1968, and all the records are in Texas, all the notes, all the hearings, everything, but they had no examples of American pornography.”

  The collection was appraised, and Zinman was able to claim a substantial deduction. “The upshot is that in May of 1990 I got a letter from the Dean of the University of Texas Law School. ‘Dear Mr. Zinman,’ he writes, ‘We are now in possession of the Zinman Collection of Pornography. And we are in the process of cataloguing it and we would like you to give us a curriculum vita on yourself and the history of the collection.’ I call this guy up right away, and I say, ‘What the hell is going on?’ He tells me that the Law Library found this collection very interesting, and they have it. He was very serious. So I said, ‘Do you have to call it the Zinman Collection?’ He said when it came to the university, it came as the Zinman Collection, a gift from Michael Zinman. So I call up Terry Halladay and I tell him the story. Terry says to me, ‘Did you ask him about a bookplate?’ ”

  Might it be ironic, I asked, if a hundred years from now the only Zinman collection that endures is the Zinman Collection of Pornography at the University of Texas Law School?

  “I love it,” Zinman said. “I love it.”

  Anyone who ever met Irwin T. “Toby” Holtzman inevitably agrees that the man was an unusually “intense” collector, an admitted fanatic so single-minded in his devotion to the printed word that after two days spent in his company, I was astonished to learn that he also made room in his pantheon of passions for the Detroit Tigers. “Toby definitely can wear you down,” Peter Howard said when he recommended that I travel to Michigan and talk with Holtzman, “but he has a native feeling for books that you really have to experience first hand to appreciate.”

  Though he had time to become one of the most successful home builders in the state, Holtzman is totally focused when the subject is literature. At the time of my visit, he and his wife, Shirley, were living in a beautiful home of Irish-Georgian design in Grosse Pointe Farms, an exclusive suburb on the shores of Lake St. Clair, where automobile industry executives have resided in quiet luxury for decades. Behind the red-brick house was a lovely herb garden. Inside, everything was precise and tasteful. Yet somehow, something seemed missing, something that became apparent only after I had followed my host to his impressive book room, an area quite separate from the family library and detached from the living quarters.

  There were no pictures on the walls.

  “You noticed,” Holtzman replied, obviously pleased. “Good. I’m glad. If you understand nothing else, you must understand that this is a house of books. We have some wonderful pictures, but they are not framed and hanging on the walls. I’ve thought this through quite thoroughly. There can be no competition in this house between books and art. Part of the reason I have been successful as a collector is because I am a fanatic about it.” He then pointed out that there was only one chair in the book room, the one behind his desk, where he did his work. “This is not a place for idle conversation. We can sit and talk in the library. You come in here to deal with books.”

  There were several exhibition cases in the center of the room where various collections were in the process of being categorized and prepared for presentation to institutions. During my visit, Holtzman was working on a collection of Israeli literature that he was planning to give to the Israel National and Hebrew University Library in Jerusalem. Expected to number about four thousand volumes, the collection had been forming since 1973 and encompasses all of Israeli literature from the founding of the state in 1948 to the present. Holtzman said that releasing books from his custody was every bit as much a part of collecting as gathering them, and involves just as much thought and effort. “I’m in the process of divesting all my collections,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I have lost any of my fanaticism, because dispersal is just one aspect of the process.”

  Holtzman said he would install the Holtzman Family Collection of Israeli Writers in Jerusalem the same way he installed the Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman Collection of William Faulkner at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, in 1989. Holtzman collected not only all of Faulkner’s works in various editions, but also translations, biographies, and criticism. “I moved fourteen hundred Faulkner items by myself, in my station wagon, and nobody handled them in between. I had the shelves built to my specifications, and the books are arranged according to the order I have established. That was part of the agreement of the gift. I call it utilization,” Holtzman said. “I created this collection. I paid for these books. I wept for them. You saw how I have the Faulkner shelved. The life. The work. The meaning. Collection. Study. You couldn’t talk to anybody and have the author explained any better. That’s what makes it a library: the comprehensiveness.”

  At one time, Holtzman collected the works of 350 American authors with similar thoroughness. “I build homes, I create dwellings, so the first books I bought dealt with housing, design, style, and architecture,” he said. Though the collection of writings by and about architects was formidable— Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and Louis Sullivan among them—Holtzman’s reputation as a collector was established mainly by his enthusiasm for modern first editions, arbitrarily selecting 1927 as his starting point. “The year of my birth,” he explained. “The compass for my American literature collection was my own time,” and the books were shelved in two sections, one for writers who were living, the other for those who were dead. “When an author died, I moved those works up to the top shelves, above the living authors, as soon as I heard the news, on the very same day. I am partial to the living, to the future. I can always pick up on what was written yesterday. I am more interested in what will be published tomorrow. I think that is the challenge of being a contemporary collector.”

  Unlike most collectors, who wait until books achieve a patina of scarcity, Holtzman said he always tried to decide in advance what works will be important. When he began collecting fiction seriously in 1950, he took out a subscription to Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine noted for its concise forecasts of forthcoming books, and he faithfully studied the periodical ever since. When he spotted items of interest, he called bookstores such as the Strand in New York that acquire review books and uncorrected proofs in order to locate advance copies. Holtzman’s insistence that he collected authors, not just books, made him well known among writers throughout the country as the persistent man from Michigan who kept asking them to inscribe copies of their works. “I have never pestered authors through the mails,” Holtzman said. “I am an in-your-face kind of guy. I would chase them around, but always in public places. I am the collector who appears in front of them at airports.” Holtzman estimated that he obtained book inscriptions from about five hundred authors during the thirty years he actively collected modern first editions.

  Holtzman was always particular as to where authors inscribed the books. “Most writers instinctively gravitate to the
title page because it looks pretty. But I believe that violates the book, so I like them to sign on the first blank page. My feeling is that somehow the first edition of a book should be as it appeared in the stores. This, for me, is paying proper respect to the book.”

  Because of his scouting techniques, Holtzman said that about forty percent of his books were acquired at their original prices, or in the case of remainders and secondhand books, even less. In 1979, Peter Howard estimated Holtzman’s investment in American literature at a modest $150,000, yet still called his collection of ten thousand books “the finest assembly of its kind in one private room in the country,” and compared it favorably with similar holdings in large university libraries.

  “Most collectors wait until a book is ‘collectible,’ and then they pay seventy-five or a hundred dollars to buy it because by then it is rare. For me the idea is to get it fresh off the press. I know what will be collectible because I have always tried to be involved with every aspect of book culture.” Holtzman not only collected the material written by his selected authors, but acquired secondary material as well. “I have the greatest respect for critics. I try as a reader and as a collector to get the whole body of opinion, and then I make my own decisions. I am a person who will not go to a movie unless I have read a couple of reviews. I never want to be surprised, I never want to be entertained; I want to know.”

  The decision to dispose of his modern first editions came after Holtzman made his first trip to Israel in 1973, when he decided to pursue a “new direction” that could make him “a great international collector.” In 1980, he sold most of his contemporary literature to Peter Howard. “I decided to get rid of everything except the major-major and the major-minor writer,” he said, explaining why he held on to the William Faulkner and Nathanael West material.

  When we spoke, his book room was filled with close to four thousand books written by Israeli authors. “By the way, I decide who is an Israeli author and who is not,” he said. “There is no reliable bibliography. What I am doing here will be the standard bibliography when it is complete. There are books here in Hebrew and Arabic. The key point is the date, May 15, 1948.” He selected a volume of short stories by Nathan Shaham, the title of which translates as Crops and Metal, and opened it to the copyright page. The year 1948 appears under the words “State of Israel.” Holtzman said he learned from the author that the book was published in the spring of that year. “I have not been able to determine yet whether any books came out the week of May 15, so for now this is the first book of literature published in the State of Israel. If it had been published in Jerusalem before that date, it would say Palestine.”

  When the collection is finally presented to Israel, Holtzman said he planned to install each book himself. “There will be nothing else like this anyplace else.” And once that project is in place, there remained still the matter of the Russian literature collection that is strong in Boris Pasternak and Isaac Babel, and a collection of American Indian literature he was still assembling when we met.

  “You have to be acquisitive to be a collector. But at some point along the line the acquisitiveness is the first thing that goes. You’ll find that every single person at a certain age is not as frantic about releasing a book, or placing a collection, or even selling some parts of their library,” Holtzman said. “I never had the equipment to become an architect, but I collected architects, and I came as close to being one as possible. There is an analogy there with my book collecting, I think, because even though I am not a writer, my attachment to writing and my love of writing is as close as a person can get to being a writer. As you see, living vicariously is just part of my makeup.”

  9

  Instant Ivy

  There was a time during the late 1950s and early ‘60s when crates filled with rare books and documents were arriving at the University of Texas campus in Austin so quickly that nobody knew where to put them, let alone say how soon any of the material would be catalogued or when it would be made available to scholars. But those were minor details that could be resolved once the buying spree ended; what mattered most during those peak oil years was that money was available and the spirit was willing.

  When Harry Huntt Ransom, the provost of the University of Texas, called for the creation of a Humanities Research Center on the booming Austin campus in 1956, there was a sense of moment and consequence, a feeling that anything was possible. Texans frequently use the word “vision” to describe the passion Ransom had to build a library in the Southwest that would hold its own with those at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Princeton; others, less impressed, called it a crude attempt to create “instant ivy.” Shortly before being named provost and vice president, Ransom outlined his goal to the state philosophical society. “I propose that there be established somewhere in Texas—let’s say in the capital city—a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation.” For those who needed further convincing, Ransom spelled it out. “Texas, which now ranks high in private income among all the other states within the Union, has the material power to fulfill its intellectual obligations in practical ways.” Put another way, the cash was flowing, and it would not flow forever.

  Outsiders who stereotype Texas as a wild frontier populated by uncultured cowboys and football fanatics often forget that striving to be the biggest and the best at everything is very much a part of the region’s persona. “Twenty-five years of reporting on the place and I still can’t account for that lunatic quality of exaggeration, of being slightly larger than life, in a pie-eyed way, that afflicts the entire state,” journalist Molly Ivins, a native of Lubbock, wrote in a best-selling collection of her audacious Texas commentary. “I just know it’s there, and I’d be lying if I tried to pretend it isn’t.”

  The path to realizing the idea that Texas could gather a collection of rare books and manuscripts that would compare with the best in the world was fraught with obstacles. Ransom realized that regardless of what he was willing to spend, the university would always be several generations behind established institutions in traditional areas, and that the only way to achieve dominance was to concentrate on fields neglected by the competition. With this in mind, he declared that people did not have to be dead or famous before they were collectible. If other libraries wanted to continue sifting through the cinders of history, that was fine, because Ransom was laying claim to the twentieth century while the fires of creation still burned. Some critics argued that the pursuit of immediacy can be impulsive, and therefore transitory, but the point was moot. Cast your net wide, Ransom seemed to say, and all sorts of interesting things will come your way.

  “It is an obvious law of nature that collections of living men, however wise, constitute highly perishable collections of knowledge,” Ransom explained. “Enlightened human minds almost invariably outmode themselves by encouraging a continual search for new knowledge, new synthesis. Furthermore, no matter how great their undertaking or how vast their accomplishment, all knowing men are sooner or later overtaken by death. So the collection of permanent records has always been essential to civilization.” Figuring out what was significant would take care of itself later. What was important in the meantime was to embark on a program of massive acquisitions.

  In time, Ransom would welcome familiar names like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh, but he also sought out a whole range of figures, many of them unknown then, many of them still obscure to this day. While writers would constitute the core of the collection, the full scope of human accomplishment, be it theater, art, music, architecture, photography, cinema, journalism, broadcasting, or politics, was part of the scheme as well. Printed books certainly were included, but they were viewed as the logical conclusion of the creative process, not its beginning. Primary documents—manuscripts, letters, journals— were the quarry.

  The most important Texas holdings at that
time were nineteenth-century British materials acquired in 1918 from John Henry Wrenn, the Chicago collector best known as a wealthy American targeted by Thomas J. Wise as a purchaser of his forgeries of literary pamphlets. “The Texas library was a good library, but it was not a great library,” according to Thomas F. Staley, who was appointed director of the Humanities Research Center in 1988. “Harry Ransom understood what a great library was.” In 1970, the British bibliographer Anthony Hobson would include the Humanities Research Center in his respected survey, Great Libraries, and in 1975 the New York Times ranked the special collections of the University of Texas with Harvard’s, Yale’s, the New York Public Library, and the Huntington Library.

  Ransom’s most impressive triumph, however, was not that he achieved respectability so quickly, but that he did it with the spirited backing of a political machine that managed the flow of public money with fierce, often ruthless, authority. To describe Texas state government as “rough and tumble” is to dance with euphemisms. “Actually,” Molly Ivins wrote, “the criterion of being considered an honest politician in Texas is as follows: If you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and vote against ’em anyway, you don’t belong in Texas politics.”