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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  The New York bookseller Justin G. Schiller, internationally regarded as the leading dealer in children’s books and a collector of note in his own right, recalled in a lengthy interview how he tried without success to arrange a meeting with Ruth Baldwin for close to two years during the middle 1960s after finding out repeatedly that she was beating him to dozens of bookstores in England and cleaning out the stocks.

  “Ruth had been a frequent visitor to England, and she would usually spend about three or four weeks, if not longer, visiting all the bookshops,” he said. “There were times I discovered her only as a phantom. I would turn up at bookstores and I would ask for children’s books, and they would look at me in shock, partly because Dr. Baldwin had just been there. Ruth’s tactic was that she never selected one book at a time. She had an overall scheme, which was to build a collection of English-language children’s books that would cover all editions and variations. Children’s books in those days were not generally expensive, and condition was never an important consideration with her. She would walk in, look over the general stock, get a sense of the pricing, and then offer a block price for everything. I would show up a week or two later on my own tour of the provinces, and invariably they would have just finished wrapping these things for her and had taken them to the post office. They would then point to a series of empty shelves where the children’s books had been stacked and inform me that Dr. Baldwin had already been through. This went on with such regularity for a number of years that I actually began to get paranoid about it.”

  Ruth Baldwin at that time was teaching at Louisiana State University, and all the books she had been acquiring were stored in her Baton Rouge house. Schiller said he finally wrote Baldwin a letter of introduction and asked to meet her, but the letter was never answered. “We finally met at the children’s book sale they have every year at Sotheby’s in London,” Schiller said. A British bookseller they both did business with pointed “the phantom” Dr. Baldwin out, and Schiller walked over to where she was jotting notes in a sale catalogue.

  “I waited for a pause in her scribbling, and finally she looked up as if she had known all along who I was and that I was in the room. She did not smile. There was a very sharp hello, a proper response to my handshake, and an abrupt dismissal. I had no opportunity to talk. She had a very stern face, as if I were the enemy. She had a mission, and her mission was to build one of the most remarkable libraries of English-language children’s books in the world. And the fact is that she succeeded. She molded and formed a base by which children’s literature can be traced through all its development.”

  Schiller, as it happened, knew Thomas W. Baldwin by reputation before he ever heard of the daughter. “My academic background was in Shakespeare, so I knew of his work. He was on the periphery of being very highly respected, and by this I do not mean to denigrate his scholarship in any way, but his approach was so blunt that I suspect he frightened people. His greatest achievement was in reconstructing what would have been Shakespeare’s reference library. And like his daughter Ruth, he was not terribly concerned with condition. He just wanted the physical books, the objects.”

  As the 1960s became the 1970s, Schiller said that he “gradually persuaded Dr. Ruth Baldwin” that he “was not a threat,” and they began a business relationship that developed into a friendship. She never “articulated” her purpose, he said, beyond a few words: “You must see it to understand what I am doing.” And sometime in the early 1980s, Schiller went to Gainesville. “I didn’t know what she meant until I did see it. That magnificent setting they have with the cathedral ceiling is part of the aura, but to see one hundred thousand books, all organized in various categories, was a moving experience.” Schiller said his response was immediate. “I wanted to help her. To my mind, the goal of a good antiquarian dealer is to provide the right books to the right clients. That’s my purpose. If you can do this at a margin of profit, well, so much the better.”

  Though Ruth Baldwin “never went for rarities,” and quite pointedly did not issue want lists for specific titles, Schiller said there are some extremely valuable books in the collection. “The value of her collection is in the collection itself, in assembling this library of books that were published for people who were just learning to read, people who couldn’t afford expensive books. Nobody would ever believe that she paid five figures for one title, but she did. It is The Poetic Garland, and I brought it down for her in my briefcase. It is one of her crowning titles.”

  Issued in London about 1808 by publisher John Harris, The Poetic Garland consists of thirty early chapbooks gathered into four volumes, including many original copperplate engravings, some of them handcolored. “She couldn’t believe it existed,” Schiller said. They agreed on a price of $10,000, and he gave her “very liberal” payment terms spread out over a period of years. “I really wanted to see it in her collection, and it pleases me to this day that it is there.”

  Rita Smith was hired in 1989 as a cataloguer for the library; even though Dr. Baldwin had retired the previous year, she was still a powerful presence. “I worked with her for six months until she died,” Smith said. “I was hired and began working almost immediately, so quickly that I didn’t even have time that first week to arrange day care for my daughter Rachel, who was ten at the time and very well behaved. One afternoon I had to bring her in with me, and Ruth would not let her sit at a table inside the library. She had to sit at a table in the outside reading room. This wasn’t a question of Rachel looking at the books, or even getting close to them. She just did not want children anywhere near her books.”

  What it came down to, Smith said, is that Dr. Baldwin “never saw herself as building a library for anyone other than herself. She gave the feeling that she really didn’t want anybody to use these books. It was always pretty obvious to me that all these books were hers. She never really said that, but actions speak louder than words. It was a library of books that had been used by children, and that was important, but it was not for children.”

  Another apparent contradiction was that Dr. Baldwin’s greatest satisfaction seemed to be in finding the books, not in enjoying them once they entered her collection. “It is a difficult thing to explain, because I don’t want to sound like she didn’t like them, or that she didn’t love having them, but her interest in a particular book would drop once it arrived,” Smith said.

  “The hunt was everything for her. It was the excitement of finding it and getting it. Every trip she made was a book-scouting trip. She and her family had a cabin up by the Indian River in Michigan and they’d go up there every year, and in every city along the way they would stop and visit the bookstores. When she went to England to visit her sister, it would be the same thing. And even after she retired, she would still get up every Saturday morning and do garage sales. Every Monday morning she would bring in a pile of books that she had just purchased over the weekend and turn them over to us for cataloguing.”

  “She wouldn’t let it go,” I said, and Smith corrected me.

  “She couldn’t let it go. It was just a total commitment for her. It was the one consuming passion in her life. Let me also say that she was a wonderful person, and that she was not without a sense of humor. The way she focused and went after these books was an inspiration to me. I liked Dr. Baldwin to the core of her feisty little being.”

  As we pulled books at random from the shelves, it was plain that just about every item we examined had two stories, the one printed between the hard covers, the other suggested by the telltale evidence left by a former owner. Many volumes had worn edges, frayed corners, cracked spines, and loose hinges, others contained innocent doodlings, some had little fingerprints that were smeared on the pages with jam and hot chocolate. “Tiny little hands opened these books a hundred years ago and found something worthwhile in them,” Smith said. “Most of them have an inscription too,” she added, and a spot sampling soon showed that to be the case as well. “To Doris Knox from Mama, in the summer, 1896,”
was written in a tattered, well-read book titled Stories Children Love. She picked up one with the inscription “Raymond Lovins from Miss Garsive, Christmas, 1880,” in all likelihood a student’s gift from a teacher. “Santa Claus, his friend, St. Nicholas,” we saw inside another.

  “So many books have unexpected treasures in them,” Smith said. “I am so pleased you are writing about Ruth. She labored so long in obscurity, and I think that what she did was a masterful thing, and I don’t think it can ever be duplicated again. It would just take a fortune to buy something like this today. When she was getting these books, she was paying fifty cents or a dollar for them. She would go into a store and tell the dealer, you have two thousand books there, I’ll take them all off your hands for a thousand dollars, and he would think that was just great. Fifty years from now, who’s going to have five hundred Golden Books from the mid-twentieth century? Nobody but us.”

  • • •

  The Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Yale University is built around a central core of several hundred thousand volumes, a spire of collected wisdom that rises six tiers above the ground to make a powerfully dramatic statement about the majesty of the written word. Shelved behind glass walls and illuminated softly by diffused light, the rarities provide a striking background for exhibitions, especially one mounted in 1991 with the inviting title “Read Me a Story, Show Me a Book.”

  If books are beautiful objects to behold—and so many of them are exquisite—it is only incidental to their purpose, which is to instruct, inform, inspire, and entertain. Children’s literature not only performs these tasks admirably, but it also involves the added dimensions of innocence, joy, and wonder. In every literate society, and in every generation, hopeful youngsters have made the same appeal: “Read me a story, show me a book.”

  The children’s books displayed in the Beinecke exhibition—comprehensive in scope, depth, and sophistication—were not drawn from the university’s own holdings of rare material, but were gathered entirely by a woman from New Jersey who not only selected the items for display, but supervised the installation, prepared the catalogue descriptions, wrote the introduction, and thought up the title. Betsy B. Shirley called an earlier show of her material, at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, “A Child’s Garden of Dreams,” and one that ran in early 1993 at the High Museum in Atlanta, “Dream Makers: American Children’s Book Illustrators.”

  Of Betsy B. Shirley, Justin Schiller said, “For all her energy, she is such a modest woman, yet everything that surrounds her demands respect and attention. Her collection is the best group of American juveniles in private hands.”

  Because the middle initial in Betsy B. Shirley’s name stands for Beinecke, it is tempting to assume that her interest in book collecting is hereditary. Opened in 1963, the Beinecke Library was given to Yale by Edwin, Frederick, and Walter Beinecke, owners of the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, the manufacturer of S&H Green Stamps. Of the three brothers, Edwin was by far the most active bibliophile, a collector of Samuel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, papyri, early illuminated manuscripts, and incunabula, all of which he gave to his alma mater. Frederick Beinecke did not begin collecting until well into his sixties, but once he became interested in Western Americana, he gathered maps, manuscripts, books, pamphlets, and broadsides with great energy. That archive also was turned over to Yale, along with an endowment that guaranteed continued growth. Walter, Mrs. Shirley’s father, did not collect books, but he participated generously in the great gift of the library.

  “The love of books does run in the family,” she said one summer afternoon in the course of giving me an enchanting introduction to her collection, “but I actually started to collect when our daughters were grown up and I was bored. Carl was busy making Kentucky rifles in the cellar, and I wanted to find something worthwhile to do with my spare time.” Carl Shirley, who had been following the discussion closely, left the living room and returned with a long flintlock rifle, intricately carved and decorated on the stock, finely polished and oiled, fully functional—altogether an impressive example of the handicraft he had mastered more than twenty-five years earlier.

  “I thought it would be fun to find an illustrated book about Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett for Carl that had pictures of Kentucky flintlock rifles,” Mrs. Shirley said, “and that is how I happened to go into Justin Schiller’s shop in New York sometime around 1970, and that is how I became fascinated with the world of children’s books. Carl did get his Daniel Boone book, but I got hopelessly involved as a collector.”

  Because the earliest children’s books were “very religious, moralizing, and didactic” tracts, Mrs. Shirley thought at first she would begin her collection around 1815 “because I knew they had color illustrations, they were fun, and they were interesting. But then I realized that all the others were interesting too, and that I should be collecting them as well. Not many people were collecting them at that time, so the prices were pretty good. Other collectors were going after the English, French, and German first editions, not the American. So I was ahead on that one.”

  There were easily four thousand books in Betsy Shirley’s basement library, and perhaps another thousand or so placed in rooms throughout her house. Mrs. Shirley said she personally catalogues, categorizes, and shelves everything she acquires, but the size of the collection is “anybody’s guess.” What is relevant is the scope and breadth of what she has assembled. “The only way I can know the collection is to catalogue it myself,” she said, explaining why she had never hired a professional curator or librarian to help.

  Glazed cabinets lined three exterior walls and both sides of a center partition in the converted basement of her home. “I don’t collect schoolbooks, really, but there they are,” she began, indicating several shelves of old primers. “This over here is all hobbies, things like astronomy, how to put on a circus, books for boys, books for girls, that kind of thing. Over here we have Christmas. Over there is ABCs, alphabet books. These are all, let’s call them modern, 1920 on up to the present.” Other cabinets held full selections of American history, geography, science, gift books, nonsense books. “I have all the Caldecott and Newbery winners over here,” she said, indicating books that have won the most prestigious awards in children’s literature, one named for the artist Randolph Caldecott, the other for the eighteenth-century publisher of children’s books John Newbery. “Here I keep all of my Charles Dickens; yes, he is English, but that’s not cheating, because these are all the first American editions. This over here is my Mother Goose, which I must admit is a really good collection.”

  Included among the first editions were familiar titles that need little introduction, books such as Mabel C. Bragg’s The Little Engine That Could, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg, Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Dr. Dolittle, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. They went on and on, one after another: Pat the Bunny, Madeleine, Tom Swift and his Motorcycle, The Wizard of Oz, The Yearling—“all the fun books,” Mrs. Shirley said.

  There also were eighteenth-century primers shaped like paddles known as hornbooks, one fashioned from leather, another from silver. To make a hornbook, a sheet of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Invocation to the Trinity is covered with a thin strip of transparent material peeled from the horn of a cow. Such study aids remained popular for two and half centuries. An example of the most popular workbook of all in Colonial America, The New-England Primer, is in Mrs. Shirley’s collection as well.

  Among early alphabet books she showed me were The Young Child’s ABC and The New Picture Primer. Storybooks include such favorites as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, Samuel Griswold Goodrich’s Tales of Peter Parley About America, Lucy Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Booth Tarkington’s Penrod. The range of nursery rhymes, the Mother Goose collection, extends from a
1794 edition published by Isaiah Thomas to Frederick Winsor’s Space Child’s Mother Goose of 1958.

  Other aspects of the collection include poetry, hand-colored chapbooks, religious books, women writers, etiquette, and works about the North and the South such as Charles D. McKenzie’s The Little Drummer Boy, 1861, and Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, 1881. In three of the letters Mrs. Shirley acquired, George Washington cautions a nephew to “quit the trif ling amusements of a boy and assume the more dignified manners of a man,” twelve-year-old John Quincy Adams writes a younger brother from a Spanish port, and Andrew Jackson implores his adopted son to attend his lessons and accustom himself to letter writing.

  Censorship in juvenile literature is represented by works frequently banned by “protective” adults, books like J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War. A 1983 edition of Little Red Riding Hood was condemned because one of artist Trina Schart Hyman’s illustrations shows Grandma enjoying a glass of wine with her lunch. A particularly scarce item in Mrs. Shirley’s collection is writer and illustrator Garth Williams’s 1958 tale, The Rabbits’ Wedding, widely suppressed because in it a white bunny marries a black bunny.

  Betsy Shirley’s collection embraces every aspect of American children’s literature, and in the area of illustrated books, an additional facet of her collection was evident in every room of her house—the kitchen, pantry, den, hallways, bedrooms, even the bathrooms. Wherever there was wall space there were original artworks created for children’s books by such artists as Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Maurice Sendak, Felix O. C. Darley, A. B. Frost, E. W. Kemble, Edwin Abbey, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Ludwig Bemelmans, Rockwell Kent, Johnny Gruelle, Justin Howard, Jessie Willcox Smith—all of the giants. Some of the pictures are variants of what was published, others are working sketches, all of them are artifacts that clarify the creative process. The original oil painting executed by N. C. Wyeth in 1911 for Treasure Island that was hanging in Mrs. Shirley’s living room is an image of three pirates, one holding two muskets, another brandishing a saber, the third hoisting a skull and crossbones, and is known by millions of readers. Palmer Cox’s 1891 painting of several dozen “brownies” seated at long tables, called “The Christmas Dinner,” was a favorite at the High Museum exhibition in Atlanta.