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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  For thirty years, Board worked in marketing for Borden Company in New York. “When I retired a couple years ago I was vice president of corporate development. I did Borden’s planning and acquisition work. I bought companies like Wise potato chips, ReaLemon, Sacramento tomato juice, and Snow’s clam chowder.” Before he went to Borden, Board did similar work for Proctor & Gamble and Standard Brands. “I started off with P and G in the early forties, and I traveled all over the place. One day, I got to thinking, I know absolutely nothing about first editions, so I said I’d like to learn. I picked an author that nobody collected, Frank Stockton. He wrote a lot of books, perhaps fifty, and there were juveniles, which are very hard to get in good condition. I picked him because nobody else wanted him and they were cheap. I was only making a hundred fifty dollars a month at the time, Jane and I were newly married, so how much money do you have for books?”

  A lot of Board’s early work involved travel, and because his expense account was meager, he often stayed in dreary hotel rooms that all resembled each other. “I’d find myself in Bluefield, West Virginia, running a couponing test, or setting up a soap display in Mason City, Iowa. I can still see the rooms. Every one is in a concrete building two stories high, there’s an old iron bed with a bare light bulb dangling over it, a big black radiator hissing in the corner, and if you had your own bathroom, the toilet wasn’t running and the tub was stained with rust from a leaky faucet. Well, in those days I didn’t drink, and the only other place besides a bar in these towns was the used-book store. They were all over the country, and I’ll bet I’ve been in ninety percent of them. Most of them are gone now, but they were wonderful. Every book dealer I met was an interesting person. I’d talk to them until they closed, and at the end of the night I’d buy a book.”

  Once Board began taking his wife with him on business trips, he began buying secondhand guides to cities and regions of the country that had been produced by the Federal Writers Project under the sponsorship of the Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1939. Though most of the 6,600 unemployed writers, journalists, editors, and researchers who worked on the WPA American Guide Series were unknown at the time, their ranks included such names as John Cheever, Studs Terkel, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright, Conrad Aiken, Samuel Putnam, Katherine Dunham, Frank Yerby, Loren Eiseley, Nelson Algren, and Margaret Walker. First editions of the books they produced have become increasingly collectible in recent years (Pantheon Books published new editions of several WPA guides during the 1980s).

  “We were buying them because we used them,” Board said. “I don’t know if I have all of them or not, but I’ve got at least five hundred different titles, a lot of them in multiple copies. This Idaho guide here, I paid seven-fifty for it; I just saw it at a book fair for one hundred fifty dollars. There’s an unopened box out in the garage that has twenty-five copies of The Minnesota Arrowhead Country guide in it.”

  But why would he buy twenty-five copies of the same book?

  “Why else? It was a good deal. They were remaindered. I only paid a dollar apiece for them.”

  When Board went to work for Standard Brands in the early 1950s, he began working in New York City. “I did a lot of advertising and public relations, and for a time there I was trying to get a powdered milk business off the ground, and nobody was interested. So one of the things I had to do was make my case to the newspaper writers, and I met the food editor of the New York Times, a woman named Edith Asbury. Well, I found out she was married to an author named Herbert Asbury, so I started collecting him. Nobody collects Herbert Asbury. Not then. Not today. I ended up with about twenty books by Herbert Asbury, and one day Edith said to me, ‘Gee, you know, Herbert would love to sign them for you.’ So he came up to my office one day, and I had them all there under my desk, and he signed every one.”

  Board walked over to a shelf and pointed out books with such titles as Carry Nation, Sucker’s Progress, The Gangs of New York, Up from Methodism, The Barbary Coast, Ye Olde Fire Laddies, The Tick of the Clock, and The Devil of Pei-ling. Every one was signed by Herbert Asbury and dated March 30, 1954. A few carried warm inscriptions, others just contained the man’s name. “He ran out of juice after a while,” Board explained.

  Other author collections were started and pursued with similar vigor—Lafcadio Hearn, Norman Douglas, Mary Webb among them. “I don’t buy books to read,” he admitted. “I don’t read any of them, really, it’s the chase I enjoy, the challenge. That’s what I was doing in business, I was chasing these companies. Then I got interested in a private press in Portland, Maine, Mosher Press. They did about five hundred books, and I have all but three or four. And then I kind of got interested in epitaph books.”

  About the same time he put together the definitive Herbert Asbury collection, Board bought a copy of Dante’s Inferno printed in white ink on purple paper. The book, in Italian, was published in the early 1800s. “I got it because it was different,” he said. “And I guess that’s when I started buying unusual things. Then I found a book that was purple on green, then I got a book shaped like a buffalo head. Here’s one over here in the shape of a shield.” He picked up a book written in a totally unfamiliar language. “You ever heard of the Deseret Alphabet? It was an alphabet invented by the Mormons in the 1860s. They printed four books in this language. Some lawyer found this in the basement of a temple in Salt Lake City. Can anybody read that language today? I’d love to find out.”

  In 1954, a book written by Walter Hart Blumenthal titled Bookmen’s Bedlam showcased the same kind of “oddities” Board was collecting. A book shaped like the state of Georgia, a heart-shaped volume, an atlas five feet nine inches tall, books salvaged from sunken ships, books bound in skin, all sorts of bizarre books. Blumenthal, a Philadelphia writer and collector, had exhibited his oddities in libraries and had even appeared on television. Board was impressed and wrote the man asking if he wanted to sell the collection. He promptly received an itemized list and replied with an offer; two years later he acquired the books. “The man was getting along in years, and he was keeping them in a bank vault, so I guess I came along at the right time.” In tribute, Board has collected all the known writings of Walter Hart Blumenthal.

  As his two hundred-year-old house began groaning under the weight of so many books, Board began to worry about dwindling storage space and the possibility of structural damage, perhaps even personal injury to himself or to his wife. “You probably aren’t old enough to remember anything about the Collyer brothers,” he said with a laugh. “But I’ll bet their place in New York didn’t look a whole lot different than this.”

  Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Collyer were urban hermits who lived in a dilapidated brownstone at 2078 Fifth Avenue in Harlem during the first four decades of the twentieth century. They were quintessential hoarders who surrounded themselves with books, newspapers, magazines, and a cache of “junk” that included seventeen pianos, an engine block from a Model T Ford, and the jawbone of a horse. The windows were boarded up and there were no electric, gas, water, or sewer connections operating in the house. The Collyer brothers were said to have withdrawn from society in the 1930s when Homer, a lawyer, lost his sight and became paralyzed. Langley, a courtly man who once aspired to be a concert pianist, went out at night to get food and reading material for the two of them.

  The Collyer brothers became front-page news on March 21, 1947, when police responded to an anonymous telephone call and found Homer seated in a chair on the second floor, dead of starvation. Langley was nowhere to be found, and for a time it was feared he might be wandering the streets in a daze. As a room-by-room search of the building entered its third week, hundreds of people crowded the street outside. “He’s right up there, looking out of the window and laughing at you,” a spectator joked. But on April 8, Langley was found in a “mazelike tunnel” beneath an avalanche of newspaper bundles, wedged in a booby trap. He died, apparently, while carrying food to his brother.

  A month after the Collye
r brothers were buried, city health officials condemned their house as a hazard to public safety and issued a demolition order. By that time, more than 150 tons of debris had been hauled off to the municipal dump. Asked once by a neighbor during one of his nighttime walks why he was filling the house with so much reading material, Langley Collyer explained that he was collecting newspapers, magazines, and books for the day when Homer might regain his sight.

  “I certainly like to think I have a little more focus than they did,” Board said. “I also believe that unlike them, I have figured out a way to ease the space problem.” He paused by an old bureau with three large drawers, and opened one. “There are three thousand miniature books in here.” He pulled out a handful of volumes, then headed into another room that contained ten thousand more.

  Board said he was considering several ideas about the disposition of his various collections, but had yet to make up his mind. A short-term solution would be to sell off the duplicates, especially the WPA Guides, which have a devoted following among other collectors. Board said that Yale had recently expressed an interest in acquiring the oddities, but that he was having too much fun with them to consider anything that drastic.

  “The beautiful thing about my specialty is that it’s endless. There’s no bibliography, there are hundreds of curious things in the world, and I’m the one who decides what is strange and unusual. I’m also the one who says when it’s complete. I probably am the only person in America who collects these things, which is a plus. The only problem is that I have an awful time getting dealers to give me some quotes. I have written letters all over the United States explaining what I am looking for, and very seldom does anyone respond. One of them did write back a few years ago and said, ‘I don’t deal much in nutty books.’ ”

  12

  Continental Drift

  Ask any book dealer in the United States which antiquarian book fair is the most successful, and unhesitatingly you will be told the three-day extravaganza put on every February in California. Other fairs are held frequently throughout the nation, but this is the big one, so big that Los Angeles and San Francisco alternate as host city. As many as ten thousand collectors—most of them paying fifteen dollars each just to get in the door—attend, and they go to buy, not merely to browse.

  “California is where the new money plays,” is one theory put forth by Marcia McGhee Carter, a partner with author Larry McMurtry in Booked Up, an antiquarian bookstore in Washington, D.C. She was expressing a mild complaint heard often among some booksellers and collectors that a major chunk of the rare-book action has moved away from the traditional power centers on the East Coast. “New money is happy money,” Carter explained, “and happy money is more free.”

  Regardless of whether the money is “new” or “old,” California has been the home of many distinguished collectors for most of the twentieth century. Henry Huntington’s determination to build a great library on the West Coast began an unbroken tradition of major acquisitions that has continued quietly but quite effectively at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, where millions of dollars are routinely spent for important manuscripts. At this writing, Harvard University is home to 12.8 million volumes, more by far than any other university library system anywhere, but the combined holdings of the University of California at Los Angeles and Berkeley are not far behind. Nicolas Barker, retired keeper of rare books at the British Library, once suggested that Lawrence Clark Powell, the great developer of special collections at UCLA during the 1940s and 1950s, was the outstanding “American institutional collector” of his generation. And while the East Coast may claim Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, Hans P. Kraus, and John Fleming as twentieth-century booksellers of distinction, Californians can point with justifiable pride to the late Jake Zeitlin of Los Angeles and the late Warren Howell of San Francisco. Significantly, the two monumental book auctions of the 1980s, those offering the libraries of H. Bradley Martin and Estelle Doheny, featured collections built over many years on a grand scale in New York City and Los Angeles. Each realized more than $35 million in sales, with the Doheny actually getting the edge by $1.7 million.

  Just a few blocks from Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills in Los Angeles is the Heritage Book Shop, a flashy enterprise at 8540 Melrose Avenue perfectly suited to its surroundings. A Rolls-Royce is often parked in the driveway, and the mock Tudor building itself, once a fashionable funeral home for the film colony, makes an emphatic statement about the clientele it serves. When the current owners acquired the property in 1986, they installed a stained-glass window that pictures a Renaissance printer at his press, attended by two smiling assistants. A close look shows the helpers to be none other than Lou and Ben Weinstein, who moved to California from Brooklyn in 1963 and started out in business as “junk dealers” (their phrase) in another part of town. The brothers can joke now about their humble beginnings because they are acknowledged to be the highest-grossing antiquarian booksellers in the United States.

  Lou Weinstein has vivid memories of his first uncertain months in business, and he became especially animated when he recalled for me the day Peter Howard of Serendipity Books came into his shop and asked if there were any works around by William Faulkner. Neither Lou nor Ben had ever heard of the writer before, which seemed to please Howard enormously. For the next three hours, the savvy dealer from Berkeley carefully sifted through their stock of four thousand volumes, finally setting aside fourteen novels. “He left our complete run of Reader’s Digest condensed books behind, all our cookbooks, and all our fix-it books, but he did give us twenty-seven dollars for the things he took,” Lou said. “We thought that was pretty good, because it was twenty-six thirty more than what we paid for everything, and he didn’t even ask for a discount. We decided right then and there we were in the book business to stay.”

  A few months later, another customer came in and looked through four boxes Lou Weinstein had “weeded” out that morning to discard with the trash. “New arrivals,” he muttered to the man, who selected eight titles and paid the asking price without murmur or hesitation. “This experience somewhat unnerved me,” Weinstein recalled, “because he had just purchased my garbage. I quickly and quietly returned the balance of the four boxes to the shelves.”

  All that, Lou Weinstein quickly emphasized, was in 1963, his first year in business “in another part of town.” Three decades later, he and his brother routinely publish handsome catalogues, they have shelves filled with exceptional books, they operate a bindery, and they employ a large professional staff. During the Richard Manney sale at Sotheby’s in October 1991, Heritage accounted for more than $1 million worth of purchases; within two and a half years, Weinstein had spent at least that much to acquire privately from Manney the two principal lots that had not met their reserves at the sale, the Eliot Indian Bible and the first four folios of Shakespeare. Concerning the handful of cynics who suggest that he needs to learn more about bibliography, Weinstein shrugged. “I have professional cataloguers working for me. I have a complete reference library. What we don’t know we look up. This is a business just like any other.”

  For its thirtieth anniversary catalogue, issued in October 1994, Heritage Book Shop offered fifty-two impressive items, every one a high spot of world literature, including works by Joyce, Shakespeare, Shelley, Proust, and Blake. Prices ranged from $4,500 for a 1643 English Bible to $135,000 for an incunabulum printed by William Caxton, England’s first printer. “In our early years of book selling, we only dreamed of trading in items such as A. S. W. Rosenbach, H. P. Kraus, and others discussed in their memoirs,” Ben and Lou Weinstein wrote in the foreword.

  Beverly Hills and Bel Air, two compact communities nearby, feature an arresting variety of opulent residences, many set snugly behind high fences and monitored closely by complex security systems. These people collect with quiet aggressiveness, and many of them do their business with the Weinstein brothers. During a stroll through the Weinsteins’ elegantly appoi
nted shop, which in its earlier role as a mortuary hosted the funerals of Rudolph Valentino, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable, Lou Weinstein was particularly proud of an upstairs room set aside for what he calls “collection development.” “This is for people who have an interest in a particular author or a particular field, but have no time to pursue it.” He indicated a shelf that featured a number of important Joseph Conrad first editions, including Lord Jim, The Children of the Sea, and Nostromo. “I started this a while ago for a customer who came in and said, ‘I want the first editions of Conrad. Call me when you have them all.’ This kind of arrangement represents a small percentage of my business, but it probably is the wealthiest. You could say it takes the fun out of collecting, but I’m in business to sell books. I am not foolish enough to tell someone, ‘I am not going to do this.’ What I am going to say is, ‘I will help you in any way that I can. I wish to accommodate you.’”

  Weinstein then pointed to another collection in various stages of “development,” one that was being assembled for a client “who is suddenly one of the wealthiest people in the world,” a client so important and so well known that “believe it or not, we cannot even use his name in the shop. I have about six customers like this whom I can only refer to by code. I cannot even use their initials. We have some people who actually say, ‘You do not have permission to say my name, not ever.’ This man is one of those people.”