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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  This collection-in-progress consisted of twenty-one authors, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton among them. “The man came in one day with his wife. They said they had been married for twenty-one years, and they gave me a different author to mark each year of their marriage; they asked me to do a complete collection of first editions for each of these authors. There are no restrictions on the budget, which is the only way to do something like this. It may be two or three years before I get it all done. When it is finished, I will get in touch with them and arrange for the delivery. This man has never collected anything before. He has only been in my shop that one time, and I am sure that I will never see him again.” There are other customers who call and say they are building new libraries in their homes. “They want some nice rare books they can put up on the shelves. They give me the funds, I earn a profit, and sometimes I even keep the books for a while because it may be several years before they can come pick them up.” In 1994, Weinstein was said to be representing yet another “coded customer,” a “high-spot” collector whose acquisitions were believed to include the Eliot Indian Bible and the Shakespeare folios bought privately by Heritage from Richard Manney of New York.

  Weinstein was unfazed by the suggestion that some of his procedures sound more like interior decorating than book collecting. “In some cases it probably is,” he agreed. “Let me also say there is no disgrace in being an interior decorator, especially when so many of your customers live in Beverly Hills and Bel Air.” Indeed, ambience is as important an element in the Heritage Book Shop as the books that are offered for sale. “People would be uncomfortable walking into most used-book shops and spending five hundred dollars for a book. But they walk in here and they don’t feel uneasy at all because they expect to spend that kind of money in a nice place like this.” Lou Weinstein’s brother, Ben, pointed out that they keep the front door to the shop locked for a reason. “You have to ring the bell to come in,” he said. “It is intimidating in a way to ring that bell and have somebody come to the door. Once you’re inside, you almost feel obligated to buy something.”

  A couple of miles away, at 535 North Larchmont Boulevard, is Dawson’s Book Shop, possibly the nation’s oldest antiquarian operation still owned by the founding family. Opened by Ernest Dawson in 1905, the store is an institution, a place bibliophiles from throughout the world call on routinely when visiting Southern California. Though outwardly modest—the building is partially obscured from the street and easy to drive by without seeing—the Dawsons have counted among their customers Estelle Doheny, William Andrews Clark (1877–1934), and Thomas W. Streeter (1883–1965). For more than fifty years, Dawson’s has been operated by Glen and Muir Dawson, the founder’s sons, bookmen who are widely respected for their knowledge and expertise and are called on often for their advice and guidance. When the FBI needed someone to help sort out Stephen Blumberg’s book thefts, Glen Dawson testified as an expert witness at the Iowa trial.

  There is no lock on the front door during business hours at Dawson’s Book Shop, where poking through odd shelves is as much fun as making an unexpected find. There are fifty thousand books on view, in dozens of different categories. “I grew up wanting to be a bookseller,” Glen Dawson said one morning over instant coffee in his second-floor office. “It’s always been my life, it’s what I enjoy doing. I got started when I was a kid. When my father died in 1945, my brother and I inherited the business as equal partners. It never occurred to us to do anything else.”

  Dawson recalled the first time he met the countess, Estelle Doheny. “One of my earliest book-selling recollections is delivering a book to her on Christmas Eve, and because I was a delivery boy, she gave me a silver dollar.” Years later, he often acted as her agent at auctions. “She made it very clear that when she wanted something, she wanted it no matter what.”

  Dawson said that Thomas W. Streeter only visited his shop once, but that they did business together for many years. “He was a very satisfactory collector. If I wrote him by air mail, he wrote back by air mail. If I telegraphed him, he telegraphed me right back. And he would either say, ‘I’ll buy the book,’ or, ‘I want it on approval,’ or he would say, ‘I think your price is too high,’ or ‘I think your price is very fair but I just bought a copy two weeks ago.’ He would buy from me promptly, and he would pay promptly. If he wasn’t going to buy the book, he would tell me what he thought about it. He was just a perfect gentleman to do business with in every respect. He was interested in the first books printed in every state, and about every state in the country.”

  Of all the collectors he came to know, though, Dawson’s candidate for most memorable was an obscure postal clerk named Michael D. Hurley. “He never married, he never owned a car, he wore the same suit year in and year out, he lived in a small house that was rented, and the only furniture he had was bookcases,” Dawson said. “All his energy and all his resources went into buying books. He never once sold a book and he never stopped buying them.” A native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Hurley moved to California in 1930 when he was twenty-three. Because he had a secure job during the Depression, he was able to build his collection.

  “He volunteered to work Sundays and the night shift, which was just fine with all the other postal workers,” Dawson said. “He got a little more money that way, and he had the days free to look for books. He bought at auction and from dealers all over the place, people like Rosenbach, Maggs, and Quaritch. There were times he even did a little work for us as a shipping clerk. We would pay him something, but what he really wanted was to be here when private libraries came in so he could get first crack at them.”

  Though Hurley was guilty of hoarding, Dawson said he did collect with some purpose and direction. “He was a great reader of English literature, and there were authors he liked tremendously: P. G. Wodehouse, A. A. Milne, the Romantic poets. It’s true that toward the end of his life he was filling his place with lots of junk, and he had no plans to do anything with any of it. One of my people here used to kid him along a little about leaving the collection to him, but as far as Hurley was concerned they could bury him and the books together in the city dump. He died without a will and the books all went to the county administrator for sale at auction. We found out through his sisters that he had died, and we were able to pick out a couple hundred interesting things from the house and list them in a catalogue.”

  Dawson’s 477th catalogue, issued in August 1984, was devoted to the Hurley books they were able to acquire from the county administrator and sell on consignment. Among the items listed were an 1886 facsimile of the manuscript for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground that Lewis Carroll had inscribed to his sister, and an exceedingly rare 1820 volume in original boards of John Keats’s poems, including “Lamia” and “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Other titles included a fine copy of the 1846 edition of Herman Melville’s first book, Typee, the two-volume first printing of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and a “very pleasing large copy” of the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works.

  A biographical sketch in the catalogue described the condition of Hurley’s house when he was found dead of natural causes. “One room was abandoned when the piles neared the ceiling, and at some point a subsidence of books blocked the door from the inside, sealing the room off. He established an annex in the garage, where piles of loose books mingled with unopened purchases from local shops and parcels from overseas.” Stephen Tabor, Dawson’s cataloguer, who wrote the brief piece, concluded that Michael D. Hurley, postal clerk, had died alone among his stacks of books, apparently “having done all he could to take them with him.”

  Below Griffith Park Observatory in Hollywood Hills, not far from the string of giant letters that have been a landmark on the horizon for half a century, Forrest J. Ackerman keeps his garish collection of memorabilia and fifty-odd thousand books dedicated entirely to the greater glory of science fiction. A visit to the onetime film agent’s home is greeted with recorded
monster messages, and inside, hundreds of old movie props, ranging from dinosaurs and mummies to vampires and flying saucers, stand in odd alignment among the bookshelves.

  Ackerman has gathered these materials diligently for more than forty years, and his holdings are comprehensive. Paperbacks and pulp occupy equal space with hardcovers, and while rarity undoubtedly is present in abundance, the worth of the collection is in its scope. As Ackerman was pointing out curiosities in this unlikely sanctum in his vast basement, he stopped to withdraw an early book written by L. Ron Hubbard and inscribed to Ackerman. I saw that the page was a photocopy, and when I asked whether the original was kept in a vault for safekeeping, his eyebrows rose in amused disbelief. “Are you kidding? A collector offered me ten thousand dollars for it. The check cleared, and I got to make a copy for myself.”

  Ackerman said he would like to see his books kept together somewhere as a collection in the United States, and added that he had turned down serious offers from several parties in Europe. As bizarre as his collection may seem, it commands the respect of some professional librarians. “What Forrest Ackerman has amassed rivals the collection that we have, and our collection of science fiction and fantasy is considered the very best in any institution,” said Sidney E. Berger, curator of special collections at the University of California, Riverside, and editor of Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship, a publication issued by the American Library Association. “Our collection began in 1969 with the purchase of seventy-five hundred volumes from a collector named J. Lloyd Eaton. Since then, it has grown by ten times that number. I know some academics will turn up their noses when I say this, but it is the most frequently used collection in our library, not just by students, but by scholars from all over the world.”

  While Berger said he would like to have added Ackerman’s books to the university’s collection, prolonged negotiations he conducted to acquire them failed. “The problem is that Forrest Ackerman’s library comes with a lot of baggage. He wants all the artifacts to go with the books, and he wants us to build a museum to house them. It is extremely difficult for any institution to accept something like that. Not only will you pay a lot of money to acquire the skeletons and the monsters and the coffins, you will pay even more to take care of them properly year after year. We would very much like to work a deal for the books and documents, but we have to pass on the museum.”

  An additional difficulty was Ackerman’s insistence that a device for projecting three-dimensional holograms similar to the one used in the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland be installed. Here, it would be used to cast a lifelike image of the collector himself. “What Mr. Ackerman wants is to give guided tours of his collection through perpetuity,” Berger explained. Eccentric perhaps, but Forrest Ackerman in the flesh still welcomes visitors to his home to view the icons of fantasy, horror, and wonder, often by the busload.

  Many spooky tales have emerged from California’s movie studios over the years, but few can match the real-life horror story of the savings and loan scandal. One West Coast failure at least provided a tiny measure of comic relief when it was learned that a major book collection bought with depositors’ funds for the personal amusement of the bank president was worth much more than it cost.

  When the First Network Savings Bank of Los Angeles collapsed in 1990 with losses of more than $100 million, one of the assets seized by the federal government was the bank president’s private “toy”—the world’s preeminent collection of books, artifacts, and artwork on magic meticulously assembled earlier in the twentieth century by John Mulholland, a distinguished magician, historian, writer, and close friend of Harry Houdini. Upon Mulholland’s death in 1970, the collection became the property of The Players Club in New York. Fourteen years later, the material he had gathered with consummate taste was consigned to Swann Galleries for sale.

  When Carl M. Rheuban anonymously acquired the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts the following year for $575,000, he moved it to a section of Los Angeles known as Century City, and used bank funds to hire Ricky Jay, a well-known professional magician and respected bibliophile, as curator. Jay was given an office in Rheuban’s building, a staff of three assistants, and a generous budget with which he was expected to augment the archive. A long-range plan to move the library to new quarters in downtown Los Angeles was abandoned abruptly in April of 1990 when California banking regulators closed First Network.

  In its efforts to recoup some of the billions in losses brought on by the savings and loan failures, the Resolution Trust Company (RTC), the federal agency empowered to deal with the disaster, sold thousands of seized properties for a fraction of their cost. The case of the Mulholland Library, in an odd way, demonstrates how books not only retained their value during the worst recession to hit the country since the Depression, but in many cases appreciated dramatically. Early in 1992, the RTC sold the collection to Las Vegas magician David Copperfield for $2.2 million, more than twice the $850,000 Rheuban was reported to have put into it.

  Six months before news of the scandal broke, I talked with Ricky Jay in Boston. Our discussion focused largely on his own magic collecting, which is considerable and widely respected, and his writing. Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, his lively survey of “unique, eccentric and amazing” entertainers, “stone eaters, mind readers, poison resisters, daredevils, and singing mice” among them, was based in great measure on the collection he began forming in the 1960s when he was a youngster growing up in New York. In 1991, the William Andrews Clark Library mounted an exhibition that featured some rarities from Jay’s private library.

  Though the Mulholland Library was a matter of peripheral interest at the time of our meeting, the identity of the “anonymous owner” did pique my curiosity. “Let me say that the man is an amateur magician, and he loves magic,” was all Jay would say. The owner had never collected before, “but he does now; in an instant he acquired one of the major collections in the field.” Jay explained that the man bought the library shortly before it was scheduled to be sold at auction by Swann Galleries in New York.

  “It is one of the most famous magic collections in the world. The Players Club had tried to sell the collection quietly for a while, and when they couldn’t do that, they consigned it for sale, at which point I was brought in as a consultant. One day a man called from out of nowhere and said he would very much like to keep this collection together. After I met with him several times in L.A., he said he would buy it provided I become his curator. I wanted to make sure that I could continue to perform and write, and he said that was no problem. What is important is that this absolutely amazing collection was going to be broken up, and possibly even taken out of the country. That would have been tragic. And we prevented that from happening.”

  William Self ’s graceful bookplate features his initials in elegant script, and the distinctive border that encloses the letters—a television screen— suggests what has enabled the veteran film producer to assemble what is arguably the world’s leading collection of Charles Dickens books to be found in private hands. A native of Dayton, Ohio, Self moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s to act, and for seven years he appeared in such films as I Was a Male War Bride with Cary Grant, Red River and Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne, and Pat and Mike with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. A close friendship with Tracy and Hepburn developed, and it was honest advice from the great actor that persuaded Self to seek a career change. “Spence said that unless you were a star, acting was a lousy job.” Promptly turning to the production end of the business, Self put together a pilot for a series he proposed to CBS, called The Twilight Zone. That unqualified success led to many others, including numerous episodes of M*A*S*H, Peyton Place, Batman, Daniel Boone, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, plus several hundred “made-for-TV movies” and miniseries. Later projects included an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, and an enormously successful production with the actress Glenn Close for televi
sion, Sarah, Plain and Tall.

  “I owe it all to television,” Self said. From this brief discussion of his professional life the conversation turned to the extraordinary collection of Dickens titles his good fortune had enabled him to form. The condition was superb and the provenance matchless, but what distinguishesd these copies of A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, and all the others, twenty-three in all, was that each was a presentation copy; every one was inscribed and signed by the author. Self’s copy of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club had this inscription at the top of the title page:

  Hans Christian Andersen

  From his friend and admirer

  Charles Dickens

  London July 1847

  That book entered Self ’s library at a 1985 sale of the library of Paul Francis Webster, a Los Angeles lyricist who had died the previous year. Webster is best known for such Academy Award-winning songs as “Secret Love,” “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,” and “The Shadow of Your Smile,” and he had built what he described in 1971 as a “small, select library” of 180 items that spanned six hundred years of Western thought and culture. “I visited Paul in his house once and saw that book,” Self said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would one day own it.” Self never thought he would own copies of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane or the 1865 suppressed edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland either, but those two rarities are among his more notable possessions. “The Tamerlane in particular is a book I tried to get two earlier times,” Self said.

  Self ’s wife, Peggy, said she often traveled to auctions with her husband and readily allowed that she encouraged him to buy the books he wanted, though she made explicitly clear that she was not a collector herself. “I enjoy being on the fringe,” she said. “I am exposed to it. I am part of it. But I am not the collector, Bill is the collector, even though I have always been in full agreement with what he was doing. Bill sometimes will hesitate to buy, and I will encourage him to go ahead and do it. But I honestly have to say that at that particular point in our lives, had Bill bought that book for one hundred twenty thousand dollars, we would have had to put a mortgage on the house to get it.” Bill Self quickly added that even though he did not have the money when he first tried to buy a Tamerlane, “we had the assets; we could have done it. But we weren’t about to deny our children’s college education.” So, in that case, the decision was made to stop bidding. “The proof is that I didn’t buy it. I knew when it was time to quit.”