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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Karpeles explained that his fervor was inspired by nothing less than a midlife epiphany, a revelation that came in 1978 when he was forty-two years old and visiting the Huntington Library in San Marino with his wife, Marsha. “We looked in an exhibit case and we saw something that we could not believe was there, something we felt belonged in the Smithsonian Institution,” he said. “It was a pass that President Lincoln had given to one of his bodyguards the night he was killed. We asked some questions and we found out that this little pass is nothing, that there are documents changing hands all the time that would make you faint. Right there, I decided I would go into this, and I would go into it with a vengeance. I would see how many of these great documents I could get before people realized what they were selling.”

  Karpeles began to pore over catalogues from dealers and auction houses, and before long he had agents bidding for him at sales all over the United States and Europe. “What we saw were documents like the Emancipation Proclamation and the Declaration of Independence of Peru, original, handwritten drafts of great documents, and people were selling them!” If people were willing to sell, Karpeles was eager to buy, and he emerged as a buyer who competed successfully with the most conspicuous manuscript collector of the 1980s, Malcolm Forbes, the New York publisher who died in 1990.

  The Karpeles strategy was remarkable for its simplicity. “We went out and we tried to purchase every single thing that looked important to us. We looked at the catalogues and marked off everything we wanted, and if there was something we wanted, we kept on bidding, no matter what. For four years, we bought every major document that came up, every single one. We just kept on bidding until everybody else dropped out. We figured that if other knowledgeable people were bidding, then the document must be worth at least the amount of money they were willing to spend. All we had to do was outlast these other people, and it would be ours.”

  Often called the “underbidder principle,” this method assumes that true value is established by an open competition in which several people bid on an item that only one of them can get. The underbidder is the last person who drops out, thereby determining what price the victor will pay. There are a number of pitfalls to this tactic, as Karpeles readily admits. One is that several people who do not know very much about a particular item can find themselves blindly following each other’s lead. A more serious danger is that when someone is willing to buy an article “at all costs,” word often gets out, encouraging others to “run up” the tally out of spite or self-interest. “I don’t doubt for a second that my purchases affected the market,” Karpeles said. “There came a point where I had to impose limits on what I was willing to spend. I do not buy everything that comes up anymore. My competitors have to know now there are times when I will drop out, and they will be left with things they may not want at the prices they will have to pay.”

  Though the number of documents in his collection is immense, Karpeles stressed he is not overly interested in “getting every piece of paper that is up for sale.” Instead, he chose to concentrate on “anything that is important,” a flexible guideline that has given him tremendous latitude. The day we talked, he had brought a selection of manuscripts from his downtown vault to illustrate this point. There was a draft copy of the Bill of Rights; a papal decree signed in 1183 by Pope Lucius III proclaiming the sacred duties of the Knights Templer in the Holy Crusades; a proclamation signed by George Washington on October 3, 1789, declaring the fourth Thursday of the following month to be a day of Thanksgiving; and a document signed by Martin Luther in 1532 approving terms offered by Emperor Charles V that recognized the Protestant movement.

  When Karpeles finished showing me those items, he went off and retrieved a few more. He then handed over one of the most quoted documents of the American Revolution, a letter written by General George Washington at his headquarters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on December 29, 1777. Starting with the simple address “Gentlemen,” the commander proceeded to ask the Congress for immediate aid, complaining that his soldiers were “barefoot and otherwise naked.” It is a quotation now found in countless history books.

  “I got this at a small auction at Swann Galleries,” Karpeles said. “I told Bart Auerbach, my agent, to just go over there and don’t even look at the thing, just act dumb, I don’t even care if it’s fake or not, just keep cool. There was a low estimate on it and I didn’t think anyone else knew what it was. But then all of a sudden in comes the secretary of Malcom Forbes. Forbes usually went to these sales himself, but I guess this time he didn’t want to arouse any suspicion. It starts off around two thousand dollars, something real low, and it goes up, and up, and up. Around thirty thousand the secretary starts to hesitate, and it was there that Bart said he felt he had her. She finally gave up around fifty-five thousand dollars.” Karpeles was vague about the limit he gave Auerbach— “under one hundred thousand or something”—but quickly added that he would have been “heartbroken” if he had failed to get the letter.

  The next document Karpeles showed me was the constitution of the Confederate States of America, not one of the hundred copies initially printed from the original version, but the actual holograph copy written by General Thomas R. R. Cobb of Georgia on forty-one leaves of light-blue paper and dated February 27, 1861. “Isn’t that something that should be in the National Archives?” I asked after a long silence. Karpeles smiled. “You would think so,” he said. “But it is here.”

  For almost three quarters of a century, this draft of the Confederate constitution had been on deposit at the University of Georgia in Athens, placed there in 1908 by Cobb’s descendants, who had retained ownership of the document. “We assumed, after so many years, that it had been given to us,” Mary Ellen Brooks, curator of rare books at the university, told me later in a telephone interview. “The heirs were the true owners, and it turned out we had it all that time on loan. We still have the permanent constitution of the Confederacy. The one in California is the provisional constitution. Needless to say, we would very much prefer to still have both.”

  Karpeles heard about the availability of the document through a bookseller. “I was told that the owner walked into the university one day and said, ‘I’m afraid my family would like our constitution back.’ And they said, ‘What do you mean, your constitution?’ He told them, ‘Look in your file, it’s only on loan. It’s been on loan all these years from our family.’ So then they asked him, ‘Well, why do you want it back?’ And the man said, ‘We need the money.’ ”

  The owner agreed to give the university time to raise money to purchase the document, either from the state or private subscription, but those efforts fell short. “That’s how I heard about it,” Karpeles said. “I heard through a dealer that they were looking for donations. I didn’t think about donating it, but what I did tell them was, ‘Listen, why not just sell it to me. I will take very good care of it, and we will let you exhibit it every so many years.’” Karpeles declined to disclose how much he paid for the Confederate constitution or to identify the individual who offered the document for sale. “I agreed to keep those details confidential,” he explained. Other sources I consulted did disclose, however, that the document had been consigned to the Wilmington, North Carolina, bookseller Thomas Broadfoot, who offered it for sale in 1982. General Cobb’s descendants were named in a three-page catalogue description of the item as owners, and an asking price of $200,000 was listed.

  The constitution that remains at the University of Georgia, dated two weeks later than the one owned by Karpeles, also has a history of uncertain custodianship. According to the National Archives, the document known as the Permanent Constitution of the Confederate States of America, written in script on vellum and ratified on March 11, 1861, became the property of the federal government at the end of the Civil War, but never reached Washington. When approached by Union troops in April 1865 at a railroad depot in Chester, South Carolina, the Southern officials charged with turning the document over took fright and fled
, leaving it and other records behind. Felix G. De Fontaine, a local newspaper publisher, rescued some of the abandoned papers and kept them for eighteen years. In debt and strapped for money, he sold the Permanent Constitution to a woman named Mrs. George W. J. De Renne in 1883. The document remained the property of her family until 1939, when the University of Georgia bought it for $25,000.

  Because public comment about the sale of the Cobb family constitution was kept at a minimum, the transfer took place with little fanfare. “The president of the American Manuscript Society brought it here on an airplane from Georgia,” Karpeles said. “It was in a briefcase strapped to his wrist. I was shaking with excitement. I was dizzy for several days after that.” The idea of giving the document to the state of Georgia as a gesture of goodwill was never considered. “If they really wanted to keep it, they could have bought it,” he said. “I’m not that type of a philanthropist.”

  On December 7, 1990—Pearl Harbor Day—a matter of similar delicacy arose when Karpeles bought a two-page letter written in 1787 by Ethan Allen, the Vermont patriot who commanded the Green Mountain Boys during the American Revolution and captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British. Addressed to Guy Carleton, the lord governor of Quebec, Allen’s letter boldly hints that Vermont might consider becoming a Canadian province if denied statehood in the recently formed American Union. “I belong to this Republic, which is not connected with the United States of America,” Allen wrote.

  Four years later, Vermont became the fourteenth state admitted to the Union, but some observers have suggested that Colonel Allen’s northern inquiries may have bordered on treason. Though not conclusive either way, the letter nevertheless is a primary document of considerable historic significance. Before the sale, Christie’s estimated a value of $15,000 to $20,000 on the lot, but competition was stiff, and Karpeles had to pay $41,800 before he was able to get the letter. When we spoke again a year later, he confided that he had been willing to go as high as $80,000 if necessary.

  Shortly after Karpeles had been identified as the new owner of the Ethan Allen letter, he received a telephone call from Madeleine M. Kunin, then the governor of Vermont. “I didn’t know who she was,” Karpeles said, “but she had met my wife at some function for Brandeis University,” an institution whose fund-raising activities both women actively supported. “The governor informed me that Vermont was the underbidder on the Allen letter, and she asked if I would consider giving it to her state as a gift.” While he was sympathetic to Governor Kunin’s request, Karpeles said he felt the item belonged in his comprehensive collection of Early American documents, and opted to keep it in California.

  Karpeles owns a substantial number of items relating to his native state as well, a collection he calls the California archive. It includes more than twenty letters written by Fra Junípero Serra, founder of many California missions during the eighteenth century. “You can feel the presence of these great minds,” he said. “We’ve got documents that actually have fingerprints on them. They have spilled ink on the paper, and you can see their fingerprints. I have a document where George Washington was writing something, and his fingerprint is right there. But what you really see on things like these are the ideas, which give you an even closer tie, and sometimes you can see where people changed their minds. They will cross out one thing and write in something else, so you can get an idea of what their first thoughts were. Because so many of these manuscripts are drafts, you can see how they changed from the time they were written to the time they were printed.”

  Karpeles explained that he likes “to stick with the monumental documents, though sometimes I fill in around them.” To illustrate his point, he picked up a draft copy of the Bill of Rights, which guarantees every American “life, liberty, and property.” “Well, as I’m sure you know, the issue of slave ownership came up, and the whole idea of property became pretty sticky, so they changed ‘property’ to ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ You can see history right there on that piece of paper.”

  David Karpeles is the largest owner of single-family housing in Santa Barbara County, most of it property he bought during the 1960s with the idea of renting and selling to the Baby Boom generation that was about to come of age. “I am first and foremost a mathematician,” he explained, noting that before he became a businessman he taught at Westmont College and Santa Barbara City College nearby, and worked in the computer industry. “You could just see the huge classes in the schools, from the ninth grade down, and before long you knew this whole mass of young people would be graduating and inundating the housing stock. I just knew the prices were going to go up, and that this was the time to get into it. It seemed pretty straightforward to me at the time. So I kept investing in houses. I couldn’t buy them any faster than I did because I knew where they were going. Pretty soon I had so many houses that I had no time to teach.”

  By the end of the 1980s, Karpeles said that buildings he paid $10,000 and $20,000 for were worth upward of $250,000 each. Though the recession of the early 1990s did not stop his collecting, economic conditions did force him to sell about fifty houses to generate the capital he needed to continue nourishing his library. “It’s no different from buying the houses,” he said. “The prices I have to pay for some of these things may sound high, but in a few years they’ll be considered cheap. The Ferdinand and Isabella letter we got a few years ago? We paid Hans Kraus fifty or seventy thousand for it, I don’t remember exactly, but when the five-hundredth anniversary of the Columbus voyage was coming up, I felt that whatever it was they were asking, it was a bargain.”

  What happens to all this material is of course the salient question. “The Karpeles Manuscript Library will exist in perpetuity,” he said. “I am a mathematician, and I have it figured out precisely.” A Santa Barbara institution bearing that name was established in 1983, and has since expanded to include exhibition halls in New York, Tacoma, Washington, D.C., and Jacksonville, Florida.

  “You ask is this an obsession? Yes. I’m sure this is an obsession,” Karpeles said. “But is that bad? You have to be obsessive, I think, or it just doesn’t work.”

  Exactly when a person becomes a book collector has been debated often through the decades, usually without any consensus being reached. One theory holds that the defining moment occurs when a person buys a book with the prior certainty that he will never read it, though other views are less cynical. “So subtile [sic] and so infectious is this grand passion that one is hardly aware of its presence before it has complete possession of him,” Eugene Field explained a century ago, which suggests that he had no idea whatsoever when he crossed the line.

  For a Northern California couple whose shared passion to own beautiful objects was once confined to furniture and decorative-art works, the motivation to acquire books can be traced to a day in 1965 when they bought an inexpensive facsimile of the most celebrated finepress volume ever published, the Kelmscott Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, a product of the Kelmscott Press, founded in 1890 by the English poet and designer William Morris. “It was a modest copy, not even full size, but there was something totally magnetic about it,” Sanford L. Berger recalled one summer morning in his retirement home, a comfortable house on the Monterey Peninsula with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean.

  “What I noticed right away was the striking similarity the artistic designs had to the drawings and carvings my father used to make, especially the detailed borders and the flowing decorations. My father just loved doing that kind of relief work, and this is what I saw when I opened that book.” Sandy Berger’s father, Samuel Berger, moved to California from Romania in 1904 at the age of nineteen, to become the most successful wood carver in San Francisco, producing decorative works that still adorn some of the better-known landmarks in the city, such as Mission Dolores, Grace Cathedral, and the Bohemian Club. “As far back as I can remember, my father had me sitting on the bench watching him carve. My three sisters and I got to do all the stencil markings for him, and he taught me to draw. But he
always said, ‘Don’t be a carver, be the architect; the architect decides where the carvings are going to go.’”

  Berger not only became an architect, he married one, an alliance that nurtured aesthetic interests that have been maintained for more than half a century. Sandy and Helen Berger met in 1941 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “We both went there to study under Walter Gropius, who had founded the Bauhaus School, and his associate, Marcel Breuer. They were in the United States as refugees from Nazi Germany. It was largely through their influence that our first apartment was furnished in pure International Style furniture, the modern things that were just becoming popular, and that got us started as collectors.” Before long, they were buying Art Nouveau pieces as well.

  Though the Bergers assembled an excellent reference library to document their holdings, they never considered themselves book collectors until Sandy Berger decided one December day in 1965 to skip lunch and visit Warren Howell’s bookshop on 434 Post Street in downtown San Francisco. “My intention was to go out and find a single Kelmscott Press book that was authentic,” he said. “I had no idea what would be in there; I just knew the place by reputation and went in to look around.” What happened in Howell’s shop that day was the first of several encounters Berger would experience over the years that have reinforced his belief in the magic of serendipity. “This collection is more than luck,” he said, and recalled a detailed exhibition catalogue published by the University of California Press in 1984. In the preface to that catalogue, Berger wrote that at the risk of being judged “mystical or superstitious,” he often feels “as if the collection willed itself” into existence.