Six hours after Judge Vietor handed down his sentence, the late-July temperatures were still in the high nineties when Ray Cornell, a Des Moines private detective, took me to a local hangout called The Viking. Shortly after Blumberg’s arrest, Cornell had been hired by Dr. Blumberg; his investigation had disclosed the government’s frequent use of Kenny Rhodes as a paid informant. Blumberg also was released to Cornell’s custody while awaiting trial, so they saw each other every day for more than a year.
We ordered a couple of beers and an Iowa specialty the detective had been insisting I try ever since we met at the trial in January: a deep-fried pork tenderloin sandwich lathered in spicy mustard and garnished with thickly sliced onions. Inevitably, the subject came around to Judge Vietor’s sentence earlier in the day; we agreed that laws had been broken and people had been hurt, but the case still required some perspective.
“Nothing happens in a vacuum,” Cornell pointed out. “Stephen is a clever thief and he deserves to pay a price for what he did. But I have a lot of trouble with those people who want to see him hang. Maybe I’m coming at it from a different direction, but then most of the cases I work on are murders, rapes, wife beatings, drugs, and child abuse, so I have a hard time making Steve out to be something that he isn’t. He stole valuable books, but he treated them with respect, and they are going back to where they belong. Harm was done, but maybe now these libraries will pay a little more attention to their security. It may be true that he is one of the great cultural robbers of our time. But he is not an evil man.”
Cornell paused for a deep pull from the long-necked bottle before offering one more thought. “Look, there was no violence, okay? There were no drugs and nobody was robbed of their life savings. Which makes me wonder: What kind of time is the savings and loan crowd doing? Those are federal cases too. How come I don’t see any of those guys going off for six years with Steve Blumberg?”
With his left hand, the private detective placed the beer on the table in front of him and in a swift motion reached deftly under his right arm.
“See,” he said, patting the empty space. “No gun. I haven’t carried my little nine-millimeter in seven months. Come Monday, the shoulder holster gets strapped on and I go back to the real world.”
14
Carpe Diem
Four large folios bound in crimson morocco spun into view on a revolving dais at the front of Sotheby’s main auction gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “Lot One Hundred, the Shakespeares,” John L. Marion announced from the old mahogany pulpit he used as a rostrum, and paused meaningfully before proceeding with what would become the most consequential book transaction of the 1980s.
The bidding opened at $500,000 and quickly advanced in $50,000 increments to $1 million. Paddles had been raised throughout the room, but at $1.5 million just two contestants were left, one of them—a wealthy Japanese businessman, it was later rumored—bidding on the telephone. The other, a man who had made a fortune by brokering advertising time on television during the 1970s and 1980s, was seated in the center of the hall next to his agent.
“One million five-fifty against you, sir,” Marion said, and pointed at Richard Manney, the man in the center of the hall. Manney nodded yes. “One million six-fifty at the desk,” the auctioneer countered; Manney nodded once again. The telephone bidder affirmed $1.75 million and Manney raised the stakes to $1.8 million. When an attendant confirmed the telephone bidder’s advance to $1.85 million, there were ten seconds of absolute silence.
“Think about it,” Marion finally said in a soothing voice, and was rewarded by the nod that closed the contest. With the ten percent buyer’s premium added, Richard Manney had just agreed to pay a little under $2.1 million for the First Folio of 1623, the Second Folio of 1632, the Third Folio of 1664, and the Fourth Folio of 1685, all bearing the same title, Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. When the Garden Ltd. sale ended the next day, 308 books had found new owners, and $16.2 million, an average of $52,815 per lot, had been spent, 12 percent of that for the seventeenth-century books known collectively as the First Four Folios of Shakespeare. They had cost Haven O’More a mere $200,000 when he bought them from Hans P. Kraus in the late 1970s, but these were the freewheeling 1980s, and this turned out to be the last big sale of the decade.
“In my heart of hearts I knew I had to have them,” Manney said on the telephone shortly after the sale, and when we met later in New York he explained his goals as a collector. “The great books of all time, okay? The ‘high spots’ if you want, call them what you will, but these are the greatest books in the world, and that is what I am after.” Certainly he had paid more than twice the upper estimate, but he offered a bit of advice about what it takes to collect at his level. “When you are bidding on the best objects, I don’t care what they are, you usually pay more than what everybody expects it will take. And you have to be prepared to do this. You have to go in with that understanding, because the best always commands a premium.”
Ten seconds does not sound like such a long time, but that night in the gallery, with so much at stake, it felt like an eternity. “It wasn’t the price,” Manney insisted. “It was, ‘Do I really want these books that badly?’ Because, frankly, there were some other Shakespeares out there on the market, nice ones, for a lot less money. But my thinking was, these are the best copies we will see in my lifetime, and I either get them now or regret it forever.”
Manney also was interested in acquiring an exceedingly rare copy of Don Quixote at the Garden sale, but dropped out of that contest at $650,000. “I knew the Shakespeares were coming along, so I decided to hang loose. The estimate on the Cervantes was two hundred thousand. I knew it would go higher than that, but when it passed six hundred fifty thousand, I figured, let the people who really want it that badly have it. There’s always another day.” After he withdrew, the bidding for that book kept on going for another $1 million before being hammered down to Arthur Freeman of Quaritch Ltd., representing an unidentified Spanish collector. A few months later, I asked Freeman how the presale estimates could have been so far off. “Two people wanted one book very badly,” he explained. “It’s as simple as that.”
Not long after the sale, I asked John Marion about the clever way he had drawn one more $50,000 bid out of Dick Manney. “I looked down, and I could see him shaking his head, so essentially, he was done,” the auctioneer recalled. “I was looking right at him, and he shook his head no, so for all intents and purposes, that was it. I looked away, and that’s when I came back and said, ‘Think about it.’ I gave him that moment for himself. I just knew he was going to bid one more time. I had this other bid on the phone, and I was certain he would bid again. That’s why I do what I do. It’s my instinct.”
A year before he bought the Shakespeares, Manney was the anonymous buyer of a previously unrecorded copy of Poe’s Tamerlane, a little book that made headlines when a commercial fisherman was reported to have found it buried beneath a pile of agricultural tracts in a New Hampshire antiques barn and bought it for $15. Manney had no serious competition that night, just the reserve established by Sotheby’s as the minimum amount it would accept for the “black orchid” of American literature; he paid $198,000.
Before his marriage in 1963, Manney enjoyed trying his luck at various table games in Las Vegas. Once he and his wife, Gloria, became collectors, however, his casino play ended. “I just had no desire to shoot craps or play baccarat once I got involved in art, furnishings, antiques, and books,” he said. “I found that the auctions satisfy my taste for gambling quite nicely. I get all the action I can handle at a big sale. The hunt is everything. I go in there ready to do battle, and my heart just starts to pound if there’s something we want. The tension, the anxiety—I love it. I won’t bid on something unless we’re really going to own it, because I try to get what I go after, without being ridiculous. Up or down in the price range means nothing, because you have to have the object.”
Once Dick and Gloria Manney began collecting
in the 1960s, they fed each other’s enthusiasm. Manney estimated that during the height of their activity they were spending between $5 million and $6 million a year on their various hobbies. “We’re building several specific collections,” he said during our first interview. “I’m building a major book collection of some of the great high spots in world literature. We’re building a collection of American Federal furniture, and we’re putting the finishing touches on our American paintings collection. Then we’re always buying objets d’art. We’re always buying little things, big things—just things that strike our fancy. If I’m not buying something, my wife is. We’re always out, she’s in the shops, I’m walking up and down Madison Avenue, we’re both looking. Dealers call me up all the time, and a day of the week doesn’t go by where we don’t add something. We must buy four or five hundred things a year.”
He described himself as an entrepreneur who started out “with sixty dollars in my pocket,” a “kid from the streets of the Bronx” who made it big in the advertising business. A phrase in vogue during the 1980s was “disposable income,” meaning money that people could spend on diversions like books, paintings, and antiques. “I detest that expression,” Manney said. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as disposable income. Disposable means there’s money that you don’t really need and that you’re willing to throw away, that what you are doing with it is unnecessary. I believe strongly that what my wife and I have done is necessary.”
The downside to this passion for beautiful things, Manney added, is that “the collection owns us, we don’t own the collection. There are times when we don’t even leave the house. I have the most sophisticated security system imaginable, and yet there’s always somebody there. It’s a great responsibility. You have to worry about taking care of the objects, restoring the objects, conserving the objects. They must always be protected and insured, be taken care of by a curator. For the books at least, I am the curator.”
• • •
On May 17, 1991, a year and a half after Richard Manney bought the Shakespeares, I was in New York to attend the Stuart B. Schimmel Collection of Book Arts sale at Christie’s. During a lull, the New York bookseller Bart Auerbach asked if I had heard the news: “Dick Manney is selling his library.”
As we spoke, an impressive selection of Manney’s books was on display a few blocks away at the Grolier Club. The members there would never allow an exhibition of material about to be sold, I said; it would give off an unfavorable impression of showcasing a person’s goods. “Check it out,” Auerbach replied, and returned to the sale. I asked around, and sure enough, not only was Manney selling his books, he had caused a minor uproar by announcing his plans at a dinner meeting of the Grolier Club when the books were already being exhibited. “I find it unspeakably vulgar,” a woman who had been a member for many years said. “I feel used,” a former club president added.
When next we met, Manney seemed genuinely sorry about the feelings he had bruised, but insisted that the timing of his announcement was coincidental. “The club invited me to exhibit the books a year ago. But a year is a long time and my decision to sell the books came quite suddenly.” The decision, he went on to explain, was caused by the recession, which had been dragging on interminably and was “just killing” his business. “My profits from the business cannot sustain our collecting habit. I am selling my books because I’m afraid to sell anything else. There’s no way I can get the value back on the antiques that I can get for the books. So if I have to sell anything, I’ve got to sell the books. I can always start another library.”
I also learned from Manney that he had been given a line of credit for whatever purchases he might make before bidding at the Garden sale. “Never in the history of the world have I borrowed a nickel to buy anything for my antique and art collections,” he said, “but I was given a year to pay for the folios. I had to give them so much money at certain periods during that twelve months. And that is the only deal that I ever made in my life to buy books.”
Manney bought the Shakespeares on November 9, 1989. When he described for me his arrangement with Sotheby’s, nineteen months had elapsed and he still owed the auction house “a million and change, a million one or a million two.” Apparently, he had begun to suffer major cash-flow problems well before he decided to disperse his library. “I need money to pay Sotheby’s back. That was my first motivation. But then I said, ‘Things are tight. I can only draw so much out of the business, so I’ll sell all of the books.’ The collection’s worth, I don’t know, seven million bucks, take a number. I never intended to keep the books forever anyway, I already told you that.”
Manney had in fact mentioned during our earlier interview that his wife and he felt that the library ultimately should return to the marketplace. “I believe books should be circulated,” he said. “Paintings are one of a kind, they’re unique, and when they are really special, they belong in a place where people can see them. When a rare book goes into an institution, you have to be a scholar and you have to get special permission to go in and see it. Very rarely are they ever on display. Don’t get me wrong, it is proper that certain books go into institutions. I just feel that because my wife and I give mostly everything else we collect away, I should return something to the people who are going to love them and enjoy them and visit with them the way I do.”
Manney acknowledged he was allowing the auction house “to take the million two off the top” of the proceeds. But, he said, “this is very important, okay? Read my lips. I am not selling the library because this is the only way to satisfy Sotheby’s. If that were the case, I’d pick a few items and just sell them, and that would take care of that. But I’m not going to cut the heart out of the collection and cheat the public. If you’re going to sell something, let people come and buy and be offered the extent of what you put together.”
Still, “the larger fact of the matter is that I could use some money right now. As collectors, we spent all our liquid income on our passion. I am selling the books because they have held their value. The paintings and the antiques, the way this economy is going, if we sold any of them right now, we’d take a real beating.” Manney stressed over and over how he had “to get liquid” again. “What am I going to get liquid with? Something I’m going to take a major hit on, or something that will return its value? I’m a successful businessman. Since I was twenty-two years old, I’ve been in business for myself. I’ve got enough smarts to know that if I’m going to sell anything, I’m going to sell what has maintained the value. Should I go and sell my Childe Hassam, which is probably one of the three finest Childe Hassam paintings in the world? If I were to sell that now, I’d deserve to have my head examined.”
The recession was not entirely to blame for his troubles, he admitted. “We all are in command of our own lives. I’m not a victim of any third party. I’m a victim of myself. I’m in command of my own life. I simply have to raise some money.” Quoting Mike Todd, the late Hollywood producer, he said, “‘I am not poor. I am temporarily out of funds.’ I feel the same way.” He saw no contradiction in disposing of his library and keeping the art. “My wife and I give most of our art away. We have two collections with our names on them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, another at the Art Institute of Chicago, our Rococo Revival furniture is at the Winterthur in Delaware. But as for the books, I have an obligation to the next generation of collectors. I have earned the right to make that statement.”
In 1991, Harry N. Abrams published a book on the Gloria Manney Collection of Miniature Portraits on Ivory deposited at the Metropolitan. After an exhibition in New York, the paintings were shown at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. In 1986, the Manneys gave the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, seventy-one pieces of furniture built by the nineteenth-century German-born cabinetmaker John Henry Belter and provided funds for their installation and conservation. “I admire the Manneys tremendously,” Mrs. Pauline L. du Pont Harrison, honorary trust
ee and daughter of the museum’s founder, Henry F. du Pont, said. “They have been very generous to our museum. The furniture they gave fits in perfectly here because it extended our coverage. I feel very strongly about them.” As a member of the Winterthur board, Richard Manney offered “very wise vision and an intelligent viewpoint,” she added. “I felt from the start that he would help us open our museum to the world. He knows a great deal about business, and he gave us sound advice on how we could get a commercial program for the museum started. Richard and Gloria have been tremendously helpful. I am devoted to both of them.”
On October 11, 1991, the major players again gathered at Sotheby’s. Richard Manney was in an upstairs booth at the back of the room, pacing; nearby stood Diana D. Brooks, president and chief executive officer of Sotheby’s American operations. The books about to be sold were Manney’s, and this time it was not the titles that were important, but the numbers. The library brought a little under $4 million for 314 lots, with high prices spent for important works of Jack London, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, and Oscar Wilde, as well as the King James Bible and a copy of Bacon’s Essayes. Lou Weinstein of Heritage Book Shop in Los Angeles accounted for $1 million of the $3.9 million spent, paying a third of that for Charles Dickens’s autograph manuscript of The Haunted Man and The Ghost’s Bargain. One gem of the collection, the dedication copy of Huckleberry Finn, sold for $99,000, well above the high estimate of $80,000. The inscription on the front free endpaper reads:
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 65
