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

  In the instance of Chef Louis Szathmary, the restaurateur and collector extraordinaire of all things pertaining to food and cooking, careful arrangements were made well in advance, and at the time of his death several tons of books and culinary artifacts had already been turned over to half-a-dozen research institutions throughout the country. “The books I give away now, they stay in my heart,” he told me on the occasion of our first meeting in 1990, a conviction he shared with Xavier Marmier, a congenial scholar who treated the booksellers of Paris to a grand feast in gratitude for helping him build an important library that passed intact to his countrymen in 1892.

  The noted San Francisco psychoanalyst Haskell Norman, on the other hand, was of the firm belief that every collector deserved a fair shot at enjoying beautiful books just as he had, and like Edmund de Goncourt a century before him, directed that his remarkable library of rare books on science and medicine be sold at public auction. In 1998, Dr. Norman’s library of twenty-five hundred volumes of uncommon significance and rarity was sold by Christie’s in three sales, the $18.6 million realized establishing several records in the process.

  As time went on, there were other milestones, and I kept track of each one, amazed, quite frankly, by how they continued to validate the sense of purpose they had articulated so eloquently for me when I first encountered them, and how they had secured their place in the unfolding continuum. Among the many collectors, booksellers, and librarians you will meet in the pages that follow, the list of those no longer with us now has grown to include Forrest J. Ackerman, Leonard Baskin, Fred J. Board, Sanford L. Burger, Mary Hyde Eccles, Raymond Epstein, Howard B. Gotlieb, Kathleen Gee Hjerter, Irwin T. Holtzman, Peter B. Howard, Carlton Lake, Bernard F. McTigue, Ralph G. Newman, Walter L. Pforzheimer, Lawrence Clark Powell, Reynolds Price, Warren Roberts, William E. Self, Ellen Shaffer, and Betsy Beinecke Shirley.

  Among the departed also is the man who called himself Haven O’More, as enigmatic in death today as he was during his lifetime, when he was known variously as Haven Moore, and Richard H. Moore, his name at birth. Some new facts concerning O’More’s murky background came my way after publication of the first hardcover edition, a few of which I included in the preface to the 1999 paperback, especially those pertaining to a sworn deposition he gave in a Wichita, Kansas, civil suit brought to contest the terms of his late father’s will, and to questions he answered at that time about the nature of his collecting.

  That fascinating postscript notwithstanding, the account of O’More’s haughty quest to be acclaimed “the world’s greatest book collector”—and to have done it with $20 million of another man’s money—remains an instructive example of unchecked bibliomania that was distinctive to the period. For those interested in the mechanics of following paper trails, I offer as a bonus the “To Have and to Have No More” chapter as a case study of investigative journalism carried out in the face of determined opposition—or what in the days of Watergate was known as “stonewalling.”

  Unchanged here, too, is the chapter on the massive book thefts of Stephen C. Blumberg, whose trial in United States District Court in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1991 remains the only instance on record in which criminal bibliomania was defended in an American courtroom with a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. As I reported in the 1999 preface to the Owl paperback, Blumberg was released from federal custody in 1996, only to be arrested again the following year on state charges of removing antique fixtures from abandoned Victorian buildings. He has since steered clear of further difficulties with the law, and is said to be living somewhere in the Midwest—and staying out of libraries.

  No news, in that instance, is indeed good news. The same can be said at this writing with respect to the continued well-being of William H. Scheide, owner of what has been said for several decades to be arguably the finest private library in the world, and subject of the “Infinite Riches” chapter. Housed in its own suite of rooms at Princeton University, Scheide’s alma mater, the collection includes among its high spots a copy of every known imprint produced in the fifteenth century with metal type made by Johannes Gutenberg; only King George III of England and George John, second earl of Spencer, could make a similar claim. Scheide observed his ninety-eighth birthday in January of 2012; on the occasion of his ninetieth eight years earlier, he announced that the magnificent library begun in the 1880s by his grandfather would pass at his death to Princeton, a bequest widely assumed for many years, but until then never publicly affirmed.

  It is a pleasure to report now, too, that another senior citizen of the rare book world profiled in these pages, the estimable Los Angeles bookseller and lifelong mountaineer Glen Dawson, marked his ninety-ninth birthday in June 2011, and that the shop begun by his father Ernest Dawson in 1905 continues in business, operated these days at 535 North Larchmont Boulevard by Michael Dawson, his nephew.

  The same cannot be said for another Los Angeles landmark, the Heritage Book Store, which at its height in 1995 was the highest grossing antiquarian book business in North America. The continued onslaught of the Internet on how books are bought and sold was cited as one of many factors that led Lou and Ben Weinstein to close the business in 2007. Lou, the younger of the brothers, retired to Arizona; Ben later opened a downsized version of the store a few miles away, and at this writing serves an upscale clientele in an elegant bricks and mortar setting.

  Among the many quotable quotations you will encounter in these pages, one of my favorites is the explanation the California railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington gave for what drove him to create what became one of the world’s great research libraries. “Men may come and men may go, but books go on forever,” he said more than a century ago to the legendary bookseller A. S. W. Rosenbach. “The ownership of a fine library is the surest and swiftest way to immortality.”

  While immortality undoubtedly was Huntington’s motivation, other bibliophiles you will meet here have reasons of their own—dynamics that help explain why so many of them keep on collecting, even when it seems they have made their eternal statements, and have nothing more to prove to anyone about the logic of their passion. Two cases in point are Michael Zinman, whose “critical mess” approach to collecting seventeenth and eighteenth-century American imprints on a massive scale is discussed in the “Mirror Images” chapter, and Charles L. Blockson, creator successively of not one—but two—Afro-American collections that bear his name in separate universities.

  The $8 million agreement Zinman reached with the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2000 for his collection called for a cash payment of $5 million over five years, with the remaining $3 million of the appraised value given to the institution as a gift. In return, the research library founded in 1732 by Benjamin Franklin became, in an instant, the second largest repository of books, pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemera printed before 1801 in what is now the United States of America.

  Driven as much by the “action” of collecting as he is by the acquisitions themselves, Zinman wasted no time pursuing new opportunities, focusing since then on a variety of other interests, including a hybrid gathering of vintage constitutions produced as bylaws for various social and civic organizations, numbering when we spoke early in 2012 at close to sixteen hundred items, proof positive that once a collector, always a collector.

  The creation of the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University in Philadelphia set the stage for an even more dramatic example of the phenomenon. Opened in 1984 with about twenty thousand graphic and printed materials of every description he had acquired since early childhood—the incentive for his distinctive “madness” is outlined in the “Destiny” chapter—Blockson continued to gather materials over the next twenty-three years, with holdings at the time of his retirement in 2007 as curator of the Temple collection numbering 150,000 items, possibly as many as half-a-million, Blockson told me when I contacted him for this preface, “if you count every photograph or post card or broadside in the collection individually.”r />
  So there is that monument to his collecting, certainly, as an accomplishment for the ages; but a year after his status at Temple became curator emeritus, Pennsylvania State University opened the Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora, an entirely new subset of related items “that had been gathering in my basement,” Blockson said modestly of the fifteen thousand materials he had entrusted to the care of his alma mater.

  While there is some replication with the Temple holdings, and though it is decidedly smaller, according to Sandra Kay Stelts, curator of rare books and manuscripts at Penn State, “it is really a distinctive collection, with materials on the passage period from Africa to the New World known as the diaspora that give it an individuality all its own. It is a very popular resource among undergraduate students, and we are thrilled to have it.”

  Blockson told me simply that the hunt is relentless, and the pleasures unending. “We never stop, do we, Nick?” he said when I asked him if he ever felt that enough was enough. “No, Charles,” I replied, “I guess we never really do.”

  —Nicholas A. Basbanes

  North Grafton, Massachusetts

  14 February 2012

  Prologue

  A brisk wind Midwestern farmers call the Alberta Clipper swept through the frozen cornfields of Iowa one January morning, creating a windchill factor many degrees below zero. The old Cadillac bucked whenever a gust struck, but Stephen Blumberg maintained control of the vehicle. A million miles of pavement had passed beneath this self-described “rescuer of the past” over the previous twenty-five years, so it was not surprising to learn that he had always found the road a tonic for his anxiety. On this particular Saturday, Blumberg and I were headed southeast on Highway 163 for Ottumwa, the scene, in a sense, of the crime he stood accused in U.S. District Court of committing on an unprecedented scale. With a verdict in his Des Moines trial still four days away, and with court in recess for the weekend, he had agreed to talk to me candidly about his life as the most enterprising biblioklept of the twentieth century. The red-brick Victorian house we were going to visit would be empty of books, of course—government agents had removed the rarities he stole from 268 libraries throughout North America and placed them in a secure Nebraska warehouse—but Blumberg was buoyed nonetheless by the prospect of seeing his home for the first time in ten months.

  Ottumwa is a community of 25,000 best known, perhaps, as the hometown of Radar O’Reilly, the popular television character from M*A*S*H. It was also the childhood home of Edna Ferber, who in a 1939 autobiography recalled with outrage an anti-Semitic episode suffered by her family just before the turn of the century. The noted author of Show Boat and Giant held Ottumwa “accountable for anything in me that is hostile toward the world in which I live,” and made a declaration that easily could have applied to Stephen Blumberg fifty years later: “Whatever Ottumwa means in the Indian language, it meant only bad luck for the Ferbers.”

  Once inside the city limits, we stopped for fuel at a Texaco station. As I paid for the gasoline and Blumberg waited in the car, the clerk said to me, in a flat monotone: “Stephen Blumberg.” He nodded toward the self-service pumps near the idling Cadillac, and then jabbed at a photograph on the front page of that morning’s Ottumwa Courier; it pictured a smiling man with a thick mustache, unruly hair, and wide, bulging eyes. “That’s the guy with the library on Jefferson Street.” I left quickly, but the point had been made; the house on Jefferson Street was the place where the wiry man outside had gathered an astonishing cache of contraband books.

  Extensive press reports had suggested that Blumberg’s haul was worth up to $20 million, a figure that had made him a minor celebrity in the criminal world. He told me that while undergoing a pretrial psychiatric evaluation at a federal medical facility in Missouri, he received what amounted to a royal summons from a Mafia don. Paramount on the mobster’s mind was why a thief with such impressive “inside talent” as Blumberg obviously had would “waste” his skills on books instead of “things that are more liquid” like gold and diamonds. “I never took the books to sell,” Blumberg explained to the man. “The idea was to keep them.” Hearing that stunning admission, the mobster abruptly ended the meeting. “He decided I was really crazy,” Blumberg said.

  We both laughed, but the discussion suddenly turned serious when Blumberg asked with unmistakable urgency: “Nick, do you think I’m crazy?” When we spoke, Stephen Carrie Blumberg stood accused in United States District Court of transporting stolen property into Iowa. His lawyers freely acknowledged that he had plundered libraries on a massive scale, so the central issue was not stolen books, but the state of his mind. The following week, twelve jurors would decide whether or not he should be sent to prison or found not guilty by reason of insanity.

  By the time of my trip to Iowa, I already had spent close to three years interviewing collectors, booksellers, and librarians throughout the United States in an attempt to understand the phenomenon of book collecting. I had browsed through countless second-hand bookstores, stopped at flea markets, gossiped at antiquarian fairs, attended important auctions in New York, and conducted hours of research in the stacks and archives of many institutions. Abroad, I had visited the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Pepys Library at Cambridge, the British Library in London, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Applying the techniques of investigative journalism, I had been studying a number of intriguing book stories that insiders had talked about openly, but that few could document. I had even found a title for my work-in-progress, one based on a description once used by Benjamin Franklin Thomas to characterize his grandfather Isaiah Thomas as a person “touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania.”

  To provide a context for this phenomenon, I wanted to weave the material I had gathered into a series of related narratives. As a connecting theme, I intended to show that however bizarre and zealous collectors have been through the ages, so much of our cultural heritage would be lost forever if not for the passion and dedication of these driven souls.

  Using the rich resources of Harvard University’s Widener Library as a base of operations, I read everything on book collecting that I could find, from the earliest derisive accounts written many centuries ago by Lucian and Seneca to the most current articles in that essential English quarterly, The Book Collector. Fresh insights on such notables as John Carter Brown, George Brinley, Henry Huntington, Estelle Doheny, and Frank Hogan were possible through examination of letters and papers on file at the Grolier Club in New York City, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, the Huntington Library in California, the American Antiquarian Society and the Boston Athenæum in Massachusetts, the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Watkinson Library in Hartford, and from oral histories maintained at the University of California at Los Angeles and Columbia University in New York. This information provided the structure for part 1, which was by no means intended to be an encyclopedic discussion of “book passion,” but a series of illustrative accounts.

  “What is Past is Prologue,” proclaims an inscription on a monumental statue outside the National Archives in Washington, D.C., a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Using this rich precept as both framework and guide, I was further determined to find today’s collectors, to talk about their craving for books, and try to grasp what impels them to acquire with such determination. Their stories are told in part 2.

  My journey brought me in contact with a breathtaking variety of riches. At the Huntington Library, I saw 5,300 fifteenth-century books, known as incunabula, stored two floors below ground level in an area called the outer vault. Behind a two-foot-thick steel door, in the inner vault, I handled the manuscript of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, a presentation copy of John Smith’s History of Virginia, and a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland given by the illustrator, John Tenniel, to the engraver, with comments by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) written inside. On various shelves we
re boxes of holograph writings by Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Burns, Charles Lamb, and many others. Before leaving, I opened a large 1472 copy of the first printed edition of Dante’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy.

  In a dazzling corner of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., I saw seventy-nine First Folios of Shakespeare’s plays, all lying flat, one shelf on top of another, like so many bars of gold bullion, and opened the copy numbered 1 to the title page signed in 1623 by the London printer Isaac Jaggard. A few hours later, when Peter Van Wingen took me into a small room at the Library of Congress where Thomas Jefferson’s books are kept, there was a reverential pause. “This is the Holy of Holies,” he said quietly. “For us, it begins with these books.”

  Everywhere I went, the dizzying cavalcade continued, and in each instance there was a tactile experience to savor and remember. At the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I held a double elephant folio of Audubon’s Birds of America. A few miles away, at the Boston Public Library, I opened one of the very first books printed in North America, a little volume known as the Bay Psalm Book. While doing research at the Newberry Library in Chicago, I picked up and admired several books printed in the fifteenth century by William Caxton, England’s first printer. Several months later, a California collector allowed me to do the same with his copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems. On the same West Coast trip, the curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum brought forth several exquisite tenth-century illuminated manuscripts from the Ludwig Collection and allowed me to turn the pages. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, I removed from a shelf the first copy of Newton’s Principia Mathematica to be brought to North America; at Cambridge University’s Magdalene College, I admired a volume of Samuel Pepys’s monumental diary; from the rare book stacks at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, came Herman Melville’s annotated copy of King Lear and the Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s personal copy of the U.S. Constitution. When the third-generation book collector William Scheide placed his copy of Johann Gutenberg’s Bible in front of me and invited me to touch where movable type had bitten into paper for the first time, I became lightheaded. A year later, a bookseller unable to attend a major sale in New York asked if I would handle her bids. Priscilla Juvelis authorized me to spend a quarter of a million dollars at Sotheby’s; I was successful in eight of the contests.