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

  In an erudite examination of the quirky “disposition to possess books” first published in 1862, John Hill Burton identified a basic trait common to most collectors: “It is, as you will observe, the general ambition of the class to find value where there seems to be none, and this develops a certain skill and subtlety, enabling the operator, in the midst of a heap of rubbish, to put his finger on those things which have in them the latent capacity to become valuable and curious.” Burton explained how the culling of important items from piles of refuse benefits society. “In such manner is it that books are saved from annihilation, and that their preservers become the feeders of the great collections in which, after their value is established, they find refuge; and herein it is that the class to whom our attention is at present devoted perform an inestimable service to literature.”

  Speaking at dedication ceremonies of the James Ford Bell Collection of voyages, travels, and early commerce at the University of Minnesota in 1953, Theodore C. Blegen surveyed the treasures newly installed around him and echoed those sentiments almost precisely: “For all time these courts will attest [to] the zeal and knowledge of private collectors who, looking to horizons beyond the rewarding personal satisfactions of collecting, have made contributions of inestimable value to scholarship.”

  The late Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach of Philadelphia, the twentieth century’s best-known bookseller, described the symbiosis that exists between libraries and bibliophiles. “It is a wonderful and magnificent thing that the gathering of books in this country is in the hands of leaders of her industries, the so-called business kinds, and not in the hands of college professors and great scholars,” he wrote during the height of the golden age of American collecting from 1870 to 1930. “It is paradoxical, but true, that not a single great library in the world has been formed by a great scholar.”

  While preservation and the service of scholarship are happy products of collecting, they by no means are the only compelling forces. “I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an old book is a rebirth,” the German critic Walter Benjamin wrote. “This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles with the element of old age.” What is evident in the exercise—and it has been apparent for centuries—is that the closer people get to the source, the closer they feel the wonders of creativity. Storytellers, philosophers, scientists, adventurers, artists, economists, politicians, diplomats, theologians, even evil despots like Adolf Hitler, articulate their thoughts between hard covers. To see and handle a first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species or Newton’s Principia Mathematica is to touch ideas that changed the way people live. To own a book inscribed by William Faulkner or a letter written by George Washington, to have the manuscripts of literary works in variant drafts is all the more meaningful because they bring people that much nearer to the generative process. “I have known men to hazard their fortunes, go long journeys halfway about the world, forget friendships, even lie, cheat, and steal, all for the gain of a book,” Dr. Rosenbach noted. Book collectors, he stated categorically— and he was including himself—“are buzzards who stretch their wings in anticipation as they wait patiently for a colleague’s demise; then they swoop down and ghoulishly grab some long-coveted treasure from the dear departed’s trove.”

  When Seymour Adelman, another Philadelphia bibliophile, was urged by friends to allow private publication of some diverting talks he had given over the years on his love for literary arcana, the affable bachelor agreed, but with reservations. “My main anxiety is that I am now in danger of losing my franchise as a collector,” he wrote in an author’s note to The Moving Pageant, published in 1977. “I was put on this earth to collect books, not to write them. It has taken me fifty years to gather my collection, now forever happily in residence at Bryn Mawr College, and I would like to add to its shelves from time to time. Hence my concern. If, because of this book, my integrity as a collector is sullied by authorship, who knows what dire consequences will follow. Will any self-respecting rare-book dealer ever let me into his shop again? Will I be permitted to attend auction sales? Will I be expelled from the Philobiblon Club?”

  In a 1950 speech to the Bibliographical Society of America, Clifton Waller Barrett, builder of an extraordinary collection of American literature now housed at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, described the temperament of what he called the genus Collector: “First of all, he must be distinguished by his rapacity. If he does not covet and is not prepared to seize and fight for every binding, every issue and every state of every book that falls even remotely within the range of his particular bibliomania, treat him as the lawful fisherman treats a nine-inch bass; throw him back—he is only an insignificant and colorless offshoot of the true parent stock.” Robert H. Taylor, whose exceptional collection of English literature was given to Princeton University, offered this observation at a meeting of the same organization four years later: “It must be clearly understood that, generally speaking, the collector is sentimental, illogical, selfish, romantic, extravagant, capricious.” Citing an example from his own experience, Taylor recalled a heated argument he once had with a bookseller over some long-since-forgotten matter. “The trouble with you,” the dealer finally shouted in frustration, “is that you’re like every other God-damned collector,” an assessment that needed no further elaboration, and which Taylor accepted as a compliment: “I don’t ask for any better tribute.”

  Praise of a more formal sort issued forth at the dedication, on June 15, 1923, of the William L. Clements Library of American History on the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan. The donor, a Bay City industrialist who had competed on the open market with Henry E. Huntington and J. Pierpont Morgan for some of his most cherished acquisitions, expressed no maudlin wish about being buried alongside his books or having any statue erected to his memory. What mattered most to him was maintaining “the integrity of this library” and keeping it “carefully guarded” from those who have “no sentimental or aesthetic interest” whatsoever in rare books. “This day and hour mark the conclusion of a book collector’s career,” Clements said in his remarks, and then placed on the record his pointed expectation that students “who have not exhausted the facilities of the General Library” be denied access to his treasures. “May we use with the greatest care these materials which can never be replaced! Let those who have no valid right to examine or handle, be content with a look; and for those who would make the examination, may not facsimiles serve the purpose?”

  By contrast, a comprehensive collection of English and Continental literature, Bibles, Americana, incunabula, and science formally given to Williams College in western Massachusetts just two weeks later was assembled from the outset with vigorous undergraduate use in mind. Alfred C. Chapin, a devoted Williams alumnus, was a lawyer, financier, and political power broker who served as a speaker of the New York State Assembly and as the last mayor of Brooklyn, New York. In 1915 he began buying such highspots as an Eliot Indian Bible in its original binding and a perfect 1465 copy of Cicero’s De Oratore, but he never regarded these purchases as his own property. Instead of sending the books directly on to Williams immediately, he kept them in a Manhattan vault for eight years until assured that the college had a suitable building in place to receive them. By the time he died in 1936, some twelve thousand rare volumes had been given to his alma mater. “Every item was purchased directly for Williams,” the Chapin Library’s first custodian, Lucy E. Osborne, wrote, “and behind every item was Mr. Chapin’s personal choice.”

  The late Philip Hofer once recalled a trip he made to Japan in 1956 on behalf of Harvard College, where he is regarded as the greatest book donor in the long history of the institution. On the customs bill of lading for the items he had bought was written, in Japanese: “With no disrespect to the gentleman making this declaration, with an apparent sincerity, the Imperial Customs Service cannot see how he can use, or understand, so many books he cannot read. Will the Japanese consul in Bo
ston please take notice, and if he sets up shop in America please ask for the usual Japanese export tax.” Hofer then told how he often enjoyed asking groups of collectors which man was happier, “he that hath a library with well nigh unto all the world’s classics, or he that hath thirteen daughters?” The happier man, he would then answer, is the man with thirteen daughters, “because he knoweth that he hath enough,” while the compulsive collector, whose days are marked by “happy, as well as greedy moments,” is never satisfied. “At other times he suffers agonies of jealousy, frustration, and humiliation. He would not be a true collector if he didn’t.”

  Seymour Adelman, Clifton Waller Barrett, Robert H. Taylor, William L. Clements, Alfred C. Chapin, and Philip Hofer were “true collectors” in every respect, but nobody ever accused them of being hopelessly out of control. On the other hand, the University of Kansas readily admits that its finest natural history collections exist solely because of the “galloping bibliomania” that consumed the two men who formed them. The Ralph N. Ellis Collection of Ornithology, which includes unparalleled holdings of material executed by the British ornithologist and artist John Gould (1804–1881), “stands out for the impassioned, almost violent haste of its creation,” according to Robert Vosper, who for many years was the director of libraries at the University of Kansas; the other collection, a massive concentration of books on botany and related sciences, was gathered by Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick, a man whose craving became “so cancerous that he could hardly forgo anything with print on it.”

  Born to wealth and social station in 1908, Ralph Ellis, Jr., began collecting birds’ eggs and nests at the age of twelve and ornithological books at fifteen. He continued with a dedication so furious that in 1940 his mother had him committed to a California sanitarium out of fear that his activity would totally deplete the family fortune. Diagnosed as “mentally ill but not insane,” Ellis finally secured his release and resumed the hunt with even greater energy. Sometime in 1944, he began casting about for an institution willing to provide permanent quarters for his collection. Frustrated by these efforts—and uneasy about staying in California any longer than necessary—Ellis orchestrated a dramatic departure. In February 1945, two freight cars were hastily loaded with his 65,000 books, pamphlets, manuscripts, plates, and illustrations, and were hauled out of Berkeley, California, on a train bound for New York, his native state.

  While the boxcars were rolling east, Ellis received an “offer of hospitality” for the collection from a boyhood mentor who by then was director of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas. Immediately won over, Ellis had railroad officials wire an urgent message to their engineer: Stop the train in Lawrence, Kansas, and leave the cargo there. The only compensation Ellis insisted on in return for donation was a proper home for his beloved bird books and an office for himself. The University of Kansas happily complied. Six months later, Ellis died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven, alone in a hotel room. “Thus finally Ralph Ellis’s shattering life has come into peaceful concentration and focus,” Vosper wrote in 1961. “Only a touch of genius, I believe, and an obsessive touch of the madness of books could have produced so extensive and so well integrated a library within so brief and chaotic a lifetime.”

  Unlike Ellis, Thomas Jefferson Fitzpatrick collected quietly and without fanfare for more than half a century. A native of Centerville, Iowa, he served as official “field collector” for the Iowa State Historical Society from 1903 to 1907, an assignment that gave professional discipline to what eventually became his driving preoccupation. In 1913, Fitzpatrick accepted a teaching position in the botany department at the University of Nebraska and moved to Lincoln, where he lived for the rest of his life. Because he never earned a Ph.D., the highest rank he ever achieved was assistant professor, and the most he ever earned was $1,800 a year. Still, his acquisitions proceeded with determination. To generate additional income, he sold duplicate copies in his collection to numerous institutions. He also wrote scientific articles and monographs, which were published in various technical journals.

  In November 1950, the eighty-two-year-old bibliomane had a brush with the law when city officials cited him for violating local building codes in his house. The maximum permissible load limit for multilevel dwellings was forty pounds per square foot; an inspector had estimated that Fitzpatrick’s house was supporting more than eight times that weight—about ninety tons altogether, most of it in books. The action was later dismissed on grounds that the collector’s “rights of privacy” had been invaded.

  On March 28, 1952, five days shy of his eighty-fourth birthday, Fitzpatrick died in his kitchen on an army cot that he used as a bed, “surrounded by a clutter of books and papers, nestled against a potbelly stove.” His immense library was turned over to a secondhand dealer for dispersal; by a stroke of luck, Robert Vosper heard about it and went to Nebraska for a viewing. “The house was full of books, packed with books, all thirteen rooms,” he recalled. “Books were stacked under tables, piled up on beds, heaped in bundles on both sides of the stairways, pressed three and four deep in bookcases and onto ceiling-height shelving that lined every room and all hallways. Every room was awash with teetering piles of books, tied bundles of pamphlets, and stacks of magazines, so that we had to inch our way along trails hacked into a bookman’s jungle.”

  The university limited its selection to ten thousand books, pamphlets, and periodicals dealing specifically with botany and the history of science, which were some of the best-represented subjects—especially Carolus Linnaeus and the eighteenth-century American naturalist C.S. Rafinesque. Other collections dealing with Americana, the Midwest, the Mormon church, and American travel went to the Kansas City Public Library; what remained was sold piecemeal. Even though Fitzpatrick’s activity as a collector had been restricted by his modest means, he was a “persistent searcher and a shrewd judge of a bargain,” according to Vosper. And his “foresight in collecting unpopular subjects” gave him a decided edge on the competition. Indeed, Fitzpatrick’s interest in local history and American science “antedates by a generation the widespread popular and academic concern with those same fields of collecting.”

  Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis was once described in a 1949 New Yorker profile as an American country squire “with chiseled features, English clothes, an authoritative air, an inquiring, skeptical eye, a cultivated and witty conversational style, a collector’s mania, a flawless worldly charm, independent means, and a strong sense of scholarship.” For all these admirable qualities, it was the “independent means” that enabled “Lefty” Lewis to devote his adult life to securing every available scrap of material and artifact related to the eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole (1717–1797), youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole and the author of thousands of diverting letters. Lewis acquired with such single-mindedness that once he outbid his own agent at an auction. Ultimately, he claimed ownership of 2,500 letters written by Horace Walpole.

  Lewis assimilated his subject so completely that he named his house in Farmington, Connecticut, the Lewis Walpole Library and furnished it with tableware, lamps, artwork, and jewelry that once graced Strawberry Hill, his hero’s home in England. He also underwrote and edited the Yale University Press edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, a mammoth project that consumed forty-seven years of his life and filled forty-eight volumes. When Lewis died in 1979, his large Colonial home was given to Yale University with the stipulation that his library be maintained there intact.

  In books with such titles as Collector’s Progress, One Man’s Education, and Horace Walpole’s Library, Lewis wrote about his obsession, yet his most penetrating statement of purpose came in a passage he wrote for a speech that was never delivered. It is preserved among his papers and includes this observation: “The loyalty of collectors draws them to each other; they are a fraternity joined by bonds stronger than their vows, the bonds of shared vanity and the ridicule of non-collectors. Collectors appear to non-collectors as selfish, rapaciou
s, and half-mad, which is what collectors frequently are, but they may also be enlightened, generous, and benefactors of society, which is the way they like to see themselves. Mad or sane, they salvage civilization.”

  There is no question that Wilmarth Lewis salvaged Horace Walpole from literary oblivion and gave him what amounted to a new life. Other instances of a collector causing renewed scholarly interest in a forgotten figure are rare, but by no means unknown. Probably the most striking examples of recent years involve one British bibliophile, the late Michael Sadleir, who began collecting first editions of the works of nineteenth-century English and American writers of fiction at a time when “he had hardly any serious rival,” according to the London bookseller Percy Muir. “To mention only two very outstanding, but very different authors, Melville and Trollope were very nearly forgotten by both readers and collectors,” Muir wrote, and it was Sadleir’s “enthusiasm that was almost entirely responsible for the beginning of the revival of interest in them.”