Art of Collecting

by nicholas A. Basbanes

A friend of mine recently acquired from an antiquarian bookseller a beautifully produced broadside that features an excerpt from a book I wrote in 2002 that expresses, in a few sentences, my considered conviction that every collector is at heart a storyteller, and that every collection is a narrative that reveals as much about the individuals who gather the material as it does about the the material itself.

W hat was especially fun about this piece of ephemera is that I had completely forgotten about it until reminded by Kurt Zimmerman, a Houstonbased, books-about-books collector to the extreme who has made a determined project of acquiring examples of everything I have committed to print, an exercise he pursues with dogged enthusiasm to the point that he contacts me whenever he turns up curiosities such as this, especially when they involves books I have inscribed to various people, to learn what I can tell him anything interesting about the relationship, if any, (since he also collectors what is known as “association” copies.) This is all very flattering, I readily admit, and I comply whenever I can; I even wrote about what it’s like to be an author who is collected with this degree of enthusiasm for Fine Books & Collections (No. 19:4, Autumn 2021).

It took a few seconds to get my bearings on this item, but once my memory banks were nudged, I recalled the occasion clearly. The handsome broadside had been printed by letterpress on fine paper by Bonnie Thompson Norman, proprietor of the Windowpane Press, in Seattle, Washington, in a run of about 250 copies as a keepsake for the Book Club of Washington to commemorate a talk I gave to the membership in 2006. I pencil-signed and numbered all of them in one sitting before setting out for a memorable meal at Elliot’s Oyster House on the waterfront. I believe I signed a few extras for the booksellers who had invited me to meet with the local bibliophilic community. I enjoyed myself, as I always do when mixing with kindred spirits, but tempus fugit, and this little interlude, and the broadside it engendered, had faded entirely from my consciousness.

I was genuinely surprised, too, to learn that the item had not only enjoyed a life of its own apart from the book it references, but that it has become a collectible item in its own right. As for the text itself, I was equally pleased to re-acquaint myself with a sentiment that I had expressed several decades earlier in Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book-Hunter of the 21st Century (Henry Holt, New York, 2002), and to conclude that I still stand by every word. Here is the quote, in full: n umerous libraries in the United s ta tes, I found, owe their very existence to collectors who have had the foresight to place their prize possessions in places where they will be preserved and enjoyed by future generations, and in many instances they established and shaped the focus of the very institutions themselves.

“ What some bibliophiles regard as a specialty, I like to think of as a theme. What some call focus, I call context. Such fine distinctions may well be little more than matters of taste, since both argue strongly for the development of a central plan, yet they support my considered view that every collector is a storyteller, and that every collection a form of narrative, a perspective that raises the process of forming a personal library above the pointless exercise of accumulation without direction. If you are inclined to accept this proposition, it follows that the plot line that emerges is as much a reflection of personality and purpose as it is of life experience.”

I had written Among the Gently Mad as a follow-up to my first book, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Henry Holt, New York, 1995), which shocked everyone, myself included, when it sold out its modest first printing of 6,000 copies on the first day of publication in August 1995, and once some very strong reviews started to come in, did the same in even greater numbers with two succeeding printings. Over the next two years the title went back to press five more times before finally going into paperback in 1998; an updated edition, and an e-book version, were released in 2013, and as the book approaches its thirtieth birthday in 2025, remains very much in print. It goes without saying that robust sales are always welcome, but even more satisfying, for me, is the knowledge that the book has retained its appeal all this time, and that 1,450 libraries throughout the globe still report having copies in their collections, according to the WorldCat database, and that dozens of colleges and universities that teach history-of-the-book courses include it in their syllabi of suggested and required readings.

How A Gentle Madness struck such a responsive chord so quickly, and how it has maintained such a resonance, is anyone’s guess, and remains a mystery to me, especially since my original proposal for the work had been rejected by more than a dozen trade publishes as being too arcane a subject for the general readership before being taken on by a far-sighted young editor at Henry Holt & Co., who was charmed by the stories of passion and obsession I had assembled, and liked the approach I had taken to go beyond the writing of a conventional history to investigate what was then the here and now of the late 1980s, and early ‘90s with fresh, previously untold examples of what I like to think of as “productive bibliomania,” with a few examples of “unchecked,” and, in one telling instance , “criminal bibliomania,” worked in for balance.

Aside from the magnificent dust-jacket with embossed black and gold decorations and a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s wonderful 1494 woodcut of “The Book Foole” for Sebastian Brandt’s

Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), AGM, also had what everyone agreed was an irresistible title, a coinage that came to me in what I shamelessly claim to have been a moment of pure inspiration, suggested by the patriot-printer and obsessive packrat of all things interesting Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), who had been eulogized at his death by a grandson as having been “touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania.” As “gently mad” as Thomas may have been, his unparalleled collection of early American newspapers and imprints had provided the core collection of the American Antiquarian Society that he founded in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1812. He served as a kind of template for the kind of individual I was looking to profile.

Numerous libraries in the United States, I found, owe their very existence to collectors who have had the foresight to place their prize possessions in places where they will be preserved and enjoyed by future generations, and in many instances they established and shaped the focus of the very institutions themselves. Stand-alone libraries I can cite along those lines include the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island; the Pierpont Morgan Library & Museum in New York City; the Henry Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden in San Marino, California; the Henry Clay Folger and Emily Jordan Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC; the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles; the William L. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Another favorite example of mine is the polymath James Logan (1674-1751), a brilliant man who immigrated to North America in 1699 to manage the colony of Pennsylvania for William Penn, and was relentless in his zeal for books that had to be shipped to him from Europe, assembling in the process what was, at the time, the strongest private library on the continent, which in due course became the core collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. This was the same man who had once implored a bookseller in Europe to spare no effort or expense in fulfilling his unending requests for titles, confiding, in a moment of unguarded candor, that “books are my disease.” A gentle madness, indeed.

Nicholas A. Basbanes a national endowment for the Humanities Public scholar, is the author of ten works of cultural history whose most recent book, Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, shared top honors in nonfiction for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is now working on a book for Yale University Press to be titled Before Paper:The Hunt for the World’s Earliest Writings, a prequel to his 2013 book, On Paper: The Everything of its 2,000-Year History, a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for excellence in nonfiction.