So what is the life of a book collector like? It’s
LENARD MOORE
As a photographer, as a collector, he is committed to making the ephemeral permanent.
LOUIS RUBIN AND KAY GIBBONS
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
not all just poking around dusty bookstores, though there’s pleasure in that. One of Jan’s favorites is The Captain’s Bookshelf in Asheville. “There is something about the feel, the smell that touches my soul. Being in a great old bookshop is like returning to the womb, like motherhood, family all rolled into one.” There’s research, in libraries and on the Internet, correspondence, and of course the busy calendar of events. Once Jan drove from a meeting of The North Carolina Writers Conference on the Outer Banks all the way to Boone to attend a bookstore signing by Robert Morgan, though when he arrived it turned out he was the only person there. (Not so the following year, after Morgan’s novel Gap Creek was featured on Oprah’s Book Club, when more than 750 people turned out for a Morgan signing.) And then there’s the parking problem. He worries about that, as well he might, considering that so many readings take place on college campuses. As much as he has spent on books, it galls him to have to pay a garage. Twice in William Styron, a privately printed chapbook memoir, he reports coming out of a well-attended event to discover that the gate at the expensive parking deck had been raised, and his words sing with the jubilation of a kid playing Monopoly whose property is all mortgaged and bank account down to its last dollar when a lucky roll of the dice takes him past his opponent’s string of hotels to Free Parking. Occasions where he gets numerous things signed — his all time record is 52 items signed in one day by Styron — prove so euphoric he’s scarcely aware of the often lengthy drive home. The many years of collecting have not dulled the excitement he felt decades ago in the Navy, when he was stationed on the aircraft carrier USS Essex and watched the mail plane bearing his Thomas Wolfe books land on the deck. Nor have the years in the darkroom lessened the thrill of watching the image of one of his writers bloom in the magic glow of the safelight. Of course, at the most well attended events he must sometimes outwit the “screeners,” the people who often supervise celebrity author signings, policing just what and how much the writer will sign. If Jan has numerous items, he often goes through the line as many as three times, running back to his car for more and presenting his stack of books all open to the title page so that the author won’t have to hunt, with a modest, politely worded request coupled with a look of determination designed to identify him as a serious collector and get the screener to back off. But always there is the wide network of friends, the writers themselves, the book dealers, scholars, and fellow collectors. In 1991, when he met Ann Deagon at a Reynolds Price reading, she made a point of introducing him to vast numbers of North Carolina writers. Now, she says, “He knows more writers than I do.”
February/March 2012
O.Henry 55