June 2016.
A Gentle Madness
by Nicholas A. Basbanes
(Owl Books, Henry Holt, New York, 1995)
This study is as much about the life cycle of books as it is about the impulse to collect them.
Page xix.
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, tin 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.”
Pages 16-17.
It is paradoxical, but true, that not a single great library in the world has been formed by a great scholar.
Page 17.
Preservation and the service of scholarship are happy products of collecting.
Page 17.
To a true collector the acquisition of an old book is a rebirth.
Page 17.
The closer people get to the source, the closer they feel the wonders of creativity.
Page 17.
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.
Page 17.
The loyalty of collectors draws them to each other; they are a fraternity joined by bonds stronger than their vows, their bonds of shared vanity and the ridicule of non-collectors. Collectors appear to non-collectors as selfish, rapacious, 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.
Page 23.
Centuries before Sigmund Freud gave scope and substance to the study of the mysteries of the mind, people had been mad about books, yet it was not until 18-09 that a name for this curious malady came into widespread use. That year, the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) popularized the word bibliomania when he published a lighthearted “bibliographical romance” he titled The Bibliomania: or, Book-Madness; containing some account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of This Fatal Disease.
Page 25.
Women too have collected throughout history.
Page 28.
Why, in five centuries, in six countries, do there seem to have been so few women book collectors? The answer is obvious: a serious collector on any scale must have there advantages: considerable resources, education, and freedom. Until recently, only a handful of women have had all three, but times are changing!
Page 31.
The therapeutic nature of books is a story heard often.
Page 32.
The reason books were tethered to shelves in medieval times was to make sure they stayed where they were. The most widely employed deterrent in the Middle Ages, however, was not the chain but the curse.
Page 35.
Throughout history books have been the source of great joy, great passion, and also great pain for their owners.
Page 36.
If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
Page 43.
Ship of Fools also was the first printed book to incorporate contemporary events and living persons in its narrative.
Page 46.
The character Shakespeare chose to say farewell to the London stage on his behalf was a magician who draws his power from books. The Tempest is the first play to appear in the First Folio, not because it was the first written, nor because it was the last, but in all likelihood because it was widely acknowledged to be the great bard’s parting production.
Pages 48-49.
Because writers are so involved in the creative process, most of them find book collecting a phenomenon too remote to understand.
Page 52.
If it is true that language is the miracle of our species, then it follows that writing is the witness.
Page 58.
From the time writing first appeared on clay tablets in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago, it has been the object of veneration.
Page 58.
As cultures developed, books became instruments of utility and enlightenment, not just guides to ritual and worship.
Page 58.
With the secularization of books came the craving to possess them, a passion that by classical times was fully developed.
Page 59.
For nine luminous centuries, from around 300 B.C. to the seventh century A.D., Alexandria was a place of inspiration, a vibrant shrine dedicated to the limitless potential of human achievement. Alexandria was by no means the first great book repository, but because it contained antiquity’s most extensive collection off recorded thought, it undoubtedly was the greatest.
Pages 62-63.
The Roman proclivity for plundering the relics of conquered countries is legendary.
Page 67.
By the second century A.D., Rome was firmly established as headquarters of the publishing world. Books were in demand, and a plentiful labor force of slaves skilled in copying made producing them inexpensive. Because there were no printing presses, there were no setup costs or expensive corrections to make. Works came directly into the shops from authors and were handed over to the scribes, and copies were produced - often, according to the poet Martial, on the same day
Page 69.
In A.D. 529 the School of Athens was closed, effectively ending Greek domination of the continent’s cultural agenda. AT Monte Cassino near Naples, however, a learned monk named Benedict established a monastery that decreed strict procedures for the copying of ancient texts. Thus, a medieval institution essential to the preservation of knowledge, the monastic scriptorium, was functioning when Alexandria was captured by Saracen soldiers 111 years later.
Page 69.
With the fall of the Roman Empire and the flood of barbarian tries throughout Europe, ancient literature became an irrelevant pursuit. … But a lifeline was maintained nonetheless. Two sixth-century Roman scholars in particular, Boethius and Cassiodorus, provided the example by which so many classical writings escaped oblivion.
Boethius (ca. 480-524) was the last learned Roman to study the language and literature of Greece, and the first to interpret the logical treatises of Aristotle for later ages.
Page 70.
Cassiodorus … his most enduring contribution was to formalize procedures for the copying of manuscripts. The precepts Cassiodorus laid down were adopted by Benedict, founder of the monastery at Monte Cassino and the Benedictine order, which embraced reading as an essential discipline.
Page 70.
Petrarch has been called the first modern man. By seeking out the forgotten writings of ancient authors, he also gained fame as a great collector of monastic manuscripts.
Page 72.
Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive.
Page 73.
I know of many who have attained the highest saintliness without literary culture; I don’t know of any who were excluded form sanctity by culture.
Page 74.
At first publishers saturated the bookstalls with new editions of Latin classics, resulting in a temporary glut that prompted the emerging industry to evaluate the dictates of the market.
Page 79.
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the most famous European scholar of the period and the first person actually to make a living as a write.
Page 81.
Since the sixth century, libraries in Britain had been the exclusive concern of the Roman Catholic Church.
Page 87.
By the twelfth century, a lay book trade was in operation throughout much of the English realm, and a community of parchmenters, scribes, and illuminators flourished in Oxford.
Page 87.
Since Pepys sent his books out to be bound, his library is the finest collection of seventeenth-century English bindings in existence.
Page 104.
“Nothing tends to the preservation of anything so much as making it bear a high price.”
Page 121.
There was not even a press operating in the British colonies until 1639, when the locksmith Stephen Daye set up a shop in Cambridge and began work on The Whole Booke of Psalmes, a psalter commonly known as the Bay Psalm Book and prized today as the oldest surviving object printed in what is now the United States.
Page 128.
Collectors, in short, not only preserve knowledge, they disseminate it.
Page 142.
“Let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks, which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of Copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”
Page 144.
There is no sure way of preserving historical records and materials, but by multiplying the copies.
Page 144.
Jefferson’s classification scheme was patterned on Sir Francis Bacon’s concepts of the “three faculties needed to comprehend knowledge,” memory, reason, and imagination, from which he derived forty-four subject divisions. His system was maintained through the end of the nineteenth century.
Page 153.
By the nineteenth century collecting had begun to change in America. No longer were books just tools for scholars and historians. They had become valuable objects in their own right.
Page 155.
“Crazy people like to see others crazier than they are.”
Page 165.
As the nation expanded, the demand for books expanded with it.
Page 166.
Americans had been using their new wealth to buy up great English libraries and bring them to the United States.
Page 176.
While the phrase en bloc did not originate with Huntington, the practice of buying the complete libraries of other collectors became his trademark.
Page 194.
By buying entire collections, Huntington not only acquired a tremendous volume of material, but was able to secure with single purchases what others had spent years assembling.
Page 207.
“I never captured a prize, the prize always captured me.”
Page 211.
The American Golden Age of Book Collecting effectively end with the Crash of 1929.
Page 221.
The life spans of private collections usually can be measured by the life spans of the individuals who build them … Typically, final scores are tallied when the collectors die and catalogues are issued, or when their libraries are dispersed at auction or go off into institutions.
Page 265.
Heartbroken at the loss of his eyesight in old age, the poet, scholar, and scientist Eratosthenes of Alexandria starved himself to death rather than live any longer without the companionship of his books.
Page 275.
There is pain to collecting. There is pleasure to collecting.
Page 275.
Knowing where everything is located is what distinguishes the true collector form the hoarder.
Page 276.
No collection is ever complete.
Page 280.
It is a commonplace of collecting, rare of attainment now, that no form of life in libraries compares with the intimacy of owning.
Page 287.
“Imprints” is a word that essentially means anything that came off a printing press in a certain place within a specific period of time. Books are imprints - so are pamphlets, agricultural tracts, sermons, broadsides, and almanacs. The Bay Psalm Book is the most famous and most precious of all because it is the oldest surviving document produced in British North America.
Because of their ephemeral nature - and because they were not, for the most part, produced to endure as hallmarks of the craft - the importance of imprints was recognized only after many of them had disappeared.
Page 302.
“For whatever compelling reason I have to collet, it is not to possess. Possessing is irrelevant to me; it’s the action. Being a collector, accumulating, and having the fun, that’s what drives me; the pleasure that I always got was in the act of collecting.”
Page 303.
“Collecting is an educative process. You have to handle the goods. If you handle the goods objectively then after a while you learn to discriminate.”
Page 303.
“My collecting mentality is that I acquire anything. I do it without discrimination. As you accumulate, all of a sudden this material reaches a critical mass, and soon it becomes a collection. The junk is absolutely essential. Some of the rarest books in my collection had been lying in the des drawers of dealers’ shops for thirty or forty years. By taking everything in, you see the difference.”
Page 304.
What develops from handling the “goods” is a sense of connoisseurship, a clear sense of worth, not just value.
Page 304.
“I’m in the process of divesting all my collection …. That doesn’t mean I have lost my of my fanaticism, because dispersal is just one aspect of the process.”
Page 309.
“You have to be acquisitive to be a collector. But at some point along the line the acquisitiveness is the first thing that goes.”
Page 311.
“It is an obvious law of nature that collections of living men, however wise, constitute highly perishable collections of knowledge …. Enlightened human minds almost invariably outmode themselves by encouraging a continual search for new knowledge, new synthesis.
Page 313.
“Once we decided that we were willing to pay good money for it, it became valuable overnight. That was inevitable. It’s the nature of the marketplace.”
Pages 315-316.
“What is junk anyway? Who makes those decisions? I believe that the only way to appreciate a masterpiece is to understand what created it. You can’t just look at the end product, the polished work. If you want to understand something properly, you have to see the things that led to its creation.
Page 316.
“Just because someone is unknown does not mean they should not be collected. … What is important is that the material has survived, and it is here to be studied.”
Page 317.
“Collecting … is an empty vanity unless it’s useful.”
Page 331.
“When you buy books, you buy some to read, some to own, and some for reference. You want to possess the books, you want to own them, you want to hold them. Perhaps you even hope that you will read them.”
Page 361.
“To my mind, the goal of a good antiquarian dealer is to provide the right books to the right clients.”
Page 373.
If books are beautiful objects to behold - and so many of them are exquisite - it is only incidental to their purpose, which is to instruct, inform, inspire, and entertain.
Page 376.
“I was a collector before I ever knew I was a collector.”
Page 402.
You don’t collect if you’re not competitive.
Page 428.
“When there are lots of books around me, I feel safe, I feel secure, I feel in the company of others even though I may be sitting in my study all alone.”
Page 436.
“You have to be obsessive, I think, or it just doesn’t work.”
Page 444.
“To use books and manuscripts is to justify the process of collecting and preserving them.”
Page 451.
“People who collect books have a certain intellectual curiosity … about books, period, and what books represent to them. The transition between collecting books as objects and colleting books for information is to differentiate … between work and play.”
Page 457.
“I also saw the books as a form of security in that they were a form of knowledge, or a form of art, to be enjoyed.”
Page 480.
“You can never really know how much a cache of books is worth unless you actually put it up for sale and see what it would go for.”
Page 487.
Patterns require repetition to take shape.
Page 532.