Idealism and Liberal Education

The Joys of Collecting Books

The Joys of Collecting Books I want to describe a passion of my private life-book collecting: how I started to collect books and why I continue to do so; what kind of collection I have and how I acquired it; and why the collecting ofbooks is for me so satisfying an endeavor. I have been fortunate, from a book-collecting point of view, in that I have moved twice in recent years, first from Philadelphia to Iowa City, and then from Iowa City to Hanover. On both occasions, the exigencies of moving caused me to rid my library of those books I no longer especially wanted. Identifying books as candidates for triage is not a congenial enterprise , but the fact is that some titles, with the passage of time, do come to seem less auspicious choices or, at least, less essential or interesting or charming than they once did. I sometimes think in this connection of Thoreau, one of whose earliest books was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. One thousand copies were printed. Several years later, his publisher, who needed the space in his warehouse, told Thoreau that there were 706 copies left. Thoreau asked that those 706 volumes be sent to him. Then he wrote in his journal, "I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Well, I now have a library offorty-five hundred volumes, one of which I wrote myselfl My collecting habits have been open-ended, and my collection, therefore , does not have the overall coherence that many others do. It does not focus on a single author or a single genre or a single subject. Rather, it reflects a variety ofinterests, many ofthem identified with particular periods in my life. I have concentrated especially on American history, literary and political biography, social and literary essays, and twentieth-century fiction and poetry. Among the writers best represented are some ofthose whom I admire most: Camus, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, E. M. Forster, Gide, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Mann, Robert Penn Warren , and Edmund Wilson. I also confess-because no book collector would be entirely credible if he or she did not-that I enjoy collecting books by that engaging pair of eighteenth-century friends, Boswell and 31 32 Idealism and Liberal Education Johnson. Among the statesmen and jurists best represented are Jefferson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, John Marshall, and Justices Brandeis and Holmes. Sometimes I wish that my collecting habits were less eclectic, so that my library would have a greater focus. In surveying the variety of my collection , I think of the remarks that Cyrus King of Massachusetts made in the House of Representatives, in 1814, during the debate over whether the United States should acquire Thomas Jefferson's library. "The bill," he said, "would put $23,900 into Jefferson's pocket for about 6,000 books, good, bad, and indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages which many cannot read, and most ought not." There is a wonderful novel-as good as anything I know of on the passion of collecting-entitled The Connoisseur by Evan S. Connell, Jr. The central figure is a life insurance executive from New York who has recently, in middle age, become a widower. He is sad and lonely. One day his business responsibilities bring him to New Mexico. Having arrived a day early, he rents a car and drives to Taos. He stops at a shop where he sees a beautiful Mexican artifact from the Mayan period, a terra-cotta statue of a magistrate, seated with his legs crossed and his arms folded, five centuries old. He knows immediately that he must buy it: I want this arrogant little personage, he thinks with sudden passion. But why? Does he remind me of myself? Or is there something universal in his attitude? Well, it doesn't matter. He's coming home with me. He becomes more and more fascinated by pre-Columbian artifacts, awed by their classic form and dignified beauty. They become precious to him, even though they had seemed valueless just before he visited Taos. He cannot understand the sense of obsession that is growing within him. He begins to experience a "mysterious excitement" and to appreciate, as a friend tells him, that "you can get hooked on this stuff." He visits dealers in New York, borrows library books by "properly accredited mandarins," and purchases a professional, stainless-steel jeweler...