Internet fuels passion for book collecting

They climbed the steps of DeGolyer Library with shopping bags full of treasures and hearts full of hope.<br><br>At the monthly meeting of the Colophon Society, a group of book-lovers who support the libraries

Monday, April 10th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

They climbed the steps of DeGolyer Library with shopping bags full of treasures and hearts full of hope.

At the monthly meeting of the Colophon Society, a group of book-lovers who support the libraries of Southern Methodist University, the subject was, as usual, books. But not - this time - reading or writing them. This was to be a sort of Antiques Roadshow for book collectors. Members had been invited to bring two or three of their favorites for appraisal.

What would the experts make of the slim volume of Wallace Stevens poetry with original prints by Jasper Johns? Or the book of architectural fantasies, published in the 1930s in the Soviet Union even as Joseph Stalin was sending venturesome artists to the Gulag? Or the Chinese-Portuguese dictionary, printed in a Macao orphanage?

No matter how arcane or downright weird, if somebody has written and published it, these days there's a good chance that somebody else wants it - and is willing to pay.

Book collecting is as old as books. The Roman statesman Cicero avidly sought out old manuscripts. Renaissance princes and popes assembled whole libraries. But never before has it been so easy to collect. A half-dozen online search services now put almost any book within the reach, if not the financial grasp, of the collector.

"The Internet levels the field," says Dick Bosse, who operates Aldredge Book Store. "You can no longer charge as much for a book because it's readily available on the 'Net." And likely, at a lower price.

David Grossblatt, a dealer with a stall in the Forestwood Antique Mall, thinks the Internet has been both good and bad for book collecting. These days, almost anyone can buy a bunch of used books and put them on the Internet, he says. "But the key to becoming a good collector is still knowing what you're collecting."

'Net at its best

At its best, the Internet supplements the traditional tools of the collector - the dealer, the auction, the catalog.

Selby Kiffer, head of the Book Department at Sotheby's, the venerable New York auction house, has seen a slow but steady growth in book collecting.

"It's expanding in the number of people interested in collecting books and in the types of book that are collectible," he says. "And there's certainly been a growth in recent years in the value of books."

Last year Sotheby's auctioned off $26 million worth of books, including a rare 15th-century atlas for $1.16 million. Millions of dollars more in books and manuscripts were sold on its Internet site.

"It's driven, as most collecting trends are, by new collectors entering the field," Mr. Kiffer says.

Many of these new collectors have made fortunes from the new information technologies. They're attracted to books - rather than, say, art - because, he says, books are themselves an information technology.
But e-billionaires are not the only new collectors.

In Hollywood, where one picture really is worth a thousand words, rare books have become the chic gift for giving and getting. "Preposterously high-priced books given to preposterously well-paid people," sniffs Jerome Kramer, editor of Book magazine.

Perhaps. But stars are not buying just any old book. Johnny Depp collects works by the Beat Generation. Winona Ryder collects J.D. Salinger.

You don't have to be rich to collect books.
"I have people who are brain surgeons and people who sell tickets at movie theaters," says Mike Murray, a New Jersey book dealer. "People will save up and pay in installments to acquire a $300 book."

Clarie Blackman, an investigator in the Dallas office of the Federal Trade Commission, figures she's never paid more than about $30 for a book.

Ms. Blackman is a serious collector of mystery novels.

How serious? "I don't collect because its a hobby," she declares. "I collect because I want every book in the series."

If she finds an author she likes, she'll go back and acquire every book by that author. When Ms. Blackman started buying Anne Perry, for example, the British author had already written 14 novels. Now she owns the full series.

Ms. Blackman has been reading mysteries and thrillers since she was in high school, a habit probably picked up from her father, a minister who read the old Detective Story magazine.
"I have not yet been able to get rid of anything, and I'm almost 60," she says. "Everyone tells me, take them to Half Price Books, give them to the library.

"I don't think I could take them out of the house."

Twain'd eye

Dr. Ludwig A. Michael, a physician who teaches at Baylor Medical School, brought a copy of Poems of the Old South (a collection of verses celebrating not the Confederacy, but Boston's Old South Church) to the Colophon Society meeting.

Dr. Michael collects first-edition Mark Twains. His wife, Carmen, who teaches psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, collects books on psychiatry.
Dr. Michael's greatest collecting coup came as the result of another hobby - bookbinding - and had nothing to do with Mark Twain. With stacks of loose medical journals around the house, he decided to take up bookbinding.
One day he was in a New York book store chatting about first editions when the owner said he had a book that might interest Dr. Michael. It was very old and had no bindings.

"It was Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, 20 years before the American Revolution," says Dr. Michael. "I bought it for $75 and bound it, which was a major project."

Today, the book is worth many times what he paid for it. Dallas attorney B.H. "Tim" Timmins and his wife, Nancy, brought a whole bag of books to the Colophon Society. The Pleasures of Imagination, a handsome book with the page edges decorated with a painting of an English manor house, happily turned out to be worth much more than they expected.

Mr. Timmins says the couple has built a "modest" collection with an emphasis on Louisiana and New Orleans history.

By "modest," Mr. Timmins means "We have boxes of books and no more room on shelves."

But the boxes are labeled, he adds, and the couple regularly rotates books from box to shelf and back to box.

Husband and wife both grew up in families that valued books and reading. Hanging around bookstores is almost second nature.

"We do it for our own personal pleasure," Mr. Timmins says. "I really don't watch the market. When a book gets valuable I'm really quite surprised."

Nevertheless he remembers coming upon a copy of Chance Impressions of Old New Orleans,a book of early-day photographs, in a shop in that city. He paid something like $35 for it.

Some years later, he recalls with relish, he found another copy of the book in another New Orleans book shop. Price: $500.

"People collect for different reasons," says Gail Glick, whose Greenway Books is in the Love Field Antique Mall.

Like most dealers, Ms. Glick started as a collector. "I collect one author, Wallace Stegner. For a time, I specialized in feminist writings.

"I have a guy who comes in all the time and just collects philosophy," she says. "I have another one that collects Pulitzer Prize winners."

Emma Rodgers, founder of Black Images Book Bazaar, collects books with racist themes, "the kind of material that's not blatant, that's very subtle," she says.

New Mexico-raised Lee Burke, a retired oil man, grew up surrounded by the lore and history of the West. So he collects books and manuscripts on the early fur trade.

Now, at 4,000 to 5,000 books, he says, "I'm almost at the end of collecting." He's out of space.

Larry Myers of Arlington started collecting books on the Civil War, then moved to Western outlaws. "Because outlaws fed off the cow towns," he says, that led to books on the cattle industry.

Recently he caught up with a book on Billy the Kid written about the time the Kid was killed. "According to the bibliography, there was only one known copy," he says. "So I have two of the rarest pieces on Billy the Kid.

That gives me bragging rights.

"You get after these books and sometimes the rush is just incredible.

"I got it bad. I think it's a disease."

Bragging rights, thrill of the hunt, or outright pathology: Whatever motivates collectors, it's clear they pursue their hearts' desire with more than the usual fervor.

Why collect?

Writer Nicholas Basbanes catches that quality nicely in the title of his absorbing book on books and collecting, A Gentle Madness.
Mr. Basbanes lectured recently at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Humanities Resource Center at the University of Texas at Austin, itself a great book collection built from smaller private collections.

"By saving and preserving books," he told an auditorium packed with collectors, "we save and preserve the elements of our culture.

"Bibliomania is a good and productive thing... provided it is kept in check."

One collector who could not keep his mania in check was Stephen Blumberg, one of the greatest book thieves of all times. Mr. Basbanes chronicles Mr. Blumberg's career in his book.

In the 20 years before he was caught, Mr. Blumberg stole some 23,600 books from libraries in 45 states and two Canadian provinces, according to Mr. Basbanes.

Fine bindings, first editions, incunabula (books printed from 1450 to 1500), historic papers - all fell prey.

When the FBI searched his Ottumwa, Iowa, home, they found it chockablock with books, all arranged by subject. The room where Mr. Blumberg slept - you could hardly call it a bedroom - was the "California Room," filled with books lifted from California libraries.

Mr. Blumberg was no mindless kleptomaniac, Mr. Basbanes emphasizes. He knew what he was stealing. "He was not motivated by greed.

He was motivated by love of the book."

In other words, a true collector.