Modern Book Collecting - Softcover

Wilson, Robert A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1602399859 ISBN 13: 9781602399853

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010

Synopsis

Modern Book Collecting offers advice that answers all the basic questions a book lover and collector might have—what to collect and where to find it, how to tell a first edition from a reprint, how to build an author collection, how to get the best price from dealers, how to understand the prices and rarity of books, and more. With a handy dictionary of terms used in auction and dealer catalogs and a new section on Internet resources, this is a must-have guide for book lovers.

About this title

About the Author

Robert A. Wilson was proprietor of the famous Phoenix Bookshop in New York City. He is a passionate writer and authored of bibliographies of Gertrude Stein, Gregory Corso, and Denise Levertov. Wilson specializes in rare books and manuscripts.

Nicholas A. Basbanes is a writer and journalist. His bestselling book A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Modern Book Collecting

A Basic Guide to All Aspects of Book Collecting-What to Collect, Who to Buy From, Auctions, Bibliographies, Care, Fakes and Forgeries, Investments, Donations, Definitions, and More

By Robert A. Wilson, Nicholas A. Basbanes

Skyhorse Publishing

Copyright © 2010 Robert A. Wilson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60239-985-3

Contents

ALSO BY ROBERT A. WILSON, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Dedication, 
INTRODUCTION, 
FOREWORD, 
PREFACE, 
CHAPTER ONE - WHAT TO COLLECT, 
CHAPTER TWO - HOW TO BUILD AN AUTHOR COLLECTION, 
CHAPTER THREE - STARTING WITH AN UNKNOWN AUTHOR, 
CHAPTER FOUR - IT'S NEVER TOO LATE, 
CHAPTER FIVE - DEALERS AND COLLECTORS, 
CHAPTER SIX - BUYING AT AUCTION, 
CHAPTER SEVEN - OTHER SOURCES, 
CHAPTER EIGHT - COLLECTOR'S CONDITION, 
CHAPTER NINE - HOW TO IDENTIFY FIRST EDITIONS, 
CHAPTER TEN - BIBLIOGRAPHIES, 
CHAPTER ELEVEN - A BOOK PRODUCTION, 
CHAPTER TWELVE - THE CARE AND PROTECTION OF YOUR COLLECTION, 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - FAKES, FORGERIES, AND FACSIMILES, 
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - INVESTMENT, 
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - DONATING OR SELLING YOUR COLLECTION TO AN INSTITUTION, 
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - DEFINITION OF TERMS, 
APPENDIX ONE - LIST OF BOOK AUCTION FIRMS HANDLING BOOKS OF INTEREST TO COLLECTORS, 
APPENDIX TWO - SOURCES FOR MODERN FIRST EDITIONS, 
APPENDIX THREE - CLUBS FOR BOOK COLLECTORS, 
APPENDIX FOUR - THE FIFTY MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE PUBLISHED, 
SINCE THE END OF WORLD WAR II, 
APPENDIX FIVE - RESOURCES FOR ANTIQUE BOOKS, 
INDEX, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
A NOTE ON THE TYPE, 

CHAPTER 1

WHAT TO COLLECT

A true book collector knows whether he is one or not, just as the old saying has it about being in love. A genuine bibliophile is born rather than made. Thus "what to collect" is a question that answers itself. A collector collects what fascinates him. The fascination, in fact, comes before the collection, because most collectors do not begin to collect deliberately. The first step, inevitably, is buying books that reflect one's interest in a subject or in an author in order to read them. Whether or not they are rare or hard to get is secondary.

My own experience is a case in point. I have a complete collection of Gertrude Stein books; I began to buy them in the first place simply because I wanted to read them. Virtually none were in print. In fact, as recently as 1960, before the intense revival of interest in her work began, only one of her more than sixty titles was available. Anyone who wanted to read Gertrude Stein was forced to seek out copies wherever they could be found — generally in the form of first editions, because only four or five of them had ever existed in any other form. I became deeply involved in the search, and the result is my Stein collection. Nowadays all but two or three of those books are in print again and can be purchased with relative ease. But no matter. In the course of things I had discovered my love of book collecting and the joy that the search can bring.

Once the line between reader and collector has been crossed, there is usually no turning back. There is no cure for the virus. But a distinction should still be made between the collector and the investor. If the acquisition of a rare, long-sought-after book gives you pleasure, a glow, a lift, just because you finally own it, with little or no thought that you may be able to sell it at a profit, then you are undoubtedly a collector and are liable to remain one for the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you buy a book and immediately think, "Aha, I can double the price at X's," then you are primarily a dealer or an investor. It's really as simple and basic as that. (However, as both a collector and a dealer myself, I can testify that the conditions are not mutually exclusive.) In recent years a great many people have begun to collect books as an investment, spurred on, no doubt, by numerous articles in newspapers and magazines written in a breezy, offhand manner and emphasizing the profit motive to the exclusion of almost everything else. Of course, everyone likes to make a profit, and it is normal and human to be pleased when a book you bought a few years ago at publication price or a modest markup starts a price climb in dealers' catalogs or at auction. But the true collector would sooner die than part with his treasures. Many literally skip meals, wear threadbare clothing, are in arrears on the rent — in short, do almost anything to hold on to their books. Once in a while, a collector gives way to the temptation of an enormous profit. In my experience, which stretches over nearly four decades, in every single case the seller regretted the move almost immediately and forever after.

Most book collecting in this century is done in the field of literature, primarily novels, poetry, and plays. There are, of course, other popular fields such as the sciences, biography, criticism, travel, and so on. The literature of chess is particularly popular. The New York Public Library has one entire room devoted to a collection relating solely to tobacco and smoking (although, ironically, the library's rules forbid smoking even in that room). The Black Liberation movement of the sixties and seventies gave tremendous impetus to "black" collections, among white as well as black collectors. Your own taste will dictate what you collect. Some people follow trends and fashions, collecting what is most popular at any given time. But to my mind, these people are not true collectors, but faddists — or, even worse, speculators.

Many factors determine what you can collect, not the least of which is the question of cost. Very few collectors starting today can hope to form a collection of Elizabethan literature, much less of Shakespeare. Cost aside, most of the great pieces of Elizabethan literature have by now gravitated into institutions. For example, all known copies of the first edition of Romeo and Juliet are in institutional libraries, so no new Shakespeare collection could ever be complete. Even the great eighteenth-century books, while perhaps slightly more available, are for the most part four-figure items. Important early-nineteenth-century books, particularly those of the Romantic poets such as Byron, Shelley, and Keats, are now fetching prices beyond the reach of the average collector. This has had much to do with the rapid and seemingly endless growth in popularity of modern authors. The term "modern" is bound to be an imprecise one, the meaning of which depends in large measure on one's own age. To some it means only those authors who came into prominence during the twenties and their successors. However, because of the enormous interest in certain late-nineteenth-century American authors, many dealers and collectors start the modern period with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in poetry and Henry James and Stephen Crane in prose. This book uses "modern" in the latter sense.

Another factor, equally as important as price, is availability. If the books are all but unavailable, with only an occasional title surfacing here and there at long intervals, sometimes years apart (as with Shakespearean firsts), there will not be enough activity to keep the collection — and your interest in it — alive. On the other hand, if everything is too easily procurable, if you can expect to gather all the items in a comparatively short time, there will also be little or no excitement. As in almost all other hobbies or sports, the chase is at least half the fun.

The most widespread type of book collecting is undoubtedly the building of author collections, that is, the gathering of all the work of any given author. It can vary from a simple collection of first editions of each book published by the particular author to an intensive, in-depth collection composed of every edition of every book, as well as appearances by the author (with prefaces or the like) in books other than his own, original appearances in magazines and periodicals, recordings and photos of the author, books about him, and so on. There is almost no limit to the boundaries of an in-depth collection.

Apart from author collections, collections are often formed on the basis of preestablished guidelines such as those set by "high spot" or category lists. In 1929, for example, Merle Johnson published the first of his lists of important American books, calling it High Spots in American Literature; a great many collectors set out to get copies of all of the books listed, a vast undertaking, and for many years catalogs regularly noted when a book was a "Merle Johnson high spot." Prior to that, in 1903, the august and prestigious Grolier Club, whose membership is composed exclusively of book collectors, published a catalog of an exhibit modestly entitled One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature. This list was made up of what could reasonably be called the one hundred finest examples of literature in the language, and even today, decades later, there are still collectors who try to assemble the books on this list. It is not uncommon to see a listing of one or more of these titles in dealers' catalogs referred to as "one of the Grolier Hundred."

A few years before his death, Cyril Connolly, an extremely avid collector of first editions as well as an author whose first editions were sought after by fellow collectors, wrote a book entitled The Modern Movement, in which he listed and discussed the one hundred books he believed were influential and crucial in the establishment of twentieth-century literature. He did not restrict his list solely to works in English, but also included important French works. This group immediately became known as the Connolly Hundred. At least one institution, the Humanities Research Library at the University of Texas, set out to gather a complete collection of the books named on this list, many of which it already possessed. With the enormous resources at its command, the library soon assembled the entire group and placed it on exhibit, accompanied by a superb illustrated catalog which has in itself become a collector's item, since a great many letters and inscriptions were published in it for the first time.

Still another group of books favored by collectors are those that appear on the list of Pulitzer Prize winners, especially in fiction, drama, and poetry. A collection based on this list is far more difficult to complete than might be imagined. While certain famous books, well loved over many decades — Gone with the Wind or The Bridge of San Luis Rey — will appear regularly in catalogs, the Pulitzer Prize, in the inscrutable wisdom of the judges, has gone over and over again to authors who subsequently sank into deserved obscurity, along with their works. As a result, these books can be difficult to find, since most dealers, understandably, are loath to stock a book that may remain on the shelf for many years before a Pulitzer Prize collector happens along.

To my way of thinking, it is far more interesting, and considerably more fun, to determine your own area of endeavor, in spite of the satisfaction to be found in achieving a widely recognized standard. Your goal can be challenging despite not being widely recognized or even popular. It can be as simple — but limitless — as making your own list of high spots, especially for the post-World War II period, where very few such guidelines have as yet been published. Indeed, for collectors who are not drawn to the idea of an in-depth collection, this is an excellent field in which to work, since it is flexible enough to admit any item you like and does not force you to acquire anything in which you are not interested merely for the sake of that tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp "completeness." A couple of years ago I prepared my own list of what I thought were the fifty most important and influential books published in the field of American literature after the end of World War II, a date that provided a clear-cut line of demarcation between the literature of the two halves of this century. (This list, along with comments on my reasons for including particular books, will be found as Appendix 4).

Another collecting area that is wide and utterly fascinating is little magazines. There are two guidelines: Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich's The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton, 1946), covering the period up through World War II, and the just published The Little Magazine in America by Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie (Pushcart Press, 1978), covering the postwar period up to the present day. This is also a field that is not overcrowded. I do not mean that such a collection is easy to form — on the contrary. Many dealers will not take the trouble to stock magazines and periodicals with the exception of an occasional outstanding issue or a complete run of a classic, such as The Little Review, transition, The Dial, Broom, and Hound and Horn, all of them seminal periodicals of the between-the-wars period. "Little" magazines have been an important part of the literary scene for some time, and there was a burst of feverish activity in this area in the 1950s and '60s, coinciding with the "beat" movement. It was caused in part by the classic stimulus behind the existence of such magazines — the inability of the young members of the avant-garde to get their work accepted for publication in the more established literary periodicals of the day. But in this period, a new factor entered the picture — the widespread availability of duplicating equipment, particularly the mimeograph, which heretofore had not been generally available to the average citizen. It was now easy to rent or even purchase a relatively inexpensive model, and such a flood of little magazines appeared from these duplicating machines that one writer on the subject, Kirby Congdon, has termed it "the mimeograph revolution." Naturally, very few of these productions were submitted for copyright; many were not for sale, but merely given away to contributors and their friends. Even those that were placed on sale had a relatively limited circulation and almost always a very short life span. Hence they are for the most part extremely scarce and generally very hard to locate. Most institutional libraries were not even aware of their existence until many were already defunct, and few universities were interested in acquiring them even if they were aware of them. While a large majority of these magazines published little work that rose above the mediocre and were often issued mainly to serve the editor's vanity, a surprising number of them contain considerable amounts of worthwhile and important material. In fact, many of the early writings of authors who are now well established — for example, Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Kerouac, and Levertov — first appeared in such magazines. The few people or institutions with the foresight to collect them as they were issued now have collections not only of great monetary value, but also of incalculable historical and research importance.

Private presses have long been a favorite area for collecting, in part because of the great beauty of most examples of their output. Here again, your own taste can set the limits. It is possible to spend much money, time, and effort in trying simply to gather a copy of every book produced by one or more of the famous little presses. Equally interesting and challenging would be a collection of one or two examples from each of the great private presses. There have been many famous private presses in the past, from Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill and Benjamin Franklin's Passy presses in the eighteenth century to William Morris' magnificent Kelmscott Press of the late nineteenth. More attainable for today's average collector, however, are the products of some of the presses of the twentieth century. These include the Doves Press and the early Nonesuch Press (before it was absorbed commercially), both British, and in the United States, the Mosher Press, operated in Portland, Maine, by Thomas Mosher at the turn of the century.

During the twenties, when most of the young British and American avant-garde writers flocked to Paris, a number of superb little presses sprang up to meet the need for avant-garde publication in the English language. Many of these books have for collectors the double advantage of being not only finely printed, but also rare and important first editions of some of the twentieth-century literary giants. This, of course, doubles the demand for them, since they are wanted both for press book collections and for author collections. Among these presses of special note, the Black Sun Press is perhaps the most famous of all. Operated by Harry and Caresse Crosby, in the brief span of four years it produced a staggering number of books that are now landmarks of twentieth-century literature. These include Hart Crane's The Bridge, as well as significant titles by Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, MacLeish, Boyle, and others, at a time when most of these names were very little known.

Other presses of this period include the Black Manikin Press of Edward Titus, the Contact Press of Robert McAlmon, Harrison of Paris, Nancy Cunard's Hours Press, Plain Edition (run by Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein and publishing, naturally, only books by Stein), the Seizin Press, operated by Robert Graves and Laura Riding from a wide variety of locations, and William Bird's Three Mountains Press. Further details concerning these presses and their products can be had by consulting Hugh Ford's excellent study of them entitled Published in Paris. While all this was going on in and about Paris, Leonard and Virginia Woolf were operating their now famous Hogarth Press, with Virginia actually setting the type for many of the early titles.

In the United States there have been several fine presses whose work is actively collected. These include the Grabhorn, Cummington, and Banyan presses, and recently the Windhover Press, the Perishable Press (whose operator, Walter Hamady, even makes all his own paper, the size of the edition of any particular book being determined largely by the amount of paper resulting from the specific paper-making operation), and the Gehenna Press, founded by the artist Leonard Baskin.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Modern Book Collecting by Robert A. Wilson, Nicholas A. Basbanes. Copyright © 2010 Robert A. Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1602399859
• ISBN 13: 9781602399853
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296