A window of opportunity to build an exceptional library had opened, and ample “disposable income” was available for just such an enterprise. “From where I sit, a hundred million dollars is not a lot of money,” David Redden, a senior vice president at Sotheby’s in New York and for a number of years the executive in charge of rare books sales, said a few weeks after the results of the Garden Ltd. sale had begun to settle in. “Sixteen-point-two million dollars for the Garden collection is tremendously gratifying, but just twenty-four hours before those books went up for sale, we sold one painting in the same room for twenty-one million. And it was not a master painting by any means, it was by Willem de Kooning, a living artist. That’s five million dollars more than the Garden totaled, and the Garden was one of the most successful book auctions ever.”
Bart Auerbach, a veteran New York bookseller and a principal consultant for Christie’s, agreed. In May of 1990, he noted, a Japanese businessman paid over $160 million in one week for two paintings, $82.5 million for Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet at Christie’s, and $78.2 million for Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Le Moulin de la Galette at Sotheby’s. He wondered what might have happened if Tokyo real estate tycoon Ryoei Saito’s taste in collectibles has been inclined toward books instead of art.
“For what that man paid for those two paintings, he could have built one of the finest private libraries in the world,” Auerbach said. And that would have included a beautiful building, a staff, and a sustaining endowment. “All he had to tell his agent was one thing –‘Keep your paddle in the air’—and it would have all been his.” Saito certainly acquired “two nice paintings for his walls,” Auerbach acknowledged, but “for a lot less money he could have gone down as one of the great book collectors of the twentieth century.”
On November 1, 1994, almost five years to the day of the Garden Ltd. sale, Bart Auerbach and I stood in Christie’s Park Avenue gallery with several hundred spectators and watched as a contingent of Italian bankers attempted to bring back to their country a seventy-two-page notebook containing more than three hundred illustrations and scientific writings compiled from 1506 to 1510 by Leonardo da Vinci. The contest to acquire this landmark of creativity, called Codex Hammer since 1980 in honor of its most recent owner, the late chairman of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer, provided an historic case study of just what Auerbach was talking about.
Auctioneer Stephen C. Massey opened the bidding at $5.5 million. Within fifteen seconds, the presale estimate of $10 million had been passed, and advances were being made in $1 million increments. After two-and-a-half minutes of spirited competition, Massey hammered the book down for $28 million to a private collector bidding anonymously by telephone; with a commission for the auction house added, the total price for the document was $30.8 million, a record for a book or manuscript sold at auction.
William H. Gates III, the founder and chairman of Microsoft Corporation and one of the wealthiest persons in the world, was not known then as a book collector, yet his acquisition of the manuscript, announced the next day, seemed perfectly appropriate. The notebook, written in Leonardo’s distinctive backward style, contains such speculations as why the sky is blue and why fossils can be found on mountaintops and predicts the invention of the submarine and the steam engine. Gates said he would display the manuscript in Italy before installing it in his 37,000-square-foot estate on the shores of Lake Washington near Seattle. “I have always had a tremendous respect for Leonardo da Vinci’s intellectual coupling of science and art,” the billionaire said. “It’s very gratifying to share an intellectual treasure of this magnitude with the world.”
When Carrie Estelle Betzold Doheny died in 1958, she left several monuments. Her three abiding passions had been the memory of her husband, a California oil baron, Edward Laurence Doheny, from whom she inherited a substantial fortune in 1935, her faith, and her books. Her faith was expressed through gifts to numerous seminaries, hospitals, and religious charities. In 1939, Pope Pius XII recognized Doheny’s generosity by making her a countess of the Roman Catholic Church, the first such title granted to a Southern California woman (resulting in the nickname the Countess). The following year, she was able to pay homage to all of her interests with one sweeping gesture. Acting on the suggestion of the archbishop of Los Angeles, she commissioned the architect Wallace Neff to construct a building in Spanish mission style architecture at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California, to be the Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library.
On the ground floor was the seminary’s working library; the second level was reserved for Mrs. Doheny’s sixteen thousand rare books and manuscripts. Her most renowned possessions included a collection of incunabula, old Bibles, and religious manuscripts, as well as a run of English and American literature and superior material relating to the exploration and settlement of California. When she died, the entire collection passed to the diocese, with the stipulation that it be kept for at least twenty-five years after her death. In 1986, the diocese announced a consignment to Christie’s in New York—the Doheny collection—with the proceeds earmarked for the education and training of priests.
While that sale was taking place, H. Bradley Martin, the heir of a New York steel fortune who started gathering books while attending Christ Church College at Oxford during the 1920s, died at the age of eight-two. Martin had maintained two enviable libraries, one in Manhattan, the other at a Georgian estate in Virginia called Rose Hill. For years, there had been talk that he wanted his books to go to some institution. Martin’s remarkable collection of ornithology alone was generally regarded as the finest anywhere, institutional or private. But his will made no such provisions, and a year after his death, on June 6, 1989, the Martin library went on the block at Sotheby’s in New York. When the nine-part sale concluded in June 1990, $35.7 million had been spent for some ten thousand books and manuscripts.
Both sales were spread out over several sessions and recorded totals that had never been approached in book auctions before. Pride of place in the Doheny sale was given to the Old Testament volume of the Gutenberg Bible; top billing in the Martin dispersal was a set of Audubon’s Birds of America. In all, twenty-six thousand books went under the hammer. Yet the Doheny and Martin averages pale when compared with those of lesser known dispersals that took place during the same period. In fewer than twenty-four hours on November 9 and 10, 1989, $16.2 million was spent for 308 “high spots” in world literature, an average of $52,815 per lot, which exceeded by far the averages logged in either the Doheny or Martin sales ($15,967 and $11,053, respectively). This was the sale of the Garden Ltd. collection, an auction that above all others recalled the reckless abandon of the Jerome Kern sale sixty years earlier on the eve of the Crash.
Beyond the impressive numbers and the excitement it generated was the fact that the Garden Ltd. collection had been built by the most baffling book collector to come along in decades. Haven O’More was a complete unknown. Even his name was a curiosity, rumored to be an anagram, for “HAVE NO MORE.”
He first attracted international attention in the fall of 1979 when he bought impressively at the London sale of an exceptional collection of books gathered over a span of forty years by Arthur Houghton, Jr., the Steuben glass heir whose most enduring monument is a special collections library at Harvard University that bears his name. “Haven basically swept what he wanted at the Houghton sale,” Stephen C. Massey, director at that time of rare books at Christie’s in New York, said. “That really is what made the Garden sale so thoroughly magnificent ten years later, that those Houghton copies—those books people thought were out of circulation for the remainder of their lifetimes—had come back once again.”
Why Arthur Houghton suddenly decided to sell his books in three comprehensive sales between June 13, 1979, and June 12, 1980, has never been fully explained. He was a principal benefactor of the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the donor of some unique John Keats material to the university as well, so many people thought
his personal collection one day would go to his alma mater. Instead, while still in his seventies and a full ten years before his death, Houghton not only decided to sell his books, but he chose to sell them in England.
Whatever his motivation, fabulous treasures assumed to be destined for institutions came onto the market. O’More had been buying important books for several years prior to the Houghton sale, but most of his purchases were negotiated privately through booksellers. In 1976, for instance, he quietly paid the New York bookseller Lew David Feldman $150,000 for the 1543 presentation copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, previously owned by Harrison Horblit. The Houghton sale, by contrast, was held in an international arena amid intense competition. Represented by John Fleming, O’More created a stir at the Houghton sale by paying premium prices for twenty-two magnificent items.
While O’More’s activity in London represented a dramatic debut, it did not come as a complete surprise to Stephen Massey, a savvy fourth-generation bookman whose great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had all been involved in the London book trade. If anything, it confirmed an urgency the auctioneer had sensed when he met O’More for the first time in April 1978. “This elegantly dressed man arrived at our Park Avenue gallery one morning and was making a scene,” Massey recalled. “Because he was demanding to see a book, I got the call to go downstairs and deal with him.” As Massey approached the disturbance, O’More shouted a single sentence: “Do you know who I am?” Massey replied that he did not have the slightest idea. “I am Haven O’More,” the man declared, “and I want to see this book.”
The book in question was nothing less than a Gutenberg Bible, a superb two-volume set of the forty-two-line masterpiece printed at Mainz in Germany in the 1450s, and consigned to Christie’s for immediate sale by the General Theological Seminary of New York. Though prospective buyers were allowed to examine the lot prior to auction, there were certain rules, and since the man’s behavior that April morning was rude, Massey decided to enforce them. If Haven O’More wanted to see a catalogued item, he had to make an appointment.
“I wasn’t worried about losing him,” Massey said, “because if the book’s good enough, they will always call back—they will crawl—if they really want the book.” Once O’More backed down, though, the two men shook hands and Massey showed him the Bible after all. O’More arrived at the sale a few days later with the noted San Francisco bookseller Warren Howell and was the underbidder on the Bible, finishing second to Bernard Breslauer, who paid $2.2 million in behalf of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, Germany.
Had O’More prevailed, the Gutenberg Bible would have been included in the Garden Ltd. sale eleven years later, an auction Christie’s made a determined effort to secure but lost “in straight combat” to Sotheby’s. “I breathed a sigh of relief on that score,” Massey said. “If there had been a Gutenberg Bible in there, it would have been a thirty-one-million-dollar sale. The way prices were that night? A perfect Gutenberg Bible? Who knows. I am just thankful they didn’t have it, because that would have been unbearable!”
Exactly where such an impressive buyer had come from became the subject of wild rumor. Some whispered that O’More had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and had been given a new identity; others said he had once been an actor. O’More had claimed to have written numerous scholarly articles and to have prepared highly sensitive evaluations for the government that were classified top secret. To others he spoke of having invented sophisticated weapons systems for the U.S. Defense Department. O’More was also purported to be a poet, an architect, and a philosopher. Some more concrete information, known by a few, was that he was president of a foundation in Massachusetts called the Institute of Traditional Science. However, a look at its organizational papers was not overly illuminating: the foundation was committed to the transmission of “pure knowledge.” O’More had also bragged that he could read ancient manuscripts in Greek and Hebrew and was adept at several martial arts, including arcane skills once practiced by American Indian warriors in the Old West. That melodramatic pose did not seem to bother anybody much, though; what did disturb the old-line collecting community was O’More’s brazen boast—that he was the greatest book collector alive.
Thirty-four city blocks away from Christie’s, in modest offices at 104 East Twenty-fifth Street, Swann Galleries mounts about thirty auctions a year. No van Goghs or Renoirs are offered there, no Chinese porcelain, no exotic tapestries—but solid values in books, prints, photographs, and ephemera. “You walk into Christie’s or Sotheby’s this afternoon with a fifteen-hundred-dollar book, and see what they say,” Stephen Massey said. “Lovely book, they will say, but sorry, we can’t take it.” But Swann’s will be delighted to take it on consignment. “Our bread and butter is the item that sells in the area of five hundred to two thousand dollars,” explained George S. Lowry, president of Swann’s. Partly because of this lower profile, Lowry got to see Haven O’More a few years earlier than the fancier houses uptown.
“Haven O’More arrived like a fireball,” Lowry recalled, speaking of O’More’s appearance on the book-collecting scene in the early seventies. “He absolutely lit up the sky. You pay attention when all of a sudden some smartly dressed guy you haven’t seen before is sitting in your gallery and spending serious money on books. The man came in with a ton of money, collected for ten years or so, and then disappeared. I’d been head of Swann three or four years when he came in with his glamorous wife and bought up a lot of books. Nobody knew who he was. I still don’t know, but I was impressed.” Lowry maintained that in some respects, O’More actually shaped the rare-book market. “He influenced it to the extent that people were orchestrating sales and catalogues they thought would appeal to him. If you’re in the business like me, that scares you a little bit. You get scared because here you’re dealing with somebody and you have no idea what’s going through his head. But I have to say this about him. He always bought what he wanted. He didn’t come to shop. He came to buy.”
Aside from his activity at auctions, O’More bought from book sellers like Hans P. Kraus and John Fleming of New York, and Warren Howell of San Francisco, three deans of the book trade. O’More also did business with Arthur Freeman of Bernard Quaritch Ltd. in London, and the bookseller Colin Franklin, near Oxford, England, both of whom became friendly with him.
Whatever his background or his manners may have been, as soon as it became evident that O’More was spending “serious money” on books, dealers were pleased to serve him and even perpetuate his myth. John Fleming, the New York bookseller who began in the trade as an associate of Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach during the 1930s, sold O’More many treasures and acted as his agent at numerous auctions. Fleming also introduced him to other important collectors, such as Arthur Houghton and William Scheide of Princeton, New Jersey. Houghton once invited Haven and Lorea O’More to spend a few days at his estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, according to Stephen Massey. In Massachusetts, where he took up residence in the late 1960s or early 1970s, O’More became a generous member of the Friends of Harvard College Library and attended dinners sponsored by Boston’s venerable Club of Odd Volumes. He traveled extensively, and everywhere he went he gained access and aroused curiosity. A curator at the University of Chicago’s John Crerar Library told me that O’More once pulled a rare book on the history of science from the shelves and made a single haughty comment—that his own copy was “far superior.”
For all his visibility, few felt they really knew the man, not the dealers who did business with him, not even the acquaintances who entertained him in their homes. Priscilla Juvelis, a bookseller who started working with John Fleming in 1979 and later opened her own shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said O’More was a total enigma. “Nobody knew anything about him,” she said, not even Fleming, “who probably sold him more books than anyone else.” She recalled what Fleming had ventured once about O’More’s boorish arrogance: “You hav
e to forgive a man who loves books as much as Haven.”
The New York bookseller Justin G. Schiller agreed. He talked with O’More briefly at a reception given by Bernard Quaritch Ltd. during the first Arthur Houghton sale and met him occasionally over the next ten years, once traveling to Boston to see O’More’s William Blake materials. “Haven was a marvelous actor,” Schiller said. “To my mind, he was a modern visionary. He tried to assemble the great books of learning. Regardless of his ego, the man loved his books. What impressed me about him was that he knew the books that he owned with an obvious degree of intimacy. But we never talked philosophy, and I knew very little of his background. Nobody did.” And what was the source of the new connoisseur’s wealth? Schiller had no idea. “John Fleming once told me that he would happily pay fifty thousand dollars to know where Haven got his money.”
Stephen Massey was one acquaintance who developed a close friendship with O’More. After their first meeting in the Park Avenue lobby of Christie’s in 1978, they began to see each other socially. “I would say I knew him very well,” Massey said. “The truth is that I grew very fond of Haven. I used to see him whenever he came to New York at fairly frequent intervals. I’d have lunch with him on his own or with him and Lorea. I was upset when he told me he had to sell the books. He didn’t tell me in so many words, but it was obvious that something was up. When he expressed some interest in the first Doheny sale, which we had in October of 1987, it was mild interest, and he didn’t buy anything at all, so I knew then that something was not quite right. Soon afterward I heard he had dropped from sight.”
In the summer of 1989, Massey was contacted by a Boston lawyer. “The man came to New York without identifying the name of his client at first, just saying he represented a partner in the Garden Ltd., and that they were looking for an appraisal prior to the dissolution of this partnership, which might require at some stage a sale of the Garden Ltd. This particular lawyer was exploring various angles about who should do an appraisal, and he came to us, among other people.” The man accepted Massey’s suggestion to assemble a team of experts that would include himself and several other specialists, and the appraisal was conducted in Boston, where the books were kept.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 29