A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Though Franklin thought he knew O’More well, he too said he was surprised to learn that there was a silent partner. He had never really probed him about the source of his wealth, but O’More had given him the impression that he was a self-made man with a genius for investment. “He mentioned something he’d invested heavily in. It may have been totally fiction, or it may have been true. I have no idea. In other words, he gave the impression he was buying with his own money. And he lived fairly high, but you don’t have to be rich to live fairly high.”

  Franklin acknowledged that when he learned at the time of the sale that O’More had been “using somebody else’s money” to build the Garden collection, “it was a little disillusioning” because what had intrigued him most about the man was his attitude toward money. “The impression he gave was an interesting one; the reality turns out to be not so interesting. The impression he gave was that he was a kind of philosopher-king, a person who had the ability to think when he chose, and live the philosophical life, and then, when he chose, to turn that off, and to turn on the money-making tap. If he needed another supply of money, well, he would just tune in to that wavelength, and make what money he needed. And then he would turn it off again, and come back into the philosophical mode, and buy what books he wanted. It was an impressive scenario, and I believed in it.”

  O’More also led Franklin to believe that he had written a hundred or more learned manuscripts over the previous twenty to twenty-five years. Nothing seemed to be published, though. O’More had shown Franklin a slim book of poems, entitled Sacrificial Bone Inscriptions, and there were a few short pieces in some photography books. “It amounted to but one slender thing, really, and he showed it to me with such great pride. I think that he had considerable fear of going into print and of not being recognized as the guru he would have us think he was. And that’s why he wouldn’t go into print,” Franklin speculated charitably. “Perhaps he felt that anything printed and subject to public scrutiny would show him to be the man he didn’t wish to seem.”

  Along with the show of deep learning, Franklin noticed that it was important to O’More to project a youthful air. “One great vanity of his was that he should seem very young.” Franklin said he saw through this, estimating O’More to be in his sixties during their acquaintance in the mid-1980s. “It would seem that he would have us think he was forty-five for such a long time.”

  Once he learned the circumstances of O’More’s collecting, Franklin said he felt “let down” by the man. “I realized that there had been some deception in our relationship. This man had pretended to be something he wasn’t. And I thought I was the one who cared for him.” Franklin shook his head slowly. “It’s always humiliating when you are exposed,” he said sadly. “When you are shown to be a lesser man.”

  Though few people knew it at the time, the real reason for the Garden Ltd. sale was not, as one Sotheby’s official had asserted, because “two collectors have decided to split up and go their separate ways.” In fact, the sale had been ordered by a superior court judge in Massachusetts after hearing evidence so explosive that it later would be sealed when I sought legal access to examine it.

  On the first day of the sale, three Sotheby’s officials had told me that I could not talk to Haven O’More anywhere inside their auction house. Why? They would not say. When I introduced myself to Michael Davis after the last lot had been hammered down, he told me to talk to his lawyer and walked away. It was apparent that there had been a major falling-out, and the obvious place to start looking for information was in the city where each of the partners had lived.

  The week after the sale, I turned up traces of a lawsuit, Davis vs. O’More, in the Middlesex Superior Court for the Southern District, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but was not allowed to see any of the files. Judge Katherine Liacos Izzo was assigned to the case. When I asked to meet with her, the clerk suggested I come back in two weeks. When I did so, I was told that Judge Izzo still had the matter “under advisement.” This seemed odd. When I had first walked into the courthouse two weeks earlier, I had gotten a copy of the case log known as the docket sheet, and it clearly showed that the proceeding had been discharged five months earlier, resolved to the apparent satisfaction of all parties. How could it still be under advisement?

  On December 14, 1989, I formally asked the chief administrative justice of the trial court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to intervene and allow me to see these public documents. A month later, an attorney in Judge Arthur Mason’s office informed me that “the case has been impounded and is not available for public inspection.” Frustrated but intrigued, I went back to the Middlesex County Courthouse and asked to see the file once again. I was not surprised to be told the case was now sealed. I then wandered into the room where the dockets are stacked and found that the seven pages I had been allowed to copy two months earlier had been replaced with a single sheet of blank paper. The case number, 88–635, was at the top with the word “impounded” written in longhand. Even the name of the proceeding, Davis vs. O’More, had been removed. Obviously, my poking around had prompted the parties to put the entire matter under wraps, and Judge Izzo inexplicably had complied. In an instant, the record of whatever had transpired in courtroom 7A from January 29, 1988, to July 5, 1989, was now forbidden material. But unbeknownst to them all, I still had a certified copy of the original docket sheet. And all this heavy-handed secrecy had roused my curiosity even more.

  Michael Davis, the suddenly-taboo summary sheet revealed, was the plaintiff in an action started in 1988 to dissolve a partnership. Davis brought suit against O’More, individually, and in his capacities as an officer of the Institute of Traditional Science, the Garden Ltd., and the Dolphin Realty Trust. The first order of business of Davis’s suit had been to seize the estimated $10 million book collection, which was being held in the vaults of the Bank of New England and the Boston Safe Deposit Company. The court also authorized an attachment of O’More’s personal property, estimated to be worth another $2 million. Nineteen motions were submitted and approved on January 29, 1988, the day the action began. Representing Michael Davis was Hale and Dorr, regarded by many as the most prestigious law firm in Boston. Five lawyers were listed as counsel for plaintiff. Haven O’More had retained Widett, Slater & Goldman, also of Boston; three lawyers were identified as appearing on his behalf. Two others were listed as counsel for the banks holding the rare books.

  In addition, the receipt of an affidavit from Dr. Thomas Gordon Gutheil was recorded. Dr. Gutheil, I soon learned, was president of the Law and Psychiatry Research Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, and director of the Program of Psychiatry and Law at Harvard University Medical School. A nationally recognized authority on forensic psychiatry, Dr. Gutheil was the coauthor of Clinical Handbook of Psychiatry and the Law, a standard text on the subject first published in 1982 and issued in a second edition in 1991. He was the editor of a 1991 book, Decision Making in Psychiatry and the Law, and had written ninety professional articles and contributed twenty-two chapters to books. He was a member of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law and the International Academy of Law and Mental Health.

  Michael Davis, my research disclosed, was the son of Leonard and Sophie Davis, who met during the 1940s as students at City College of New York. Leonard Davis became a successful businessman engaged in a variety of enterprises, including Colonial Penn Insurance Group and Play-Pix Productions, Inc., producers of stage and film dramas. He was also principal owner of National Telefilm Association, which in the early 1960s sold WNTA-TV Channel 13, a New Jersey television station. In 1972, Leonard Davis received an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a tribute frequently bestowed on major donors. On May 13, 1975, the New York Times reported that Leonard Davis, class of 1944, had given $2.5 million to his alma mater toward the construction of a $5 million performing arts center, Aaron Davis Hall, housing the Leonard Davis Center for the Performing Arts. Another article described the gift as “the largest con
tribution by a living person to a unit of the college.”

  On the strength of these findings, it was evident to me that Michael Davis had been persuaded or, more likely, pressured by his family to break his legal relations with Haven O’More by bringing the suit.

  I unearthed the original Garden Ltd. partnership papers almost by accident. Since the thrust of Davis vs. O’More was to break a partnership, the documents had to be recorded somewhere showing that such an alliance had been formed. Curiously, none was on file in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, which seemed odd, since both men lived in the state and the court action took place there. Among all the records of the real estate transactions near Harvard Square of Michael Davis and Haven O’More in the Middlesex County Registry of Deeds office, I found a scrap of legal miscellany recorded in 1985. It showed that Haven O’More, the owner of a condominium unit at 14 Concord Street in Cambridge, had granted Haven O’More, general partner of the Garden Ltd., the right to use parking space number 19, which adjoins the building. The transaction was nothing more than a routine formality, but in executing it, the Garden Ltd. was identified as “a New York limited partnership” with “a post office address of c/o Aperture, Elm Street, Millerton, New York.”

  Limited partnerships in New York are not recorded in Albany, the state capital, but in the various county seats. Millerton is in Dutchess County, ninety miles north of Manhattan, and maintains administrative offices in Poughkeepsie. And it was there, in the county clerk’s office, that I found the Garden Ltd. partnership certificate. The Garden Ltd., it shows, had been established on December 9, 1983, as an association formed “primarily to write and develop new manuscripts, to rewrite, edit and publish manuscripts, and to hold and collect rare books and manuscripts.” Haven O’More was listed as “sole general partner,” and Michael Davis the “sole limited partner.”

  Michael Davis, the certificate disclosed, had contributed to the partnership “marketable, listed securities” then valued at $10.5 million, subject to bank indebtedness of $2.35 million, which the partnership assumed, and rare books valued at $6 million. Nothing in the agreement suggested that Davis was seeking a rapid return on his stake in the partnership. Davis had locked himself into the partnership “until the close of business on June 16, 2029.” By then, Davis himself would be very elderly, and O’More—twenty-five years older than Davis—would be well over 100, and in all probability deceased. Davis, moreover, was forbidden to “sell, assign, encumber or otherwise transfer” any part of his interest in the partnership to anyone else, and no time was set forth for the return of his contribution. Furthermore, no other general or limited partner was allowed to become involved without the consent of Lorea O’More, who was the only person permitted to become general partner and to continue the partnership in the event of the death, retirement, or insanity of Haven O’More. The partnership’s bills would be paid out of the first $100,000 in dividend income earned each year; Michael Davis could have 25 percent of whatever was left over as an annual allowance.

  So Davis had given O’More nearly absolute control over more than $13 million—$7.7 million in negotiable securities and $6 million that already had been spent for rare books—and had done so without even signing his name. Only one signature appears on this certificate, that of Haven O’More, who executed it “on his own behalf and as Attorney-in-Fact for the Limited Partner.” On the same day the partnership was formed, Davis had granted an irrevocable power of attorney to O’More, making him his “true and lawful agent and attorney-in-fact, with full power of substitution, in his name, place and stead to make, execute, sign, acknowledge, deliver and file on behalf or in respect to the Partnership” any documents that would have any bearing on the Garden Ltd. In effect, O’More was granted total authority to handle Davis’s partnership affairs for the rest of his life and beyond it as well, as it remained in force even after Davis’s death.

  A year later, in October of 1984, the partnership certificate was amended to allow Michael Davis’s contribution to be increased from $13.7 million to $17,001,589.78, the additional money being “cash in the amount of $4,105,589.78.” In return, Davis was allowed an increase in allowance; he now was permitted to withdraw up to $100,000 a year for his personal use. Once again, the only signature is that of Haven O’More, signing for himself and as attorney-in-fact for Michael Davis.

  In 1983, Haven O’More had been living in Massachusetts for at least ten years. Michael Davis was then listing his legal residence as Grantham, New Hampshire, where there is no state income or sales tax, though other documents show that he also lived next door to the O’Mores in Cambridge. All the rare books they bought were being kept in Boston bank vaults. Yet the certificate of limited partnership located their principal place of business as Millerton, New York. No telephone number for their partnership was listed in the town, nor did it appear that O’More or Davis ever actually conducted business from there. An Aperture executive acknowledged that the Garden Ltd. never had offices at the Elm Street address they cited either. So why had the Garden Ltd. used a small community more than a hundred fifty miles from where the principals lived as the legal address of their partnership?

  Most states have laws requiring that certificates of partnership be announced over a period of weeks in the classified advertising pages of local newspapers. Establishing the Garden Ltd. in Cambridge would have meant publishing such a detailed declaration—including the power of attorney agreement—in a Boston publication in which the arrangement was likely to be noticed. But by establishing a “mail drop” in Millerton, the Garden Ltd. could satisfy these requirements with notices in the Poughkeepsie Journal and the Millbrook Round Table, regional newspapers with modest circulations that do not extend east into New England or south to New York City. Thus, nobody in the antiquarian book world— and nobody in the Davis family, for that matter—would have been likely to learn about an arrangement giving Haven O’More unrestricted use of more than $17 million of Michael Davis’s money.

  When the partnership was formed in 1983, some $6 million already had been spent on rare books, all of it furnished by Michael Davis. O’More and Davis had been in business together for quite some time before that, however. Nine years earlier, in September 1974, the two had established the Institute of Traditional Science, Inc., as a non-profit, charitable corporation “to explore the knowledge and learning of ancient civilizations,” and to “study the applicability, relevance and relationships of such knowledge and learning to contemporary life in its broadest scope, encompassing inter alia the contemporary areas of religion, the physical and biological sciences, medicine-nutrition, and philosophy; and to transmit this knowledge and learning and the energy stored in these ancient works to the present time period and to future generations.” To these ends, the institute would “establish libraries and archives of relevant published books and materials, unpublished manuscripts and other study materials for use by researchers, students and scholars of Traditional Science.” Haven O’More was listed in the incorporation papers as president, his wife as treasurer, and Davis as clerk.

  At about the same time, O’More and Davis had formed yet another entity, the Dolphin Realty Trust. This entity promptly began buying up property on Concord Avenue and Garden Street in an area adjoining their homes in Cambridge known as Arsenal Square. Perhaps, as O’More asserted in the Sotheby’s sale catalogue, the name of the Garden Ltd. was inspired by a Hebrew word for enclosure, but maybe it had something to do with Garden Street as well. The properties created a triangular lot of about one and a half acres, and it was here that their library was to be built. But it was a doomed project. Cambridge, it happened, is very particular about its historic preservation regulations, and records show that in his haste to build his “sacred city,” O’More did not secure proper permits in tearing down several old buildings protected by the Cambridge Historical Commission.

  O’More’s efforts to proceed met with strong neighborhood opposition. One resident, Albion T. Sawyer, le
d a 1978 petition drive called the Arsenal Square Moratorium to prevent construction. Rumors swirled that Dolphin Realty Trust was a front for Harvard University, crudely seeking to expand its territory, a sensitive issue in a city where Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology already own major parcels of tax-exempt real estate. The Planning Board became involved, the City Council was drawn in, meetings and hearings were held, votes were taken, orders made and renewed. The project was put on indefinite hold, and never got beyond the planning stage.

  “There was a feeling out there that Haven O’More was a straw for Harvard,” Dr. Owen Gingerich, professor of astronomy and the history of science at the nearby Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recalled many years later. An ardent bibliophile in his own right, Dr. Gingerich was widely recognized as the world authority on the publishing history of Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, a circumstance that first brought him in contact with O’More. He knew O’More as well as anyone at Harvard during the 1970s and 1980s, and followed the Arsenal Square controversy closely. “Of course it wasn’t true at all, it was quite preposterous; Haven had nothing at all to do with Harvard, but the people in the neighborhood wouldn’t believe it.” Finally, O’More abandoned his dream. If his great library was going to go up, it would not do so in Cambridge. Gingerich said he heard stories that O’More “actually talked about putting the library into a space capsule and putting it into orbit,” and failing that, “he would move everything down to Arkansas,” where Lorea O’More was from, and where the couple maintained a second home.