A past president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America widely respected for his knowledge of the trade, Howard considered Burden’s bold undertaking from the perspective of his colleagues. “This notion developed that Carter Burden was collecting all of American literature, and that all of American literature would be made available to him,” he said. “What is truly extraordinary is that all of American literature was made available to him. And those books didn’t just get born in the basements of those three or four primary booksellers. They had to come from somewhere, and the effort involved the whole of the book world. Just about everyone supplied those books, and they were repaid handsomely for their efforts.”
The problem with most of his colleagues, Howard suggested, is that “today is only a way they use to get to tomorrow, and once Carter stopped buying, he ceased to be a part of their plans. But he put millions of dollars into the modern first edition book trade, and that money became a free-floating cannonball.” As a consequence, Howard said Burden gave modern first editions “ten, twenty, or thirty more years” of boundless activity and that the “trade ought to be everlastingly thankful” to him.
The result for Burden, Howard added, was that “in ten years and however many millions of dollars—how many millions, maybe ten million, maybe twenty million; I doubt if it was more than twenty million— he built a fabulous collection. And he brought it up to the point that he stopped. None of us have a clue as to why he stopped buying, or why he stopped collecting. It seems inconceivable that it was money that stopped him from buying, so I have to feel that the collection, in his view, for the most part, was done. But it was absolutely wonderful while it lasted.”
Howard said that Burden, during the height of his activity, “represented more than twenty-five percent of my accounts receivable, which banks are inclined to tell you is a bad business practice. But I would not have my half-million-dollar building in Berkeley if Carter Burden had not come along when he did. So in truth and in memory, the Carter Burden phenomenon was a wonderful thing for the trade.” Ralph Sipper, who provided Burden with a large number of books and later took a number of smaller collections back as part of the winnowing process, offered a more succinct analysis: “What happened simply is that Carter ran out of room.”
But was it really over?
The February 1992 issue of Vogue published a stunning feature on a Manhattan apartment, newly designed by Mark Hampton and conceived entirely around the theme of books. Though the owner was not named in John Russell’s article, there was no doubt about the collector’s identity. Only one person in the world could have had the books Russell described: “The authors in question are all modern American, from Mark Twain more or less to the present.” Later, Russell noted that “this collector also delights in drafts (preferably unpublished) and will tackle movie scripts and diaries and rehearsal scripts, story lines and television plays and every other kind of memorabilia.”
Burden and I met again over a glass of wine late one afternoon that summer. My first reaction was that Burden’s Fifth Avenue apartment was more striking than the photographs reproduced so lavishly in Vogue were able to show, and later in House & Garden, which published a similar spread. While neither of these articles identified Carter and Susan Burden as the owners, the Burdens’ taste was richly apparent. The objects from the old house were everywhere, the George III writing table, the William IV armchairs, the sculptures, bronzes, porcelain, drawings, and clocks. And throughout the apartment the prevailing motif was, in Mark Hampton’s words, “books, books, books.” Because the ceiling in the living room was fourteen feet high, the dark cabinets had room for ten shelves. The arrangement was alphabetical by author, starting from the left, James Agee to John Steinbeck, and picking up in the next room with Peter Taylor and continuing through Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. On one exterior wall, twelve clamshell boxes were lying flat, each containing “special” John Updike material. Seventeen others, green with black labels, contained more than fifty “first draft playscripts” by Tennessee Williams.
It was an impressive sight, but there was still a small problem to be resolved. “I’m an old newspaper reporter who’s pretty good at estimating crowds,” I said, “and I figure something between ten and fifteen thousand books altogether in here.” Burden laughed. “About twelve thousand, maybe a little less. The rest are still in storage. It’s expensive, but I have access.” So was it true what people were saying after all, that he had stopped buying books? “I will never stop collecting,” he answered. “But the original scheme is finished. Six thousand authors is impossible. I finally realized that I can’t do it all. I can’t keep up with everything. It’s absurd.”
That Burden was still collecting, and collecting with purpose, became evident by his disclosure that Glenn Horowitz had recently bought for him a copy of Sinclair Lewis’s first book, Hike and the Aeroplane, at Swann Galleries auction of the Raymond Epstein library. Published in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham, the book was written for a juvenile audience that for the most part had “read the book to death.” As a result, very few of the one thousand books have survived with jackets intact, making complete copies exceedingly scarce. The presale estimate was $3,000 to $5,000; Burden paid $19,250.
“With everything you’ve got, I would have figured you to have Sinclair Lewis pretty much covered,” I said.
“I already had a copy of the book,” Burden replied evenly. “It was the dust jacket I needed.”
When two people collect in tandem, a dynamic comes into play that may create a product greater than its parts. The best-known twentieth-century example is the shared passion of Henry Clay Folger (1857–1930) and his wife, Emily Jordan Folger (1858–1936), who created the Folger Shakespeare Library in the nation’s capital. Their ashes are deposited behind a stone marker off the main reading room, with their legacy “for eternity.”
The library of the celebrated artist, printmaker, sculptor, and fine press publisher Leonard Baskin and his wife Lisa is a more recent case in point. When I visited the couple one Sunday afternoon in 1989, there were, they said, approximately thirty thousand books shelved in their eighteenth-century house in western Massachusetts, but overall size, Baskin quickly added, is largely irrelevant when viewed in context. “One book can be so fantastic that it makes numbers meaningless,” he said while moving purposefully through the large annex that adjoined his studio, then showed me a book titled Les Bouquets des Bergeres (Bouquets of the Shepherdesses) to reinforce the point. Published in Amsterdam in 1640, the large volume is notable for engravings executed by Crispin van De Pass, a man Baskin identified as one of the great Flemish engravers of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. “What you see here are Flemish and Dutch ladies of the aristocratic and upper middle class dressed as shepherds. Well, this is an incredibly scarce book. So what do numbers have to do with it? I could buy a thousand books for what this book is worth.”
As an artist in his own right, Baskin came to prominence during the 1950s as a man of many talents. Proficient in creating woodcuts, wood engravings, etchings, aquatints, and lithographs, he was considered a maverick in some quarters for his opposition to Abstract Expressionism. But the images and forms he produced attracted an appreciative following, with the result that many of his distinctive works are represented in the permanent collections of more than fifty major institutions. As a productive sideline during this period, Baskin also became well-known as a fine-press printer.
Baskin began collecting when he was a child growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression, and he recalled with special pleasure the memory of finding books he knew nothing at all about until the moment of discovery. “It is a thrill when you see something that you know in an instant is important. And it is just as exciting when you have the perception to connect it with something else of equal importance.” Leonard began collecting with Lisa, his second wife, in the mid-1960s; she said that her “
really passionate collecting” of books, pamphlets, letters, broadsides, almanacs, and ephemeral items relating to the political, social, and intellectual history of women from the sixteenth century on parallels her involvement with the revival of the women’s movement.
“I would say that we collect some books in concert and that we pursue others independently,” Baskin said. “Being older than Lisa, I’ve been doing it far longer, so there was a collection into which she merged. Then her own instincts had a way to express themselves. They were sharpened and intensified once our relationship was established.”
Baskin established the Gehenna Press while a student at Yale School of Art during World War II. In 1992 a commemorative exhibition, curated by Lisa Baskin, was mounted in honor of the press’s fiftieth anniversary. Hosea, the couple’s son, prepared the bibliography, and the British antiquarian bookman Colin Franklin contributed a lengthy essay to the exhibition catalogue. In it he compared Leonard Baskin’s work as a printer favorably with that of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press. Both Morris and Baskin produced fine printing “against the background of typographic reform, bibliophile taste, and artistic work, bearing in mind always that for Baskin these books display just one facet of an artist’s life.” Franklin found Baskin’s “chronic addiction as collector of books and prints,” moreover, to be relevant to “any account of books he has printed, for they also grew within traditions. It is a commonplace of collecting, rare of attainment now, that no form of life in libraries compares with the intimacy of owning. The point has to be made, because the books and prints surrounding him are also within the soul of that art which informs this exhibition.”
Franklin had known Baskin professionally for more than twenty-five years, not only as a provider of books for his library, but also as a leading authority on fine press printing, the “peripheral, though splendid, activity” Baskin took up when he founded the Gehenna Press and which he never stopped mastering. “Leonard is quite exceptional among collectors in that he has an artist’s eye for things which other people are ignoring,” Franklin said when I interviewed him in his Oxford home. “He doesn’t buy the fashionable things. He’s a thoroughly original man. His knowledge of early color printing, for instance, or those seventeenth-century etchers and engravers he has uncovered, have demonstrated great perception. I would guess he feels something like contempt for people who collect middle-of-the-road things.”
After Baskin returned Les Bouquets des Bergeres to its shelf, he brought out what he described as a “great new addition” to the collection that he “never knew existed” until the moment he laid eyes on it a few weeks earlier. “At first glance it’s a rather common book of the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was published in 1610,” he said. “This copy, as you can see, was owned by a cardinal, and part of the original covering is rather nicely preserved in a nineteenth-century binding, which has surrounded the original central portion. That is all very nice; but look further, and you will see there are thirty engravings after a man named Otto van Veen, whom I knew to be the teacher of Peter Paul Rubens. Now, what makes this copy very special is that the engravings have been gilded and colored by a very talented artist. It’s breathtaking, actually. It’s the sort of book I never dreamed we could possibly ever own, yet here it is. It absolutely takes my breath away.”
What made the book especially meaningful was Baskin’s considered belief that the engravings were colored by someone closely related to the artist who drew them. “I knew Otto van Veen was a great theoretician and artist in his own right. And the quality of the painting here is unmistakable; this book was colored by a very fine artist. That is what was immediately apparent to me. I’ve been looking at books critically since I was thirteen years old, so call it instinct if you want, but it’s a little more than that.”
“We were still pretty lucky,” Lisa added, and Leonard laughed.
“We were, indeed,” he said. “We got it from a bookseller who didn’t understand; he thought that because someone had colored in the engravings, they were worth less.”
While discoveries of such magnitude are infrequent, the Baskins go out constantly to hunt for fresh material, and they both insist they find good books wherever they go.
“I can find good books anywhere,” Lisa said.
“I just got a wonderful book at the Boston Book Fair that I had never seen or heard of before,” Leonard said. “It’s on the movement of water.” He located Les Raisons des forces mouvantes, a scientific work published in Paris in 1624 that explains the mechanics necessary to move water through fountains.
“This man Salomon de Caus, I knew that man, he is famous for having done a perspective book which I could never find,” Leonard said. “So this is fundamentally a book about machinery, about the movement of water, about waterwheels.”
“Fundamentally a boring book,” Lisa said.
“It’s not really a boring book,” Leonard said.
“It’s boring,” Lisa insisted.
“Yeah, maybe—until you get to these wonderful etchings. Look at this, this is like a tableau vivant, only in this case the animations are created with water. This is a musical instrument, a player piano, maybe, who knows? But look—here—this is a grotto, with fountains. Look at this plate. Here is a ball coming up out of the fountain, and all around it are chameleons, monsters, fairies, creatures, making a star of water jets, and the creatures are keeping the ball in the air. It’s a fabulous plate. It really knocked me for a loop when I saw it.”
Another plate pictured a kind of seventeenth-century automaton, “worked by music, worked by water, and meanwhile the animals are charmed. You see the animals? In every nook and cranny there are animals. These are copper engravings or etchings, it’s hard to say which, but look, you see these animals everywhere. I even know where most of them are copied from. You see this alligator hiding there? The owl up there? It’s just gorgeous.” He paused, considered a question, and continued almost in a whisper. “It hits me on every level, as an artist, as a collector, as a printer, on all levels, because it’s a book of vast interest. And it’s so peculiar. So unknown.”
Baskin expressed his firm belief that the illustrated material he and his wife have assembled as a couple “should go out again, to collectors,” but that her archive belongs in an institution. “What Lisa has done is put together diverse materials and made a new whole out of them. The ephemeral material, the journal material, the manuscript material, and the printed books together create a new entity which has never existed before. And as a result, it instructs us, it informs us, it delights us, it educates us, and it transforms us, and it won’t ever be put together in that way again. It can’t be, because the material is too ephemeral. To break that up, it seems to me, would be to betray its essential quality. Whereas to break up the collection of old books, you’re not breaking anything up, that’s just a very nice collection of miscellaneous early books.”
The Baskins also showed me their collection of portrait books, books that feature likenesses of people, which Leonard said are desirable because “nobody else is interested” in them. “There are a half-dozen great portrait books that everybody knows and all the great libraries have, but beyond that there are hundreds and hundreds that nobody knows anything about. It’s totally unknown because portrait collections tend to be boring, so they become a drag on the market. The booksellers don’t like them. But since I have started this collection, the market has been rising slowly. I’ve had a direct influence on that to the point that every portrait book that comes along is offered to me.”
We then examined a variety of other unusual items, Renaissance medals, bronzes, and casts among them. “I collect something called memorial jewelry, which nobody was interested in when I was buying it in the early sixties,” Lisa said. Memorial jewelry, also known as commemorative jewelry, came into vogue during the Renaissance and was crafted to observe family milestones such as weddings, birthdays, and deaths. Because the pieces often bear personal inscriptions, they h
ave the potential to “tell a story,” a quality Lisa said she found especially attractive. “We used to collect old master prints, too. We sold many of them and now we have begun only recently to collect them again.”
“Do you know what watch papers are?” Leonard asked. “When people had those great big watches and they brought them in for repairs, the watchmaker made a note on a piece of paper explaining what work he did. The piece of paper was engraved with his name and locus. From that commercial interest, which was started in the eighteenth century, a device grew where lovers would give to sailors, or someone going off on a long trip, or just generally, a token of affection to keep inside their watch. It was a little watercolor. Well, we have the largest collection in the world of those. Whenever one comes on the market, it comes to us.”
He noted that the American Antiquarian Society has “a very nice collection” of watch papers too, though the one he and Lisa have assembled is stronger. “The Antiquarian Society also has an excellent collection of ferry tickets, which I admire. Things like ferry tickets are very important because that’s how history takes on a graphic side. If you have an 1812 ferry ticket, that ferry becomes palpable in your imagination instead of just being a figment of your imagination. The presence of the ticket lends reality to the idea. Isn’t that true?”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 36