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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  The book Brodsky and Hamblin agree may contain the single most important Faulkner inscription is not a first edition, but a later copy of The Sound and the Fury presented to Malcolm Cowley, the editor who brought out a popular collection of Faulkner’s fiction in 1946 titled The Portable Faulkner. The inscription reads, “To Malcolm Cowley, Who beat me to what was to have been the leisurely pleasure of my old age. William Faulkner.” Hamblin said the book’s importance as an artifact lies in its context. “Cowley revived Faulkner’s reputation when it was at its lowest. Cowley had rendered him a great service. What you have here is Faulkner paying tribute to this man who gave his career a new life.”

  After we sampled a few more items, the conversation returned to Brodsky’s sale of the collection. “I offered it twice to Yale, and I got the impression that what I had to offer wasn’t all that important,” he said. But indifference and bruised feelings weighed little in his decision compared to Yale’s unwillingness to allow him any say in how the collection would be handled. “That collection is a testimony to enormous passion, and they felt I should just turn everything over to them. And then they didn’t want to pay me anything for it. They buy things all the time at Yale, and here is a collection that would have brought them great distinction.”

  In the end, Brodsky sold part of the collection to Southeast Missouri State University for $1 million and donated the rest, though he insisted that money was not the only reason he placed the collection in what he called a “no-name” school. “The short of it all is that I am now an employee of the state. I am curator of the Louis Daniel Brodsky Collection. The contract is good for twenty years and my curatorial powers are all-inclusive. I may deaccession and accession anything that I choose during that period. At the end of that time, there is an option to renegotiate. When I forgo my position, my successor will not have any power to deaccession anything, not one item.” Proximity to Brodsky’s home— and the apparent approbation it would bring from his family—weighed just as heavily with him.

  A prevailing belief in antiquarian book circles is that Brodsky was able to go off wherever he wished on a moment’s notice because a vast family fortune was available to support his collecting passion. When Carl Petersen sold his Faulkner collection in 1989 to a consortium of booksellers for $445,000, the dealer who arranged the purchase, Peter Howard of Berkeley, California, thought he could sell it en bloc to Brodsky through Glenn Horowitz of New York.

  “It was my intention to sell the collection intact the day after I bought it,” Howard said, “and the idea basically was to move it across the same town” to Brodsky. The asking price was $670,000. “He and his dealer were not interested in buying the collection at my price, so I determined that the next responsible thing that I could do was to catalogue the collection properly.”

  Howard acknowledged that Brodsky’s collection is superior in its holdings of inscribed books, letters, and movie scripts, and little duplication would have resulted from the addition of Petersen’s collection. “Carl had the most comprehensive book collection in private hands, and by far the best ‘condition’ collection.” Petersen’s collection encompassed Faulkner in all languages and in all printed forms, including appearances in periodicals, and was rich in secondary material.

  When Petersen talked to me about his collection over dinner in St. Louis, there were no words of remorse and no second thoughts. He had collected Faulkner for more than forty years, and then had let the collection go. A chemical engineer and lifelong bachelor, Petersen said he was comfortable but not wealthy. “I was able to put money into something like this without ever having to worry that I was depriving anyone of anything.”

  But as he approached his sixtieth birthday in the late 1980s, he began to reflect. “The major items in the collection—the Marble Faun typescript, for instance—were all in a bank vault, all out of sight. So what was I supposed to do, go down to the bank once a week and play with them? I never got bored with the collection, but once the decision was made, I had no problems living with it.” He tried placing the collection with an institution, but gave up after a year. “Everyone wanted it—the Library of Congress was very interested—but they all wanted me to give it to them.” Finally, he sold the books to Peter Howard of Serendipity and his group of investors in 1989.

  “I was getting to the point where maybe the money began to mean more than the collection,” Petersen admitted. “It had served a very useful purpose, and now it is serving another useful purpose. So now let somebody else enjoy them. William Faulkner has served a purpose at both ends of my life.” Sadly, two and a half years after he sold the collection to secure a comfortable retirement, Carl Petersen died at the age of sixty-two.

  When asked why he passed on the Petersen collection, Brodsky took pains to point out that he did not have unlimited funds to work with. “That was more money than everything I had put into my collection combined,” he said. “In thirty years of collecting, the Brodsky Collection has cost six hundred thousand dollars, that’s all. So let me tell you another trick about collecting. You size up what’s there and you decide, I’m either going to go for it or I’m not, because I’m either in this for the long haul, or I’m not, but you have to live by your decisions, and there’s no looking back. You have to develop a sense of balance so that if you blow it on one, it’ll wash out the next time around.”

  As for family wealth, Brodsky said that his father is “an enormously prosperous man,” but he vigorously denied any suggestion that Saul Brodsky blindly underwrote his son’s collecting. “My father put three hundred thousand dollars into the collection, but those were loans over a twenty-five-year period, and every nickel he put in he got back. The reality is that I scraped for everything I got. My father is a very pragmatic businessman who didn’t think collecting Faulkner was very important, certainly not as good as stocks or real estate. I always tried to persuade him that what I was doing was a great investment, even though that was never my purpose at all.”

  Brodsky said that his most consuming goal had always been to gain recognition as a writer, and that collecting the manuscripts and books of William Faulkner fed that ambition in a stimulating way. Since 1963, he has written thirty-three volumes of poetry, twelve published by Time Being Books of St. Louis, a small press that specializes in poetry by American writers.

  “You must understand, above all, that I am a poet, and that Faulkner was a poet, even though his poetry was prose. Looking back, I can say that the reason I collected Faulkner so hungrily all those years was because he fired my desire to emulate him. There is no question that he inspired me to be a writer, and I did write seven novels when I was a much younger man. Unfortunately, they all came out sounding like William Faulkner, and none of them has been published. What I finally realized is that if I were ever going to succeed as a writer, it would have to be in poetry, the medium Faulkner wanted so desperately to master, and the one in which he failed. So the truth of the matter is that I wasn’t collecting just one great American author, I was collecting two, one of whom had already succeeded splendidly. The other—Louis Daniel Brodsky—is still striving to make his mark. It may well be my reason for being.”

  Michael Zinman was trying to explain why the old wooden three-decker house he owned outside Ardsley, New York, was filled with several hundred crates of American imprints, and why his home a few miles away and the building where he operates his business nearby contained almost as much material again. “I’ve always wanted action as opposed to quality,” he said. “I have always collected indiscriminately. If you do that, the good stuff takes care of itself.”

  When we first met in 1990, Zinman had already put together what is widely regarded as the most comprehensive private collection of material printed before the year 1800 in what is now the United States. He did this by gathering “imprints,” a word that essentially means anything that came off a printing press in a certain place within a specific period of time. Books are imprints—so are pamphlets, agricultural tracts, ser
mons, broadsides, and almanacs. The Bay Psalm Book is the most famous and most precious of all because it is the oldest surviving document produced in British North America.

  Because of their ephemeral nature—and because they were not, for the most part, produced to endure as hallmarks of the craft—the importance of imprints was recognized only after many of them had disappeared. Isaiah Thomas and George Brinley collected them with a passion. Significant institutional collections of American imprints are in the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Huntington Library, but relatively few remain in private hands. Prevailing wisdom holds that interest has waned because most of the “good stuff” already has been accounted for and that only “imperfect” material remains. What Michael Zinman decided to do in the early 1970s was to acquire all the early American material he could find, regardless of quality or condition.

  Zinman is a businessman whose company, Earthworm, Inc., buys and sells heavy construction machinery on an international basis, and a lot of what he does requires intense negotiations. “Yes, my business is a form of action as well,” he agreed, noting that a good deal of his activity was in the “energy area,” which involves “dealing with major utilities” around the world. He started Earthworm in 1968, and with its success came the freedom to collect on his own terms. “That doesn’t mean I no longer owe money to the booksellers; it only means I now owe them more than I ever did,” he said. “Most people collect for different reasons than I do. One of the things I did was always to collect objects in multiples. Let me also say that for whatever compelling reason I have to collect, it is not to possess. Possessing is irrelevant to me; it’s the action. Being a collector, accumulating, and having the fun, that’s what drives me; the pleasure that I always got was in the act of collecting. The possessing of the book, as pleasurable as it is, is transferred. Most of all, I believe collecting is an educative process. You have to handle the goods. If you handle the goods objectively, then after a while you learn to discriminate.”

  Zinman said that before he embarked on his American imprint odyssey, he collected United States Revenue Stamps, stamps affixed to documents to certify the payment of taxes. “I had a very formidable collection, probably the best collection of tax-paid beer stamps around. I loved them. But when I decided that books were overwhelming this area of my interests, I didn’t pack the stamps away; I dumped them because they weren’t alive anymore for me. I wasn’t about to lock them up and put them away.”

  William S. Reese of New Haven, Connecticut, the leading dealer in Americana, described Zinman as the “earl of Ardsley” in a speech given to mark the opening of an exhibition at the American Antiquarian Society in 1989 and later said, “Michael Zinman is in a class by himself.” Stephen Massey of Christie’s in New York said, “Michael Zinman has an extraordinary collection of Americana, and what makes it remarkable is that he has no reservations about acquiring imperfect copies.”

  Zinman agreed, though he does have some criteria. “What I have is certainly the largest, certainly the most important, though not necessarily the finest collection, because I look at fine in terms of quality, condition, and significance. I don’t own many of the great high spots of American imprints. I own three complete Eliot Bibles, for example, but they are second editions. I do own half of a first edition. I can buy one tomorrow, but I don’t want to spend a quarter of a million dollars for it. It’s a premium that I’m not prepared to pay, because I have limited sums of money to spend in a universe that would consume my money. Having said all that, however, it is probably true that I have formed the most comprehensive collection of American imprints in private hands since George Brinley, and he collected more than a hundred years ago. My feeling was that there had to be enough material out there for one more serious player.”

  Zinman explained that he gravitated toward imprints “because they had been forgotten by the private collector, because supposedly all the good stuff was accounted for. Nobody had collected this material for fifty years. It was no longer being sold. When I started buying these things, an imperfect book was considered less than garbage. It wasn’t even listed in catalogues. So I just started taking what nobody else wanted. My collecting mentality is that I acquire anything. I do it without discrimination. As you accumulate, all of a sudden this material reaches a critical mass, and soon it becomes a collection. The junk is absolutely essential. Some of the rarest books in my collection had been lying in the desk drawers of dealers’ shops for thirty or forty years. By taking everything in, you see the difference. You have the goods. You put everything on the table side by side, and you compare.”

  What develops from handling the “goods” is a sense of connoisseurship, a clear sense of worth, not just value. When a document said to be a long-lost copy of The Oath of a Freeman surfaced in 1985, Michael Zinman was the first person to challenge its authenticity. Such a broadside is known to have been produced between 1638 and 1639 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is regarded as the first document to be printed in British North America, predating the Bay Psalm Book. Though no copies of it are known to survive, its contents—the oath colonial freemen swore before assuming citizenship—are well documented. “It was too good to be true,” Zinman said, trying to explain why, unlike so many professional experts who believed it to be authentic, he advised every institution that sought his advice not to buy it. The Library of Congress passed on the $1.5 million asking price. The American Antiquarian Society made a firm offer of $250,000, which was rejected as too low by the owner, a Salt Lake City collector named Mark Hofmann.

  That Hofmann was a master forger became dramatically clear only after several people who suspected his activities were killed by homemade pipe bombs. In 1987, Hofmann pleaded guilty to murder and fraud and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His activities, including many spectacular forgeries produced and sold to the Mormon church that accounted for more than $3 million in sales, have been the subject of at least four books, but from a bibliographical standpoint, the most authoritative by far is The Judgment of Experts, a series of essays and documents published by the American Antiquarian Society in 1991. Zinman’s name appears throughout as a voice of disbelief. “It just didn’t settle right, not in any way,” he said. “I can’t explain it better than that. When I first saw it, it was so appealing it was seductive, but I had this feeling in my gut that something was wrong.”

  In the process of gathering material, Zinman acquired copies or fragments of every imaginable kind of Bible printed in America, the 1663 Eliot Indian Bible being the most prominent. He located multiple copies of the first German Bible printed in Pennsylvania, by Christopher Saur in 1743; the first American Bible printed in English, by Robert Aitken in 1782; Matthew Carey’s Roman Catholic Bible, known as the Douay Bible, published in 1790; first American Bibles in Hebrew, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French; the first Bible for the blind; the first children’s Bible; and the first with illustrations.

  “I have twenty copies of Kometographia, which is a great seventeenth-century scientific tract by the Massachusetts minister and author Increase Mather. I will buy any seventeenth-century book I can get my hands on, without exception. This is a very distinctive collection, and it grew out of accumulation. What I did was arrive on the scene, walk inside every bookstore I could find, and buy everything that was around. I wheeled and I dealed, and most of the time these people were thrilled simply to get rid of the stuff. I was fortunate in being in the right place at the right time. I bought it indiscriminately, and I wound up having a very great holding of this material. There is no holding like this that could be duplicated today.”

  Because he does not hesitate to part with books that no longer interest him, Zinman said he often sells material or gives it away to institutions. “Before I collected Americana, I was collecting natural history, so there was a time when I would go to one side of Quaritch and sell my natural history, and then go
to the other and buy my Americana.”

  The question of why Zinman has collected with such enthusiasm does not have a thoroughly clear answer. “It’s the action, but there also is an interaction, a link with some mechanism of history that strikes a responsive chord for me. I’m doing something that has some meaning. I like having these imprints, but I’m just the caretaker, and when I’m done with them, they will be dispersed. There will still be five institutional collections that are better than mine. I don’t think the world needs a sixth, or something clumped between five and ten.”

  Among the otherwise unknown items displayed in his exhibition at the American Antiquarian Society was a 1670 copy of the Laws of Massachusetts, a previously unrecorded eighteenth-century sermon given at a Boston execution, several early collections of church music, and an anthology of “meditations” that contains the only known published poem of Edward Taylor, a Colonial poet whose other work survived only in manuscript. Zinman said that he would like to follow the examples of George Brinley in the late 1800s and Thomas Streeter in the 1960s, collectors who ordered the sale of their libraries but also gave money to various institutions to bid for material at their auctions. “I like that,” Zinman said. “You help the institutions you want to help; they can go after the specific things they want, and what’s left goes out for everyone else to enjoy.”

  Every book collector has at least one “great story” to relate, and the one Zinman shared is unusually germane to his concept of unconditional accumulation. “About 1980 or so I got a call from a dealer by the name of Jim Rizik, a wonderful guy, and he says, ‘Do you want to buy a collection of pornography?’ It’s a huge collection, he says, one of a kind. ‘No way, I don’t want it,’ I tell him. But he’s practically giving it to me, so I say, okay, fine. Why do I do this? Who knows, but probably because the quantity and the dollars were reasonable at the time. So I send a couple of my employees out in a truck to pick it up, and they come back and they say, ‘You have no idea what you bought. You bought a house full of dirty books.’ By the time they finish unpacking, I have two hundred and sixty-eight cartons. What I bought was essentially an example of the entire world of pornographic literature from 1950 to 1975. There were twenty thousand paperbacks, ten thousand magazines, fifty thousand pictures—God knows what. I put it in the basement of my office, and it began to grate on me. You have to understand that this is trash, irredeemable trash, absolutely the worst things. Anything you can think of is there. It is a tumor in my cellar and I don’t know what to do with it.”