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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Harry Ransom was not a politician, yet his dream depended on how skillfully he could manipulate the Board of Regents and the state legislature. Amazingly enough, he always got the money he wanted, and he usually got it on the strength of his word. “There was something about the man that made people believe anything was possible, even if it wasn’t,” said Warren Roberts, the administrator who served as Ransom’s principal HRC executive for fifteen years, one Saturday morning in his home near the Austin campus. “Harry Ransom had a God-given talent for getting money out of the Board of Regents,” Roberts added with a shake of his head. “I don’t know how he did it year after year, but he did it every time.”

  Born in Galveston, Ransom spent most of his adult life at the University of Texas, starting as an assistant in the English Department in 1935 and becoming a full professor in 1947. He was named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1954, vice president and provost in 1957, president of the University of Texas at Austin in 1960, and chancellor of the statewide system the following year. Warren Roberts researched his doctoral dissertation on D. H. Lawrence under the supervision of Dr. Harry Ransom and was appointed director of the Humanities Research Center in 1961, a position he held until 1976. As point man for Ransom’s acquisitions program, Roberts often absorbed attacks that belittled the university’s aggressive tactics. “They all thought we were a bunch of pirates, hayseed millionaires with no taste in anything,” he said. “It didn’t improve our reputation with the old guard very much that we were buying everyone we could find, everyone, and that we were doing it intentionally and as quickly as possible.”

  Roberts shrugged at the suggestion that this aggressive strategy inflated the value of twentieth-century material, and that other institutions were unable to compete in the face of such activity. “I admit that we probably were responsible for driving the prices up to higher levels,” he said. “But I also knew that there wasn’t enough money in the world to build a collection that would be the equal of Harvard’s or Yale’s. It didn’t matter how rich you were thirty years ago or how rich you are now, that kind of material wasn’t available then and it isn’t available today. But there sure was enough money to build a better twentieth-century library. Once we decided that we were willing to pay good money for it, it became valuable overnight. That was inevitable. It’s the nature of the marketplace.”

  Sixteen years elapsed between Ransom’s articulation of his proposal to the opening, in 1972, of the huge limestone citadel known as the HRC at Twenty-first and Guadalupe Streets; during these years, while the acquisitions program was proceeding at full speed, no permanent facility was available for storage. “The stuff was housed everywhere, all over the place,” Roberts said. “We kept things in the main building, up in the tower, over where the president’s office is now. Despite everything some people would have you believe, though, we did not buy indiscriminately, and regardless of where we put it, we had everything pretty well cared for.”

  But the image of rare documents gushing like so many rogue oil wells into Austin elicited ridicule and contempt, and lingered in some quarters for years. The New York manuscript dealer Charles Hamilton, without offering any specifics, alleged in print that the university spent millions of dollars for “virtually worthless” material, while the esteemed John Carter of Great Britain snorted in a self-serving letter to the widow of a noted Chicago collector that Texas was “the most bibliophilically unpopular institution in the entire United States.”

  More reliable evaluations, though, have come from people with no personal agendas. “Anyone who says Texas bought junk doesn’t know what they are talking about, it’s as simple as that,” Roger E. Stoddard, former curator of rare books at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, said. Robert L. Nikirk, for twenty years librarian of the Grolier Club, agreed: “You hear that whining every so often, and it’s nothing but sour grapes.” The British bookseller Colin Franklin reasoned that acquisition on the Texas scale “almost guarantees that you’ll get some inferior material along the way. But they also bought a massive amount of genuinely useful things.” Roger G. Kennedy, the former director of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the author of many books on social and architectural history, asked, “What is junk anyway? Who makes those decisions? I believe that the only way to appreciate a masterpiece is to understand what created it. You can’t just look at the end product, the polished work. If you want to understand something properly, you have to see the things that led to its creation.”

  Nicolas Barker, speaking in his office at the British Library, agreed with Kennedy’s essential premise, and provided a comparison. “Just because someone is unknown does not mean they should not be collected. We have scholars in this building at this moment who are looking at the work of several obscure sixteenth-century poets. Who knows what they will find? What is important is that the material has survived, and it is here to be studied.” G. Thomas Tanselle, the noted bibliographer and vice president of the Guggenheim Foundation, pointed out that fashion is always fickle and agreed that preservation should always take precedence over whether an author is in vogue or not.

  Harry Ransom made his first great acquisition in 1958 when he purchased an enormous collection of literary material from Thomas Edward Hanley, a Bradford, Pennsylvania, brick manufacturer who had filled his house with many important paintings and thousands of books and manuscripts. “I found out about Hanley in an odd way,” Roberts said. “I had gone to New Mexico in 1954 to do some research on my D. H. Lawrence bibliography, and I got to know Frieda Lawrence pretty well. She told me how this man in Pennsylvania had bought up a lot of her husband’s manuscripts, some of them through Jake Zeitlin out in Los Angeles, some directly from her on the installment plan. She told me who he was, and I wrote him a letter, which began a correspondence that went on for some time.”

  Ransom opened negotiations with Hanley through Jacob Schwartz, a former Brooklyn dentist who operated the Ulysses Bookshop in London during the 1920s and was noted for his ability to acquire primary material from writers in need of cash. Indeed, on his stationery “Jake” Schwartz listed his specialty as “First Editions and Manuscripts of Esteemed Authors.” Hanley bought thousands of manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia by such writers as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and T. E. Lawrence from Schwartz. Samuel Beckett called Schwartz the “Great Extractor” for his uncanny ability to separate authors from their literary material.

  Hanley was a man of means, but his obsessive buying had gotten so far out of hand that in 1958 he owed Jake Schwartz $128,000, and that was just one dealer; he had been buying books and paintings for three decades, and his debts were numerous. What finally persuaded Hanley to divest himself of his books was not unpaid accounts, but the visit he received one day from his insurance company. “Hanley lived in an old Victorian frame house in Bradford,” Roberts said, “and the underwriters flat out refused to give him another policy. They told him the place was a firetrap, there was no security, and it was filled with priceless things. The walls were completely covered with paintings— Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin—you name it. He decided to keep the art and sell everything on paper. We got there at just the right time.”

  Though Roberts did not remember the precise amount Texas paid Hanley for the 155,000 books and manuscript leaves that came to the university in several installments, Carlton Lake, the executive curator of the Humanities Research Center, wrote in a 1987 essay that the acquisition was “a seven-figure deal.” In return, Texas acquired a collection that Anthony Hobson judged to be of “international importance.” Roberts said he returned from Italy “just in time” to open the first boxes. “You would not believe the stuff that came out of that shipment. I don’t think anybody knew what he had or what was going to come out next. It was one of the most exciting things that ever happened.”

  Among the prizes were Lawrence’s manuscripts for Kangaroo, The Lost Gir
l, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and The Virgin and the Gipsy— more than twenty-five hundred pages in the writer’s hand. The Samuel Beckett material included manuscript copies of Waiting for Godot, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and the heavily revised text of a work-in-progress titled Beckett’s Bums. Among the hundreds of T. E. Lawrence items was the earliest surviving manuscript version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “The list was endless,” Roberts said, and reaffirmed a point he made in a 1986 essay for The Library Chronicle: “Thomas Edward Hanley was an astute collector and an extraordinary man; although not a scholar himself, he had an uncanny instinct for buying the right manuscript or book, a distinction rare even among collectors. Scholars must always be grateful to Hanley because much of surpassing importance would have disappeared had it not been for his drive to collect in the contemporary field.”

  Hanley sold his personal books and manuscripts to Texas for cash because he needed the money, but the zest for giving had inspired him to help others who were less fortunate. The University of Arizona considers him the most important book donor in its history, a commitment that began with an impromptu visit he made during the Depression and continued for more than twenty-five years. Hanley’s custom had been to spend three months during the winter in California buying books. While traveling by train to Los Angeles in 1936, he stopped briefly in Tucson to look up a Harvard classmate at the university, and discovered to his dismay that research and reference material in virtually every area of the humanities and fine arts was lacking. Arizona had fewer than half a million residents then, and the state university was struggling for survival, so book purchases were not a high priority.

  Starting then, and continuing well into the 1960s, Hanley bought hundreds of rare and important books throughout the United States for the university, which he routinely shipped to Tucson with eccentric instructions for cataloguing, shelving, and possible function. “His passion for acquiring was so great that it usually exceeded even his own substantial resources,” Lee Sorenson wrote in a commemorative booklet published by the Friends of the University of Arizona Library. “Shipments of books from Hanley appeared in all forms from all sources and at all times.” When Hanley died in 1969, his book gifts were calculated to total 91,500 volumes, 38,550 to Arizona alone; other recipients included St. Bonaventure University in New York State, Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, and the Carnegie Library in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

  For Texas, the Hanley acquisition represented a new way of doing business. As Warren Roberts pointed out, getting other archives now involved “visits to heirs and executors of estates, the cultivation of friendly and amiable relations with writers themselves, their kinsmen, booksellers, literary agents, and assorted friends, landlords, and hangers-on.” Authors, moreover, were delighted with what they perceived as a lucrative new market for their material.

  In an essay for the London Sunday Times of April 15, 1962, Cyril Connolly reported how a certain unnamed American university was willing not only “to pay for what an author has written but what he has tried to throw away; his note-books, correspondence, false starts; they will sort it all out for him and accept material which is never to be shown and provide him with copies and even resident facilities for writing his autobiography.” The development, he concluded, was “probably the best thing that has happened to writers for many years.”

  Not surprisingly, Connolly’s manuscripts and notebooks were among those that soon made the migration across the Atlantic to Austin. Exactly two years after the appearance of his article, another view was expressed in the same newspaper by William Rees-Moog, owner of Pickering & Chatto, one of the most respected booksellers in England. He warned that the steadily rising prices of contemporary books and manuscripts, very few of which were going to English institutions or universities, probably meant that “this is the last decade in which it is at all possible to form any sort of proper university collection of English literature. [The] opportunity is already slipping fast away. The University of Texas has been taking it—we have not.”

  What people were saying in confidence about the trend raised even greater alarms, not only in England but also in the United States. In one documentable case, a blatant appeal to regional loyalty helped terminate a deal that would have sent a major private American collection of English books to Austin in 1964 for $2.75 million; the sudden change of mind led to a civil suit to recover the lost commission. The New York bookseller John Fleming filed the court action in Illinois on August 6, 1964; he had negotiated to everyone’s apparent satisfaction the sale of the Chicago hotel owner Louis H. Silver’s library to the University of Texas. On the very day that Texas officials were expected in Chicago to close the deal, the arrangement was rescinded and the books were sold instead to the Newberry Library. In his suit Fleming claimed that because he had found a legitimate buyer, as directed by Silver’s estate, he was still owed a commission of $200,000.

  On December 17, 1968, after more than four years of depositions, hearings, and oral arguments before Judge James B. Parsons, Fleming accepted an offer of $92,000 from Silver’s estate to settle out of court. Beyond validating the merits of Fleming’s personal claim, the case also shed light on the bitterness Ransom’s acquisitions program had engendered among his rivals. “This is an action for commissions due and owing to plaintiff for procuring a ready, willing and able purchaser for the Silver rare book collection,” Fleming had stated in his complaint. “The sale was not completed because of defendants’ wrongful refusal to consummate the transaction after reaching complete agreement upon all terms of sale.”

  In a lengthy brief filed with the court, Fleming explained how he spent sixteen years helping Louis Silver, a Chicago lawyer and president of Gold Coast Hotels, build “one of the most famous privately owned rare-book collections in the world.” He recalled that he was in London in June 1963 when he received an urgent message to meet with Silver in New York. He returned immediately, and Silver told him that he had terminal cancer and wanted to arrange the sale of his books.

  Though Silver had no misgivings about selling his library, he was adamant that it be sold en bloc and that it realize at least $2.2 million. During the four months that followed, Fleming offered the books to Paul Mellon, Arthur A. Houghton Jr., and Yale University. With Silver’s authorization, he also asked Parke-Bernet of New York and Sotheby’s of London to submit proposals for auctions. After Silver’s death on October 27, 1963, Fleming met in Silver’s home with John Carter, the British rare-book expert who had gained fame thirty years earlier with his exposé of the Thomas J. Wise forgeries. By that time Carter was working as a Sotheby’s consultant, and he submitted a proposal to the Silver family for an auction.

  Amy Silver remained committed to her husband’s wishes, however, and insisted that the library be sold as a unit rather than piecemeal at auction. “Accordingly,” the court papers state, “Fleming continued to search for an en bloc purchaser.” On November 15, 1963, he received a call from a member of the Board of Regents in Texas. The next day, Harry Ransom was on the phone with Fleming, and the chancellor got right to the point: What would it cost Texas to acquire the Silver library? Fleming replied that a bid of $2.5 million to $3 million probably would be received favorably. Ransom then asked if $2.75 million “would do it.” Fleming said he thought that figure “would be adequate.”

  Within a month Ransom had the money he needed from the Board of Regents, and a good-faith offer was submitted. But problems began to develop with the Silvers when Fleming told them that he expected a commission of “at least two hundred thousand dollars” for arranging the deal. “The defendants rejected out of hand” such a commission, he asserted, but agreed to give him “something” for his efforts. The heirs expressed delight with the Texas offer, especially since Ransom had assured them that the books would be kept in Silver’s name “in perpetuity.”

  Word about the imminent sale to Texas got out quickly, prompting John Carter to write an impassioned letter to Mrs. Silver, d
ated January 2, 1964. It was obtained by Fleming’s lawyers during the discovery process and was included as an exhibit in the court documents. “Dear Amy,” it began, “I won’t say, because you know, how deeply disconcerted and distressed and disheartened I am that, after all the weeks of work and thought (and delay after delay at the Chicago end) since the evening you and I and Bob made our agreement for the sale of the library at Sotheby’s, we now hear that John Fleming has negotiated its sale to Texas.” He beseeched her to “think hard before the executors require you to sign any contract.” After all, he stressed, “you are concerned, and rightly, not only with the money but with Lou’s memory.” It would be one thing if the books were going to the Newberry Library, the University of Chicago, Harvard, “or even Illinois,” maybe then he could understand. “But what did Lou, what do you, care about Texas? It just has a lot of money, some empty shelves, and an overweening appetite.”

  Beyond the implied indignity of sending the books off to a university with an “overweening appetite” was the more delicate issue of what Mrs. Silver stood to earn from the sale. Carter disdained subtlety on that point as well. “John Fleming knows perfectly well that we shall get the estate more money than they are offering.” On the matter of assuring Silver’s place in history, Carter promised a magnificent catalogue, “the best and truest memorial in the eyes of future book-collectors.” A Sotheby’s auction would give “collectors and scholars and libraries all over the world” a chance to buy some splendid books and to enjoy “the pleasure of keen competition” that “Lou himself so relished when he was collecting.” That would be a far more fitting tribute, he argued, than to put the collection “behind glass thousands of miles away.”