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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  Once again, Carter appealed to whatever misgivings Mrs. Silver might harbor about Texas: instead of being “carted off as a captive to the most bibliophilically unpopular institution in the entire United States,” the Silver Library could “culminate in a blaze of national glory.” He ended with a plea that was personal and to the point: “Amy, I beg of you, think of all these things, and think hard, before you are persuaded to sign any contract. Don’t let them close the door in our face.” He closed the letter “Affectionately,” and signed his name.

  Whether Mrs. Silver was moved by Carter’s plea cannot be determined from the court papers, but there is no doubt she knew that more than one prospect was now hovering in the wings. Two days after Carter’s letter to Mrs. Silver was received, the deal with Texas began to waver, and negotiations with Sotheby’s started—but the implied threat of legal action revived talks with Ransom. Fleming alleged in court documents that John Carter began to “spread the word” that the deal with Ransom had “fallen through,” even though it had not, and that he hoped the University of Texas would “fall on its face.” But on May 13, 1964, the Silver family did reach an agreement with the Newberry Library for $2.75 million—the same figure offered six months earlier by Ransom— and on the very day that HRC officials were expected in Chicago to conclude the sale. “Unknown to the University of Texas, back in Chicago the Silver group was busily rushing the Newberry Library through all the procedures necessary for the Library to consummate the purchase of the collection before the University’s representatives could come to Chicago to claim it,” alleged Fleming’s complaint.

  On May 16, Ransom wired Herman Smith, the director of the Newberry Library:

  CONGRATULATIONS UPON THE ADDITION OF A GREAT COLLECTION OF BOOKS TO A VERY GREAT LIBRARY STOP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS THE HIGH OPINION OF THE LOUIS SILVER COLLECTION WAS MANIFESTED BY UNANIMOUS APPROVAL OF ALL UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS, THE BOARD OF REGENTS AND EVERY STATE AGENCY CONCERNED TO OFFER TWO MILLION SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS IN CASH FOR THE COLLECTION STOP THIS SUM WAS IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE AND PLANS FOR THE INSTALLATION OF THE LIBRARY HERE WERE COMPLETED STOP BUT GREAT COLLECTIONS OF BOOKS ARE NOT A MATTER OF MERE LOCAL CONCERN SO ALL MY COLLEAGUES JOIN IN THESE GOOD WISHES TO NEWBERRY STOP

  As gracious as Ransom’s words were, they emphasized in capital letters the fact that $2.75 million “in cash” had been “immediately available,” and that provisions to keep the collection intact had been made. Meanwhile, officials at the Newberry Library were not nearly as flexible. While they had matched the Texas offer of $2.75 million, it soon became clear that the money was not “immediately available,” and it was not “in cash.” Indeed, the library mounted the first fund drive in its seventy-eight-year history to underwrite the purchase, and negotiated a series of bank loans. To raise more money, the trustees then announced that they would sell titles from the Silver collection that were duplicated by their own holdings, as well as other materials they considered “inappropriate” to their “collecting priorities.”

  Of the nine hundred items acquired from the Silver estate, fully three hundred were declared surplus. Among them were books said to be far superior to the copies already owned by the Newberry, including examples from the nineteenth-century English fine-press and -binding tradition: a Doves Bible, a Kelmscott Chaucer in pigskin, an exceptional Ashendene Malory on vellum, and a Kilmarnock Burns in original wrappers. Fanny Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, uncut in original boards, a Gutenberg tract from 1450, and the editio princeps of Homer were also among “rejects.” On January 22, 1965, the Newberry Library Subcommittee on Books had a meeting. It was attended by George B. Young, the chairman, James M. Wells, associate director of the library, and John Carter of Sotheby’s, London. Among the decisions reached, according to a memorandum in the Newberry Library files, was that a sale “of duplicate rare and scarce books and other works extraneous to the Library’s holdings” which had been “created by the Silver Collection” should be sold at auction, and that the books be consigned to Sotheby’s. John Carter, then, would be mounting a sale of Silver material after all.

  Over the following year, two critical commentaries that appeared in The Book Collector raised more than a few eyebrows in the world of rare-book collecting. John Carter had not only written regularly for the London-based quarterly since its founding in 1951, but also served on its editorial board. In a commentary in its summer 1964 issue, well before any decision to sell off “surplus” Silver items had been reached, the quarterly termed the Newberry purchase an exercise in “gulosity”— greediness. The magazine’s editors, John Carter among them, declared the “in toto” sale of Silver’s books to the Newberry Library “a great pity.”

  A little more than a year later, however, in its fall 1965 issue, The Book Collector expressed a decidedly different attitude, occasioned, curiously enough, by the Newberry Library’s startling decision to consign more than a third of the Silver material to Sotheby’s, precisely the kind of dispersal the magazine seemed to be calling for four issues earlier. It was significant that John Carter’s name did not appear on the masthead of this issue. John Hayward, the widely respected founding editor, signed this commentary alone. He began by noting how Sotheby’s had “saved something from the wreckage of their hopes of acquiring for sale the Louis H. Silver collection,” a “salvage operation” made possible by his colleague John Carter, “whose persistence in the face of progressive frustration and disappointment has at length been rewarded” by the Newberry Library trustees.

  At that point, Hayward’s commentary took on a sharper edge. The “salvage operation,” he declared, “turns out to be far more important and valuable than anyone could have anticipated”; when studied closely, the items being sold were “by no means the throw-outs from an extremely choice cabinet.” In addition to the printed books being dispersed were autograph letters and manuscript material by Castiglione, Machiavelli, Galileo, Harvey, and Chesterfield, and the holograph copy of John Bull’s Other Island, one of the few remaining longhand manuscripts of Bernard Shaw available for sale.

  “While all collectors, dealers, and libraries will welcome Newberry’s decision to get rid of what they consider superfluous to their needs,” Hayward wrote, “it does seem very odd that much of the material now to be thrown on the market should be the very stuff of which great research libraries (and Newberry justly pride themselves on being one of the foremost) are made.” He then asked, “in bewilderment,” how the library could:

  afford to sell from a collection, purchased in order to fill specific gaps and generally to increase their research resources, manuscripts and autograph letters which, being unique, cannot conceivably be classed as “duplicates” and rare printed books which may be loosely described as duplicates but which no experienced bibliographer could say were “surplus” to his needs—the Mainz Cicero, for example, with its mixed leaves, or the Block Books with the possible inferences to be made from the condition of the blocks? Maybe the answer is simply that they could not afford not to, or in other words that they had to pay more than they could really afford for something they did not altogether want.

  Hayward did not mention anything about how the materials could have improved the Humanities Research Center in Texas, or whether sufficient funds had been a problem there, or that the collection was something Harry Ransom did “altogether want” and had intended to preserve as a unit.

  The sale catalogue itself opened with a lengthy preface, signed anonymously by “Sotheby and Co.” and closed with an unusually defensive paragraph:

  We venture to think that the international fraternity of book-collectors, rare book librarians and antiquarian booksellers will join us in saluting the addition of the Newberry Library to the roster of those enlightened institutions who have come to believe, in the words of Dr. Louis B. Wright, Director of the Folger Library, Washington, D.C., that “if all libraries would take stock of their possessions and sell books that have no predictable use, they would improve
their cash position, gain space that they need, and serve the public interest”; concluding that “a vast shuffling of books by way of the sales rooms would help libraries, stimulate collectors, and advance learning.”

  The consequent sale of books that had “no predictable use” was held on November 8 and 9, 1965, in London, and the Newberry realized $800,000 for its “inappropriate” holdings.

  Harry Ransom, meanwhile, had gone about the business of buying other material. Having lost in Chicago, he looked elsewhere, and he did not brood about what might have been. Four months after the Chicago agreement fell through, the $2.75 million given him by the Board of Regents “was fully used” to purchase “a number of archives, collections and libraries in lieu of the Silver Library.”

  Kathleen G. Hjerter, curator of art at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center from 1972 to 1992, was walking me through the Alfred A. Knopf Room when she paused at a portrait of Chancellor Ransom. “Look at his eyes,” she said softly, whispering so she would not disturb a university function that was in progress nearby. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Tell me what you see,” I replied.

  “I see eyes that capture you,” she said. “You can’t say they pierce you or anything, but they do stick on you, and once you get into those eyes, you don’t get out. He had a very melodious voice, too. It was not soft, but very full and mellow, and he had such beautiful diction. It didn’t really matter what he said, he just said it all so exquisitely. You could have been the janitor or the governor, it didn’t matter, he made you feel like you were the most important person in the world. You felt he had something he wanted to say just to you, and nobody else.”

  A few minutes later, as we stood in a corner where selected articles of Art Deco furniture from the Manhattan apartment of Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf repose as museum pieces, she told the story of Frances Hudspeth, a devoted assistant “who worked every night until midnight” for Harry Ransom. “She had a heart attack while Ransom’s dream building was being finished, and her doctor told her that if she didn’t quit work she had a year to live. And she said, ‘Well, I just want to live long enough to see Dr. Ransom in his building.’ So they finished the building, and she came over one day to my office to pick out some paintings for the new offices, and then Dr. Ransom moved in. Three days later they took her off to the hospital. She’d been in that building just three days when she died. I remember a painting she picked, too, it was ‘Offering for the Day of the Dead,’ by Jaime Flores, a Mexican artist. She never saw it hanging in there. She worked herself to death. But that’s the way people felt about Harry Ransom.”

  Part of Ransom’s appeal was an almost transcendent quality military officers call “command presence,” something a person either has or does not have. “He walked into a room and everything stopped,” Hjerter said. “And if there was anything that people liked to do it was to give him things. A famous story about Dr. Ransom is that one day a man came out of his office and somebody who had been waiting outside said, ‘What did he say?’ And the man said, ‘I don’t know, but I just gave him twenty thousand dollars for his program.’” Most important was Ransom’s ability to make others share his enthusiasm. “The Board of Regents just adored him. All he had to do was go down and stand before them once a year and say, ‘I want two million dollars.’ They didn’t even ask him what for; they totally trusted him.”

  Until her retirement Hjerter was responsible for a comprehensive collection of 100,000 works by a wide variety of artists, many of them with literary connections. In 1986, Harry N. Abrams published Doubly Gifted, Hjerter’s examination of visual art produced by noted writers, a work based largely on the holdings she oversaw in Austin. There are pencil sketches by T. E. Lawrence, caricatures by Jean Cocteau, watercolors by e. e. cummings, drawings by G. K. Chesterton, cartoons by O. Henry, landscapes by Edward Lear, hand-colored engravings by William Blake, and oils by D. H. Lawrence. Some are curiosities that say something about a writer’s impulses, others are strikingly beautiful in their own right.

  Most of the artworks were acquired in tandem with the literary material Ransom was buying in great volume, many of them as peripheral afterthoughts to the manuscripts. But with so many paintings at his disposal, Ransom was pleased to lend some of them around. “That was one of my duties,” Hjerter said during a walk through the huge room that is home to the works. “I would let people come and select paintings for any university facility, and also for the governor’s office. These were Dr. Ransom’s calling cards. They were a way of introducing us to these people and of doing them a favor, which might help later on.”

  Today, everything is neat and orderly in the Humanities Research Center, and though some 30 percent of thirty million pages of manuscript material is still uncatalogued, all of it is at least stored in protective clamshell cases and shelved sensibly in the seven-floor building. Hjerter recalled a time, though, when the situation approached chaos. “As the boxes began to appear in the early sixties, they were just stuffed into the tower. I remember going in to see Dr. Ransom’s assistant once, right around the time they were moving into the new building. I walked down the hall to her office, and it was stacked to the ceiling with so many cardboard boxes that you had to walk sideways to get around. It was coming in so fast that they could barely keep up with it.”

  Dave Oliphant, appointed editor of the Texas Library Chronicle after graduating from the University of Texas in 1971, told me about the time he received a surprise telephone call from Ransom to congratulate him on a job particularly well done. “It was like hearing from God Himself,” Oliphant said. “That’s the way people felt about Harry Ransom. He was larger than life.”

  Dave Oliphant suggested that Ransom was like “God Himself,” and Kathleen Hjerter called him a “royal presence.” But for every Prince Hal, there usually is a Falstaff, and the quintessential foil for Harry Huntt Ransom was Lew David Feldman, the flamboyant owner of the House of El Dieff, Inc., for years a high-profile bookseller in Manhattan and the agent of choice for the Humanities Research Center during its frenzied years of creation. “Lew Feldman wanted to be known as the man behind the man who built the collection,” Warren Roberts said. “He saw Texas as his moment in history. We were pleased to work with him because he got us the books and manuscripts we wanted, and he gave us time to pay. That is very important. He would buy stuff for us and hold it until we got more money from the Board of Regents, which often meant waiting a year or more. We did not pay him any interest, just his 10 percent commission, though there was a point, I don’t remember exactly when, that he went up to fifteen percent. Still, there aren’t any other dealers, so far as I know, who would do that for you. There were times when we owed him two or three million dollars, and we were always buying more.”

  Roberts said he frequently traveled to New York to reassure financial institutions that these unusual arrangements were valid. “One of the things I had to do was go to the bank with Lew Feldman and say, ‘How do you do, Mr. Banker, yes, we are the University of Texas, and we do owe this man a lot of money for this material.’ He borrowed money from the bank and he put up the books he was buying as security. Not many people know this. In effect, he was our banker. Only we weren’t paying him any interest, just his commission.”

  A seven-paragraph obituary in the New York Times in 1976 described Feldman as “an imaginative and tenacious dealer who was willing to back his judgments with great amounts of cash,” and who “was probably the only man who ever bid on fifty-six successive items at Sotheby’s London while dressed in pajamas, a robe and a raincoat,” an odd circumstance prompted by a case of sleeping late on the morning of an important sale. What the article did not mention was that Feldman bought just about everything he wanted on that November day sixteen years earlier, including 173 letters of Robert Southey for £1,950, five others written by Oscar Wilde for £220, and the autograph manuscript of D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places for £2,000. Five months earlier, at another Sotheby’s sale, he accou
nted for half the money spent; among his purchases was every lot of a T. E. Lawrence collection. A few days after that triumph, he swept for Texas every important item offered at a Christie’s sale, including the holograph copy of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for £6,500, more than tripling the previous English record for a modern manuscript.

  In a private purchase Feldman bought and sold to Texas material that came from the home of William Faulkner’s mother: letters, manuscripts, and documents that more than two decades later still remained sealed in red boxes in the Humanities Research Center. One day, of course— presumably when all the parties to the transaction are dead—Faulkner scholars will be granted full access to this material. Similarly, in 1972 Feldman sold to Texas for $125,000 a collection of four hundred love letters of the nineteenth-century emperor of Mexico, Maximilian, and Empress Carlotta. Press accounts were vague about the source of the material, reporting only that the letters had been hidden for more than a century by Carlotta’s relatives, the Belgian royal family.

  “How Dr. Ransom got the letters, widely coveted in Europe as well as North America, is not exactly clear,” Martin Waldron wrote in the New York Times. “Dr. Ransom is guarded about revealing his methods of knowing when and where rare books and papers will become available.” Waldron then quoted Ransom directly: “We learned that the Belgian royal family was about to release the letters and an alumnus got an option. The existence of these letters was not commonly known.” Waldron then wrote how in 1960, “only two years after he set about to upgrade the research files of the University of Texas library, Dr. Ransom began to anger collectors who were used to getting private libraries and collections of papers for small sums. But, as Dr. Ransom said, the University of Texas did not have the drawing power of Harvard or Yale, and if it was to get the materials, it had to buy them.”