The decisive moment for Pforzheimer as a collector came when he was in New York on agency business in 1950. “I had been getting relevant things along the way, but they were to read, not collect. There is a fundamental difference, as you know. So I had been buying a few books, nothing terribly serious, though my bookseller friends had started pushing me back in time. For example, I bought one book by Alan Pinkerton from Dave Randall at Scribner’s, Spy of the Rebellion, which brought me back to the Civil War. But anyway, one day I stopped into Rosenbach’s branch office in New York to see my old friend Bill McCarthy about some little document he had, and he said, ‘Walter, I think I have something else you might be interested in.’ He then laid on a table a letter from Washington dated July 26, 1777, to Colonel Elias Dayton, who was Washington’s intelligence chief in New Jersey. The letter’s last paragraph has been quoted occasionally on Capitol Hill, and has been misquoted by many other people over the years.”
Though the letter was lying in his lap, Pforzheimer recited the passage from memory: “ ‘The necessities of procuring good Intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged. All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible. For upon Secrecy Success depends in most Enterprises of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned and promising a favourable issue. I am, sir, your most obedient servant, G. Washington.’ ”
Pforzheimer said he looked at the letter lying on the bookstore table in green baize, and he gave the implications of what was about to happen deep consideration. “We were now at what you call the make or break point. Do you or don’t you collect? I had not considered myself a collector of intelligence material until I was faced with this document, and what do you do? Well, there’s no question of what you do; you just cannot let something like that go by. So obviously I got it, and at that point I was committed. What you see around here is the logical extension of what happened that day in New York.” Pforzheimer owns three other George Washington letters, but this by far is the most important.
Among the curiosities in Pforzheimer’s collection is a visa application requesting entry to France submitted by a Dutch woman named Margarethe Geertruida Zelle McLeod in 1916. “She never made it out of the country,” Pforzheimer said. “As we say in the trade, it’s signed in her ‘true name,’ and her ‘pseudonym.’ ” The woman’s pseudonym was Mata Hari. “That’s an unhappy group of books down there,” Pforzheimer continued, pointing to seventy-one volumes of bound documents lying in a pile. They contain classified material seized by the Iranians who captured the American embassy in 1979. Much of the material had been shredded, but was reconstructed by the intruders and printed in English and Iranian versions.
Pforzheimer said he considers the “cornerstone book of the collection” to be The Memoirs of Secret Service, published in 1699, “and from my standpoint the first book in English completely devoted to intelligence operations.” His copy was inscribed by Matthew Smith, the author, to the Lord High Chancellor of England. He said the “foundation book” of American intelligence represented in the collection is a monograph dated September 29, 1780, which bears the title Proceedings of a Board of General Officers, Held by Order of His Excellency Gen. Washington, Commander in Chief of the Army of the United States of America, Respecting Major John Andre, Adjutant General of the British Army. John Andre was the case officer in the defection of Benedict Arnold at West Point, and the sentence imposed was “death by hanging at high noon.” Pforzheimer noted that he also owns “countless” memoirs written by contemporary intelligence people, many of them inscribed to him by the authors.
Though retired, Pforzheimer lectures at the Defense Intelligence College and edits the college’s bibliography on intelligence literature. Some five thousand items are represented in the Walter Pforzheimer Collection on Intelligence Service, and new material is continually added. “When I was at Langley, Allen Dulles told me to start up the agency’s book collection. He wanted a library on all aspects of the intelligence profession since the beginning of time to the latest book, in all languages, and he gave me a nice budget. So I established the Historical Intelligence Collection at the agency, and I was curator for many years, in addition to my other duties. After ten years as legislative counsel, that became my title. Collateral duties required me to travel the world from time to time, and I was able to collect books for the agency. When I left, they had twenty-one thousand volumes. It’s a lot larger now.”
Pforzheimer stressed that what he created at the CIA was a reference library. “What I have here for myself is a collector’s collection. What they have at the agency is material in all languages. My stuff is primarily in English. And the agency doesn’t collect rarities.” Pforzheimer said his job as “head bookman” for the CIA provided the model for James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor; it was adapted into a 1975 movie titled Three Days of the Condor, in which a CIA “reader” played by Robert Redford becomes drawn into a deadly internecine conflict. While the CIA would love to own his collection, Pforzheimer said his decision to send everything to his alma mater is firm. “The agency makes noise every now and then, but they get their hands slapped. A lot of people make noises. The Hoover Institute made noise. They can’t have it either. It’s going to Yale, period, the end. Everything goes to Yale, including my ashes, if they want them.”
As a lawyer skilled in negotiating detailed agreements with committees of Congress, Pforzheimer made sure the terms of his bequest to Yale were “clear as a bell.” When he dies—and not a day before— the university gets his collection on intelligence along with the five thousand books he received from his father as a twenty-first birthday present. “They can’t have one without the other. I know they’re salivating to get the Molière stuff and the bindings, and the money of course, but I made it explicitly clear that everything goes together, or nothing goes at all.”
The Molière collection assembled by his father “is probably the finest in this country in private hands. Father knew his books. It’s an interesting collection. That last shelf of books on the left there, those are all plays by famous British playwrights. Now, why are they there? Because in every one, there are parts that were stolen from Molière.” His father’s collection of exquisite royal French bindings, including one fashioned for Jean Grolier in the sixteenth century, is superb as well, and there is a sizable collection of royal French autographs. “I added a few things to the Molière collection, but did nothing with the bindings. If you’re going to collect rare bindings, you do that to the exclusion of everything else.”
How Pforzheimer’s father, also named Walter, came to collect French authors, autographs, and elegant bindings is an interesting story in its own right. It relates to the collecting interests of Walter Jr.’s uncle, Carl H. Pforzheimer, whose collection of English literature, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer collection, occasioned publication of one of the great bibliographies of the twentieth century and was sold in 1988 to the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas for $15 million. In a separate purchase, Texas also bought from the Pforzheimer collection a Gutenberg Bible in 1978 for $2.4 million. Another segment of the collection, arguably the finest gathering of materials outside the British Library relating to Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Romantic poets, was given to the New York Public Library.
Three Pforzheimer brothers, Carl, Walter, and Arthur, were hugely successful Wall Street brokers who specialized in oil company stock, but in the mid-1920s, for a variety of personal reasons, they went their separate ways. “After Arthur and my father left the firm, Arthur set up his own rare-book business,” said Walter Pforzheimer. “It was not a great success, but I’m devoted to his memory because when he and Father were together, he would always ask what I was studying, and whatever it was, some perfectly appropriate book would end up on my desk the next day. These were not rare books, but he was interested in young people, and he knew I was interested in reading.”
Relations between Walter
’s father and his uncle Carl, on the other hand, were strained, and affected the course each man followed as collectors. Basically they stayed out of each other’s way. Carl Pforzheimer continued to form his comprehensive collections of English literature while Walter Pforzheimer, Sr., concentrated on France. “My father was a very quiet, sensitive, lovely guy who would die at the mere mention of his name,” Pforzheimer said. “Every charitable gift he ever made was anonymous. He didn’t want any conflicts with anyone. Carl and Lily, on the other hand, would never do anything unless their names were on it in lights. So that kind of limited where their great library could go. Harvard wouldn’t build Carl a building—they already had the Houghton and he wanted to be sure the marquee over the door said, ‘This is the Carl H. and Lily Pforzheimer Library,’ so nothing much happened. Then he died in 1957. By the time the deal with Texas came together, Carl Senior was long gone.”
In that regard, at least, there is a similarity between Walter Pforzheimer and his uncle Carl. “I go out the door feet first, then my library can go up to New Haven,” he said. “I call it the Walter Pforzheimer Collection on Intelligence Service. But when it gets to Yale, I’m sure it will always be known as ‘the spy collection.’ ”
Staff members at the University of Florida recall a warm spring day in 1990 when a nervous undergraduate appeared in the rare-book room on the second floor of the main library and asked to speak with Ruth M. Baldwin, who had built an enormous collection of children’s literature that was named in her honor. When told that she had recently died, the student expressed profound relief, not sadness, a peculiar reaction that warranted an explanation. It turned out that as part of his initiation into a fraternity, the young man had been required to ask Dr. Baldwin if he could borrow some of her books.
“Her reputation was legendary on campus,” said Rita Smith, the project cataloguer for the Baldwin Library. “Ruth Baldwin controlled her collection with an iron hand, and if she didn’t think your reason for wanting to see something was good enough, you were gone. She even got angry with professors who sent students over here for what she thought were frivolous requests to use her books. She had her desk right by the entrance over there. She wanted to see everyone who came in, and everyone who went out, and when she wasn’t at her desk, there was an alarm on the door that let out a high-pitched scream whenever the door was opened. She may have turned the books over to the university in 1978, but she came along as the curator, and she watched over her collection right up until the day she died.”
Barely five feet tall, stout but by no means overweight, and gray-haired with glasses, Ruth Baldwin did not project a stereotypically intimidating image, but her books had become the guiding force in her life, and since possessiveness is not uncommon among book collectors, her unyielding attitude was accepted as part of the agreement she had struck with school officials. After all, she had put the University of Florida on the map as far as special collections were concerned, and if it took twelve years from the time she gave the books to the time she let them loose, that was all right too, because when she died in 1990 at the age of seventy-two, her distinguished collection of 100,000 English-language children’s books became a full-service library, ready at last to serve the interests of scholarship.
“It’s extraordinary,” Bernard McTigue said shortly after moving to Gainesville from New York to become director of special collections at the University of Florida. “I really am in awe of what this woman did. In some areas the collection has no equal. What makes it very special is that Ruth Baldwin wanted books that children had used. She liked the fact that these specific books—these actual objects—had touched children’s lives.”
The Baldwin Library occupies much of the south end of the second floor of Library East at the University of Florida Gainesville campus, including four large rooms with connecting balconies, high cathedral ceilings, handsome wood shelving, and elegant walnut paneling. The collection is divided more or less equally into British and American children’s books from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
Ruth Baldwin began collecting children’s books in her mid-thirties almost as a challenge from her father, a professor of English at the University of Illinois who was renowned for his own collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books. In 1953, during one of many book-hunting trips to England, Dr. Thomas W. Baldwin and his wife, Elisabeth, bought about twenty old chapbooks and sent them to their daughter in Urbana, Illinois, where she was working toward her doctorate in library science. Along with the gift went the suggestion that children’s books “might be a nice little hobby for a woman to pursue.” She took up the challenge with unexpected enthusiasm.
“I was always a reader, but it never occurred to me to collect books,” Ruth Baldwin told Jacob L. Chernofsky, the editor of AB Bookman’s Weekly, a periodical published for the antiquarian trade, shortly after her retirement in 1988. “In high school, I was not allowed to go to games or dances or anything else like that, because of my parents’ background— they just didn’t think I should do those things. My father was a Southerner and he wouldn’t let me go out after dark.” She described her father as a man “driven” in his collecting, but interested only in material “that he thought might give him clues to the education and the writing of Shakespeare.” There is no suggestion in Chernofsky’s article as to whether or not Ruth Baldwin may have been trying to surpass her father as a collector, though Rita Smith told me she thinks such a wish could have motivated her will to acquire.
Born in South Carolina in 1918, Ruth was a precocious child whose early ambition was to attend medical school. She told Chernofsky that one reason she transferred from the University of Illinois to Muskingum College, a Presbyterian school in New Concord, Ohio, was to distance herself from her parents, though the “atmosphere” at the college was “not much different from home.” After graduating in 1939, she returned to the University of Illinois, where she would earn three more degrees.
A succession of interesting jobs followed in various sections of the country, leading finally to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1956, where she remained for two decades, retiring in 1977 as a professor emeritus. At that point, barely a year shy of her sixtieth birthday, the pivotal moment in her life as a book collector developed when a visiting professor from the University of Florida happened to see the enormous library she maintained in her home. A University of Florida delegation visited her shortly thereafter and issued her an invitation to move everything to Gainesville, which she accepted, with the understanding that she would go along as curator. Not only would her books have a permanent home, but she would be the full-time custodian, and she would have a free hand in shaping the collection’s future. Retiring as professor emeritus at one university, Dr. Baldwin assumed an exciting new position at another; in 1988, at the age of seventy, she retired once again, this time with the title of university librarian emeritus.
“Ruth and I talked often in the afternoons,” Smith said. “I grew up in Michigan, her family had a cottage in the Indian River Valley in Michigan, and we both studied library science at the University of Illinois. So we had a few things in common we could chat about. Her personality was extremely forceful, but she was not without a sense of humor. There were times when she talked about her childhood and her family when I wished there had been a tape recorder going. As to whether or not she was offended by her father’s suggestion that children’s books would be a nice thing for a woman to collect, I cannot say. But I do know that she certainly took him up on it, and from then on it became the total focus of her life.”
Thomas Whitfield Baldwin was collecting what were regarded as the far more serious books, and his collection of about 5,500 titles is now in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It’s an extremely imaginative collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books,” Frederick Nash, the curator or rare books there, told me. “It includes Bibles, classical texts, colloquies, homilies, chapbooks, catechisms, logic, pray
er books, all kinds of things that were available during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and that might very well have influenced his thought and his writing.”
Dr. Thomas Baldwin was a respected scholar and author of no fewer than seven books, several of which drew on this intelligently conceived collection. His best-known work is William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, which focused on knowledge, learning, and education during Elizabethan times. An earlier book, William Shakespeare’s Petty School, reproduced facsimiles of prayer books, catechisms, and devotions from Baldwin’s collection.
Thomas Baldwin’s books are an important part of the University of Illinois’ special collections, but they are by no means the centerpiece. In fact, they are integrated with all the other books—including some important Carl Sandburg and Mark Twain archives—and listed in an eleven-volume catalogue with the rest of the holdings. Ruth Baldwin, on the other hand, produced a library that was given its own wing in a major university and its own three-volume catalogue. The collection is ranked among the best of its kind in the United States.
Even though Ruth Baldwin never expressed any bitterness about her father, Smith agreed there “could have been a competition” with him. “She did mention once to me that her father managed to run off any man that was brave enough to darken their front doorway. That’s pretty much a direct quotation. I think she revered her father, but she was, I sensed, also sort of bitter. There were two other sisters, incidentally, and neither of them ever married either. What I also found interesting is that one of her sisters worked at an orphanage in England, the other taught kindergarten in Illinois. None of Dr. Baldwin’s daughters ever married or had families, but all three were involved in one way or another with children.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 46