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

by Nicholas Basbanes

  After an hour of talk, Self got up and led the way to a long table he had prepared for this visit. “This afternoon I took a few things out of the vault I keep downtown,” he said, and carefully picked up a fragile little book with paper covers and two wedge-shaped holes snipped out of the side. The book’s author is not named; it is simply “By a Bostonian,” and the date is 1827. “Well, this is my Tamerlane,” he said, and handed me the little book I had seen him spend $165,000 to get at the H. Bradley Martin sale in New York, an impressive victory that had persuaded me to learn his identity and request an interview. “You can say you have a good Poe collection,” he was now saying, “but I don’t think that you can say you have a great Poe collection unless you have a Tamerlane, just as I don’t think you can say you have a great Lewis Carroll collection unless you have an 1865 Alice.”

  Unlike the Tamerlane, which they bought at auction, Bill and Peggy Self bought their Alice in 1970 from Chicago booksellers Frances Hamill and Margery Barker. Only nineteen copies of the book are known to exist, and only three of these are privately owned. “Peggy wanted to give me a book as a birthday present, and what she tells me now is that she had only about five hundred or a thousand dollars in mind. I called Miss Hamill to see if she had anything special, and it turned out that I called her at the right time,” he said. “She told me she had that item you are holding in your hands right now about to come in, and I told her she had to be mistaken, she couldn’t be getting a ’65 Alice. I had a census of all the copies, I knew where they all were, and none of them, so far as I knew, was up for sale. She said, ‘Well, Bill, yes, there is one, and we’re getting it.’”

  Miss Hamill explained to Self that the book about to arrive in her store formerly had been in the celebrated library gathered by Carl and Lily Pforzheimer, most of which would later be sold to the University of Texas. “It seems that every once in a while the Pforzheimer estate pruned a few things out of the library and deaccessioned them,” Self said. “A few years earlier, they had sold the Alice to a certain woman, and when I called Chicago, that woman apparently had just decided it was time for her to sell it. We wound up spending twenty-five thousand dollars. Actually, we spent a little more, because there was an 1866 Alice there too, the finest copy I have ever seen, and that was another two thousand dollars.”

  Self emphasized that he and his wife “didn’t just snap these things up,” they did “some serious soul-searching, because up to that time it was the most money we had ever spent for a book. And the reason we bought it, I guess, was the same reason we bought the Tamerlane twenty years after that; we felt we would never get another chance. I recently turned down a very substantial offer for the Alice. We have never bought for investment, but it is nice to know we haven’t been throwing our money away all these years.”

  A diary Emily Brontë kept for several years in her youth came next from Self ’s table, followed by an eight-stanza fragment of poetry in Poe’s hand, and then by some love letters written by Dylan Thomas. Self then picked up an octavo volume from the table and opened it to the title page. “This is one of my favorite books,” he said. “This is Dickens’s own copy of David Copperfield, presented to a man named J. L. Rickards, with an exceptional inscription. Here is what it says: ‘Dear Sir, I wish to preserve between us some little outward and visible remembrance of your generous Mexican adventure, the adventure for which I was unconsciously responsible.’ I will interject here that nobody I know has any idea what that’s all about. But anyway, Dickens continues: ‘Will you do me the favor to accept my own copy of a book, for which I have a particular affection, in the assurance that you will like it none the worse for coming from my own study shelves. I beg you to accept it with my thanks and good wishes. Charles Dickens.’”

  Inside the dark green cloth cover, on what is known as the front pastedown, were two bookplates, one belonging to William Self, the other bearing a design that combined the silhouette of a small bird with the initials KS. “This was a book that Charles Dickens took from his own library and gave to someone as a gift,” Self said. “Many years later, after it had passed through the hands of several owners, a very dear friend of ours gave it to me as a gift. The man’s name was Kenyon Starling, and he and I collected Dickens together for a number of years. It is a very special book.”

  Private book collecting is uncommon as a collaborative exercise, and when it is practiced, it is usually by husbands and wives such as Henry Clay and Emily Folger, who created the great Shakespeare library in Washington, D.C., that bears their name. It is not often that rival collectors suddenly combine their efforts and pool their trophies, yet the reason Bill Self said he was able to form the world’s finest Dickens collection in private hands was because he happened by chance to meet a rival from his hometown named Kenyon Starling.

  In November of 1971, Bill and Peggy Self went to England intending to buy a number of lots in the two-day Sotheby’s sale of the Comte Alain de Suzannet Dickens Collection. “We had figured out in advance what we wanted and what we were willing to spend. I got a few small things, but we did not get a single lot that was a first-choice item. Every time I went after something especially nice, I kept getting outbid by someone.”

  “It was the House of El Dieff,” Peggy Self said.

  “Exactly,” Bill Self continued. “So I finally said to someone, ‘Who’s Lew Feldman bidding for?’ And the man, I forget who it was, said, ‘He’s bidding for a guy from Dayton, Ohio.’ I said, ‘Hey, I’m from Dayton, Ohio, I don’t know anybody from Dayton who collects Dickens.’ And he said, ‘Well, this guy’s a recluse, not many people know him,’ and I thought he said the fellow’s name was Sterling. So I remembered that name. And we came back home, and a little later we were going to Chicago for a television convention, and I said to Peggy, ‘Why don’t we go over to Dayton and see some friends, and I’ll try to find this guy Sterling who outbid us, and maybe he’ll show us his collection.’ The only problem is, I didn’t know how to contact him. I didn’t call Lew Feldman because I was sure he would not want me getting together with one of his top clients. So I called John Fleming in New York, and I asked him if he knew this collector from Dayton named Sterling. John Fleming said, ‘The gentleman’s name is Starling, Kenyon Starling, not Sterling, and he’s standing right here by my side. Let me put him on the phone.’ And that is how I got together with Kenyon Starling.”

  Starling loved showing people his books, and he invited Bill and Peggy Self to visit him in Dayton when they were in Chicago. “It was a library to put mine to shame,” Self said. About a year later, Starling visited the Selfs in California. “Another year went by and I ran into him in a New York bookstore. There he was, smoking his pipe, and I asked him what he was doing in New York. ‘Buying some books,’ he said. So I took him out to dinner—we went to a theatrical hangout called the Palm, which he got a great kick out of—and our friendship developed from there.”

  Bill and Peggy Self traveled to Paris with Starling, they took a cruise off Alaska together, they were always choosing and acquiring books together. Soon, Bill Self was asking Starling’s opinion of certain Dickens titles that were coming up at auction, and he began receiving odd advice. “He would say, ‘I wouldn’t buy that.’ And I said, ‘Well, I know you wouldn’t buy it, because you’re such a stickler for condition, you won’t buy anything unless it’s terrific, but I haven’t got it.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but it’s not a very good copy, I wouldn’t buy it.’ So I said okay. Then another Dickens item would come around, and it would look pretty decent to me, but he would say the same thing. Once again I asked him why not, and he said, ‘Well, you’re forcing me to tell you something.’ I said, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘I’ve willed my Dickens collection to you. You’re from Dayton, I’m from Dayton. I haven’t got any heirs and most of my books are going to universities. But I want you to have my Dickens collection.’”

  Robert Liska, owner of Colophon Books in Exeter, New Hampshire, recalled dealing with both men, particularly K
enyon Starling, in the late 1970s. “It was right after my wife and I began our business, and we were doing our first New York Book Fair. I wanted to make a good impression, so I had brought along the cream of my own John Steinbeck collection, which let me say was second to none. Everything I had was in perfect condition—I even had a mint copy of Cup of Gold in dust jacket—and I put them off by themselves in a glass case, maybe twenty or twenty-five titles all together. I priced them high because deep down I guess I really didn’t want to lose them, but hey, I was in business. Well, right after the fair opened, this awfully nice fellow came by and asked me if the Steinbecks were for sale. I told him they were, which one would he like to look at. He said, ‘I’ll take them all.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘I would like to buy all of them.’ He didn’t ask the price, he didn’t even handle them. He saw they were perfect and he bought them on the spot.” Liska recalled being paid about $17,000 for the books.

  After Starling’s death in 1983, the Dickens books went to Self. About ten thousand other titles were given to Stanford University, where Starling had received a bachelor of arts degree in 1927. According to the rare-book librarian at Stanford, David Sullivan, “He gave us an extraordinary batch of first editions for Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy,” along with some “very fine holdings in many of the other major novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Starling was a fanatic for quality, and our copies show it.” Sullivan said university officials had no idea that such a gift was forthcoming. “Our file on the collection begins with a letter from his estate, and then we have a copy of the will that splits the book collections. Prior to that letter, there is nothing. We had no idea whatsoever that these wonderful books were coming.”

  When Louise Taper decided early in the 1980s to document the life and times of Abraham Lincoln, she confined herself to acquiring unique objects like letters, deeds, certificates, journals, and precious family artifacts. Once begun, the quest grew into a competition between herself and the great collectors of all time, living and dead. “I will do it, sooner or later,” the Beverly Hills collector predicted, and that when “it” happens— when she owns more material than any of her competitors—the only standard left to exceed will be her own.

  Louise Taper’s days are long and intense, but fairly easy to describe. It is Lincoln in the morning, Lincoln in the afternoon, Lincoln at night. “Yes, I work at it all the time,” she acknowledged with a bright smile. “But I enjoy it. I love it, actually; I am driven by it.” When I asked her whether she collects simply because she wants to know Lincoln and his family, or because she wants the finest collection ever put together by one person on the subject, she answered without hesitation. “It is everything that you’re saying, and more. Once you get an area going, you start doing your research, and then you find yourself working on something else. That’s how I got into John Wilkes Booth. When you’ve been around buying the way I have, people hear about you, and they offer you things. It just takes off, and you can’t control it. You don’t want to control it. You don’t even try.”

  On those rare occasions that she needs to get remotivated, Taper said she will glance through a catalogue assembled in the 1940s by the late Oliver R. Barrett and figure how many documents she needs to surpass his holdings. Barrett was a Chicago lawyer whose zeal for collecting began as a child. In 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes received a form letter from Barrett, then seven years old, which said: “I enclose you a portion of my autograph book and would be very much obliged if you would sign your name on one page and then address an envelope to the next person after you on the opposite page, enclosing this letter and the book.”

  In addition to President Hayes, Barrett included the names and addresses of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Clemens, Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and General William T. Sherman. Everyone on the list complied with the request, and the book came back to Barrett with handwritten responses from everyone. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) signed, and wrote instructions on the envelope to pass “the damn piece of impudence” on to the next name on the boy’s list.

  When Carl Sandburg came to know Barrett, his Lincoln collection was without equal. Sandburg was given unlimited access to the material, much of which he used to write his six-volume biography of the sixteenth president, a monumental effort that earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Barrett’s archive was so essential to the research that Sandburg later wrote a respectful biography about him entitled The Lincoln Collector. “Where would history and biography be unless there were collectors?” Sandburg asked, and paid the ultimate tribute: “The collector’s f lair leading Barrett since he was a boy has resulted in a mass of source materials wherein are many items that would have probably been lost for historical purposes but for the sagacity and method by which they were sought out.”

  Sandburg told how Barrett had filled his house in the suburbs with so many items that he began sneaking new acquisitions inside through a cellar window so as not to aggravate his wife. After Barrett’s death in 1950, the collection was sold and “scattered to the four winds,” according to Paul Gehl of the Newberry Library. Ralph G. Newman of Chicago, widely renowned as the world’s leading dealer in Lincoln material, said that he bought “eighty percent of the Barrett sale” at Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1950, and that he originally had wanted to buy the collection en bloc from the family. “As a matter of fact, I offered them more than what they finally got in the auction, but they thought they could do better at a public sale, so that’s the way it went.” Newman added, though, that even if he had bought the collection privately, he still would have broken it up and sold the material piecemeal.

  Because of his specialty, Newman came to know Louise Taper well, and with more than sixty years’ experience as a bookseller, he was able to place her accomplishment in perspective. He ranked her among the foremost collectors of Lincoln of all time. “What I like is that even though Louise can make up her mind in a hurry, everything she buys fits in with everything else she has. It isn’t random material, it’s selected, and that’s because she does her research. Louise never plays it by ear. Her collection on Booth is exceptional, and she certainly has the finest private collection of Mary Lincoln material you’re going to find anywhere. She’s very competitive— you don’t collect if you’re not competitive—but she isn’t foolish. If she wants something, she’s willing to go for it, and maybe even stretch a bit, but she never loses sight of where it is she’s trying to go with her collection.”

  Taper’s competitiveness shows in how she went about establishing her goals. “I looked up all of the leading Lincoln collectors, not just Barrett, and I counted how many letters each of them had,” she said. Before her 1985 marriage to the Los Angeles investor and developer Barry Taper, who is the son of the prominent Southern California banker and philanthropist Mark Taper, Louise worked for the noted Lincoln scholar Justin Turner, who had a major Lincoln collection of his own. “I sat with Justin and I actually counted with him how many letters he had,” she said during our first interview. “Once I passed him, I got pretty excited. But what he really had was the greatest Mary Lincoln collection ever, so that was another goal I set for myself, and I am now within five of catching up with him there.” Ten months later, Taper was pleased to report that she had passed her mentor in that category as well. A year after that, the purchase of a Lincoln dinner plate was the beginning of a china, flatware, and crystal collection to include all American Presidents.

  “When I read Carl Sandburg’s book and saw what Oliver Barrett had done, how obsessed he was, how he competed with people, and how he went about getting things, I said, ‘Oh God, that’s just like me. I’m doing that now,’” Taper said. “And it’s so much harder as a woman.”

  I asked how it is harder as a woman.

  “You don’t get the proper respect,” she replied. “My husband and I had been married about three years when we had some of his friends over to the house. I
had a lot of my Lincoln things out and they came in, and a couple of them said to Barry, ‘Gee, I didn’t know you collect Lincoln.’ I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, I’m the Lincoln collector.’ And a lot of his tennis friends, they looked at me like I was just, you know— because he’s older than me—like I’m just some empty-headed girlfriend of his. This went on until one day my husband missed a match, and they said, ‘Where were you?’ And he said, ‘I went with Louise to buy some John Wilkes Booth letters.’ Well, that was very nice.”

  The next time Barry Taper showed up at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, one of the members gave him a small black box to take home and show Louise. Inside was a pardon Abraham Lincoln had written on a bandage for a dying soldier, dated May 28, 1864. “I looked at it, it was absolutely authentic, and I said, ‘Well, so what? What does he want? Is he just showing it off?’ It turns out the man is a lawyer who had been keeping it for a client of his. I called the man and said, ‘I have to have it.’” The lawyer replied he doubted his client would sell it. “I said, ‘Let your client name a price. It is cruel to keep this from history, because people should know about it.’ And so he told his client, and I bought it. I took it to Springfield, where they photographed it at the Illinois State Historical Library; it is absolutely authentic.” Taper has since determined that Lincoln probably wrote the unusual “document” while visiting a hospital. “This boy must have been dying and Lincoln wanted to pardon him, and there was no paper nearby, so he picked up this piece of bandage and wrote on it.” Because it is dated, she was able to research it in the War Records Office in Washington.