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

Home > Other > A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books > Page 54
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 54

by Nicholas Basbanes


  After putting the “bandage” safely away, Taper brought out a succession of other documents. “I have most all the Lincoln ancestors going back five generations,” she said. “I have the great-grandfather. I have the uncles, the great-uncles. I have almost all of them. I’ve got all the descendants, every single one. I have the grandsons. I have them all.” She explained that when she says “I have,” she not only means “documents they wrote,” but related material like a watercolor one of the granddaughters painted, or, most impressive of all, the only stovepipe hat worn by Lincoln known to be privately owned. “I feel like I have every phase of Abraham Lincoln’s life before and after, right down to Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, who was the last in the line. He’s the one that owned that deed on the table over there. A lot of the artifacts I have came through him. I guess what I like the best are family and all the happy parts.”

  Having the money to buy these objects is essential, of course, but it by no means guarantees a superior collection. “If you don’t have a collector’s mentality, and you are not focused, you cannot acquire a collection like this,” she said. “You have to have the knowledge and the direction. I have met accumulators who have advisers come into their homes and put their collections together for them; they do the whole thing. I fly wherever I have to go, I pick up the new pieces myself, then I bring them back here. Then we catalogue them. We get them deacidified and properly protected. Then we do all the research. And then they enter the collection.”

  Ranking high among the objects Taper values most is the earliest surviving piece of writing known to have been done by Abraham Lincoln. Dated 1824–1826, it is the first of ten leaves from a homemade notebook Lincoln used as a teenager to practice his mathematics. It has three signatures, and a pair of rhyming couplets:

  Abraham Lincoln is my nam[e]

  And with my pen I wrote the same

  I wrote in both hast[e] and speed

  and left it here for fools to read.

  Another document she acquired represents the only instance in which Lincoln is known to have borrowed money for a professional enterprise. Dated October 19, 1833, it is a promissory note for debts incurred when Lincoln entered a partnership to open a general store in New Salem, Illinois. It is written entirely in Lincoln’s hand and is signed by him. On February 1, 1988, Taper was the “anonymous” collector who spent $71,500 at the Estelle Doheny sale for the first California printing of the Emancipation Proclamation, one of three signed by Lincoln; the presale estimate was between $10,000 and $15,000. A year later, in Session V of the same sale, with Ralph Newman bidding in her behalf, she spent $19,800 for a first printing of the political debates between Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, signed and presented by Lincoln to R. M. Elder, a friend.

  In 1990, she went to Kennebunk, Maine, with her secretary to attend an auction at the nearby Boothbay Theater Museum. Her modest intention at first was to buy some letters and manuscripts relating to the Booth family that she knew were being offered. “It turned out that not many people showed up, so I wound up buying about half of the auction.” An article in Maine Antique Digest credited whatever success the disappointing sale realized to “the presence of a single buyer from California who bought virtually every major item in the Booth collection, including a collection of forty-five holograph letters from Edwin Booth to American landscape painter Jervis McEntee, for $13,200, the sale’s top price.”

  I wondered whether there had ever been anything Taper really wanted that she failed to get. “No,” she replied after a thoughtful pause, “not really, no. I guess I haven’t, have I? Because if you really want something, you’ll pay anything for it, if you have to. I decided from the beginning that I wanted to have the greatest Lincoln collection ever, not just now, but the best private collection in history, and that I wanted every phase. I want it to be the one by which all others are measured.”

  That her goal was clearly in sight was made strikingly evident by an exhibition mounted in the fall of 1993 by the Huntington Library. The library has an excellent Lincoln collection of its own, which for the exhibition was supplemented with additional material supplied by the Illinois State Historical Library, and one private collection—the one owned by Barry and Louise Taper of Beverly Hills. Mark E. Neely, Jr., a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, wrote the text for The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, a critical study that Harvard University Press published to complement the exhibition. When it closed in October of 1994, more than 300,000 people had come calling at the San Marino library.

  In her conversation with me, Taper estimated that she had at least twenty-five more years of productive collecting ahead of her, rendering any questions as to the final disposition of these acquisitions speculative at best. “You’re the first one to ask,” she said with a light laugh. “There are certain pieces right now, just off the top of my head, pieces like the sculptures, this piece here that Robert Todd Lincoln owned for instance, I would say the artifacts probably should be broken up. But the manuscripts and the letters? I don’t know what I’ll do with them.”

  One possible solution, though, might be to make sure that certain categories are kept intact. “I see it all as a number of separate collections. There is a Mary Lincoln collection, an Abraham Lincoln collection, and then a Lincoln Family collection. I see it as a John Wilkes Booth collection, and I also see it as a Booth Family collection. That’s how I got on the board of the Hampden-Booth Theatre Library in The Players Club in New York, as a matter of fact. The Players Club was once the home of Edwin Booth, the great Shakespearean actor and the older brother of John Wilkes Booth. Maybe a lot of my Booth stuff should go there.”

  But all those decisions, she quickly pointed out, will not be made for many years. “At the moment, I don’t know,” she said. “Right now, I’m just enjoying my collection.”

  Before taking me in to see his library of about two thousand modern first editions, the man known to millions of television viewers as the outrageously libidinous lawyer Dan Fielding on the long-running comedy series Night Court made a pot of strong Louisiana coffee, a rich brew cut with chicory and served piping hot. As we sat in his kitchen, John Larroquette spoke with the same good humor that energized the characterization that won him four successive Emmy Awards from 1985 to 1988.

  “I can tell you exactly when I became a book collector,” he said, recalling the leaner times of just a decade earlier when he performed in a variety of odd theater jobs. “I had just gotten the part of Ham in a local production of Endgame, which was quite a thrill because I had always loved reading Beckett, going back to the time when I was about fourteen and growing up in New Orleans.”

  A few days before the play opened, Larroquette was browsing through a shop in Venice, California, that specialized in seashells. “In the back was a little shelf with some books on it, and among them was this sixteen-volume collection of Beckett’s collected works that Grove Press published in 1970. There was a signed limited set of the same thing there for four hundred dollars, which was too much money for me. The sixteen volumes were a hundred twenty-five. They weren’t first editions, of course, but they were all of Beckett’s plays. I bit my tongue and paid the money for these books. It gave me such a wonderful feeling to know that in one fell swoop I had gotten all of these books. It just gave me a feeling of fulfillment.”

  When he began playing the Dan Fielding role on Night Court in 1984, Larroquette’s fortunes improved dramatically, and the level of his book-collecting activity picked up accordingly. A few weeks before we met he had acquired an exceptional collection of eight hundred Beckett items that were formerly the property of an actor who Larroquette said was “one of the best interpreters of Beckett” ever. Understandably, those books were given a choice location in Larroquette’s handsome library. But pride of place is still assigned to those first sixteen volumes he bought in a seashell shop.

  Larroquette collects what are known as modern first editions, but the majority of his b
ooks more appropriately are called contemporary first editions, books written by authors who not only are still alive, but still writing. In this pursuit his focus parallels those of most other American book collectors. He is particularly proud of his Anne Tyler books, especially the Baltimore author’s first two novels, If Morning Ever Comes and The Tin Can Tree, which regularly sell at fairs and in catalogues for $750 to $1,000. “I don’t know why, but it matters to me that when I read the books of my favorite authors, I want to read the first editions,” he said, and pointed to titles by John Fowles, Anthony Burgess, and Barry Hannah.

  Once Larroquette was buying rare books, he learned the subtleties that every serious collector must master: how to identify first editions, how to look for points, the importance of dust jackets, the essence of good condition. “That became an end in itself, being able to pick up a book and to know something about it,” he said. “What really excites me the most now is signed copies, the fact that an author I admire so greatly actually had possession of it, for a moment anyway.”

  At first Larroquette bought just the individual titles that he wanted, but in time he appreciated the wisdom of assembling comprehensive author collections. “I will still get single works by authors. I recently got a nice copy of A Streetcar Named Desire. I don’t collect Tennessee Williams, but I bought it because it was published the year I was born and I used to ride that streetcar in New Orleans when I was a kid.”

  Larroquette’s passion for book collecting became so well known around Los Angeles that he was duped into attending a mock auction set up at a Hollywood antiques store for a television program hosted by Dick Clark called Bloopers and Practical Jokes. “They set up a fake auction, and my wife worked right along with them,” he said. “I got an invitation in the mail, and just put it on my dresser. My wife said nothing, she just played dumb. They were offering precisely the kinds of things I collect, so the day came around, and I said to my wife, ‘I think I’m going to go to this, do you mind?’ She said, ‘No, I’ll go with you.’”

  When they arrived at the shop, Larroquette’s wife excused herself while he went into the sales room. As soon as he sat down, the action turned immediately from paintings to books. “They had talked to people I do a lot of business with, and the idea of the joke was to sell books they knew I already had at a fraction of what I had paid for my copies. They were counting on my staying out of the bidding because these were things I already owned. But I’m not stupid; when I saw a book I knew was worth eighty dollars, I would get in when it was five. When it got to eighty or eighty-five, I would stop. So they couldn’t get me on that. What they did next was go to the other extreme. People started bidding a thousand and two thousand for books that I knew were worth one hundred. By that time, of course, my wife Liz was sitting next to me wired with a microphone, and they were able to pick up my reactions. They had to bleep out a lot of what I was saying because I was pretty astounded, to say the least, about how insane some of the prices were going. Finally, they pulled the rug out from under me. They walked over, just like that, and gave me a book. I looked up, I saw the mirrors on the wall, and then I saw the camera lenses. I had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker. But it shows you, doesn’t it? When a man has greed for books, he will believe anything.”

  One of the booksellers who had been alerted to the television prank was Ralph B. Sipper, founder of Joseph the Provider Books in Santa Barbara, California. Known as “Joe the Pro” throughout the antiquarian book world, Sipper formed the business in 1970 with the clear intention of “providing” nothing but the best books he could find; Joseph was the name of a beloved grandfather, and the resonance of a Thomas Mann character from the biblical tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943) made the choice all the more appropriate. Though Sipper said he loves books, he acknowledged that being a professional dealer makes it difficult for him to collect. “I get my satisfaction in knowing that certain beautiful books pass through my hands, and that they help build nice collections.”

  Sipper cited John Larroquette as an example of the kind of collector he particularly enjoys working with. “I take pride in having gained John’s confidence and having been able to pass along some nice things to him,” he said. “The way I met him was, he came around to book fairs very quietly for two or three years, not just out here in California, but others. I remember, for instance, that he came over to our booth in Boston once. I didn’t know who he was because I don’t really have time to watch much television. But I recognized that this was somebody who was asking the right questions, even though he was a novice. And I could see not only a genuine interest, but a pragmatic intelligence. Then after he started buying some books, I realized he also had the ability to buy. And we have become very good friends.”

  The Samuel Beckett collection he acquired for Larroquette is a good example of matching books with customers. “If you want to collect Beckett today, and you came to me with five or ten times the amount of money that John paid for that collection, I could not produce those books. I probably could over a period of time, but my point is that it’s not only the money, but having the right copies available at a given time. Things of this caliber usually disappear into institutional collections.”

  Another writer who has secured a special place in Larroquette’s library is the poet Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994. “I discovered him around 1980,” Larroquette said. “I was drinking pretty heavily at the time when I found him, very heavily. That first-person voyage he goes through, I identified with it. I look at it all as a man living in the underbelly of life, but a man who still has the strength to push one hand out and type. I thought this is not a bad way to go if you have to live in this pain, to be able to communicate what it is like and how horrible it is. I could never do that.”

  A shelf on one of the library walls holds two of the four Emmys Larroquette won in successive years, the first actor in the history of the awards to achieve such a milestone. Between those two gold statuettes, in mute counterpoint, stands an unusual sculpture depicting two grizzled men sitting on a bench, waiting for a bus that may never come. “I keep that right there to remind myself of who I am and where I was headed with my life,” he said quietly.

  Larroquette agreed that he collects books obsessively, but he does not see it as a healthy substitute for alcohol. “When there are lots of books around me, I feel safe, I feel secure, I feel in the company of others even though I may be sitting in my study all alone. Drinking is just drinking, that’s all, it has nothing to do with books. I am an alcoholic and there are only two ways for an alcoholic to go, and that is either continue or stop. One night I decided to stop. That is why I keep that statue by the Emmys, just to remind myself not to feel too self-important about any kind of achievement, because everything we have is all so very fragile.”

  The actor looked around his library, nodded at the four Emmy Awards, and with a sweeping arm motion took in his superb collection of modern first editions. “If I walked in here off the street, I suppose I might say this fellow must be pretty important,” he said. “It may sound like false modesty, but I really try to take no credit whatsoever for what has happened to me. I show up for work and I try to take care of my responsibilities and I hope that whatever happens is pleasant. But I can’t just say I did it, because it just doesn’t mean anything when I say that to myself. It’s all been wonderful, but so much of it is luck.”

  In just fifteen years of determined collecting, a Santa Barbara real estate investor has acquired about a million pages of historic manuscripts, an archive so vast it requires a reinforced steel vault ten feet wide by thirty feet long to assure safe storage. Driven by a passion that approaches missionary zeal, David Karpeles has gathered original material in virtually every conceivable field—history, exploration, cartography, religion, art, music, politics, science, literature, and medicine among them. “Whatever I get must make sense to a fifth-grade student, that is the only limitation I have,” he said when we met one August afternoon in his spa
cious home. “Finding a great document is better than cotton candy, watermelon, and sex.”

  Two documents were displayed as centerpieces for his daughter Cheryl’s wedding reception, held in one of five private museums Karpeles maintains in various parts of the country to showcase his treasures. Richard Wagner’s manuscript copy of the Wedding March, from the opera Lohengrin, a composition synonymous with the joyful lyric “Here comes the bride,” was featured in one cabinet, while Felix Mendelssohn’s original score of the sixth number of his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the lively melody bridal parties everywhere know as the recessional, was lying in the other. A string quartet entertained the guests with memorable renditions of the two pieces.

  “We like celebrating important events with manuscripts from our collection,” Karpeles said. To honor the bicentennial of the American Constitution in 1987, he mounted an exhibition that displayed five original documents: the report of the Committee to Implement the Articles of Confederation, the announcement by Congress of the election of the first president of the United States, New York’s ratification of the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation Amendment to the Constitution signed by Abraham Lincoln and the full Senate, and the original constitution of the French monarchy proposed and submitted to King Louis XVI.

  In 1989, Karpeles marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Sigmund Freud by exhibiting a number of papers in which the father of psychoanalysis discussed headaches, dreams, and self-analysis. The following year, the invention of electronic communications was marked with an exhibition of pertinent Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Guglielmo Marconi materials, including the first pencil sketch of the radio. A 1991 music exhibition featured the original manuscript for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Paderewski’s Minuet in G.

 

‹ Prev