“Warren Howell wasn’t around the day I showed up, but when I asked if there were any Kelmscott Press books around, the fellow who was minding the store opened a door to this collection that had just come in on consignment. Nothing had been put out on display yet.” Of the sixty-six volumes comprising fifty-three titles printed at the Kelmscott Press, Howell had obtained fifty-one of them from the library of the late Templeton Crocker, a wealthy San Francisco collector best known for a remarkable archive of California imprints, travel accounts, Gold Rush diaries, maps, and newspapers that was sold to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1961. Crocker also loved fine printing, and his collection included many of the books produced by the legendary fifteenth-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius and known as Aldines. All of the William Morris books Crocker had gathered were in superb condition, all had flawless provenance, and most had important inscriptions. During three “successive extended lunch hours” spent in Howell’s shop, Berger examined each one before finally selecting The Life and Death of Jason, presented to the artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones by his lifelong friend and colleague William Morris on June 30, 1895. “It’s an extraordinary association copy, and it was mint, so fine,” Berger said. “It was just one book, a large quarto, but it was the one I felt I had to have.”
Instead of providing gratification, though, the acquisition produced what Berger called “a severe case of anticipation syndrome,” which he described as “the reverse of withdrawal symptoms.” The syndrome went away only when he returned and bought the remaining fifty books three weeks later. “I brought home three cardboard boxes, and those three cardboard boxes started it all,” he said. “What I had experienced was something uncontainable; handling so many Kelmscott Press books in so short a period of time was like handling a marble figurine. There was some sort of transference, a realization that these are jewels, these are important. I get chills just remembering it.”
Over the next few years, Warren Howell found the remaining items the Bergers needed to complete their run of Kelmscott Press titles. One came from the library of an elderly American expatriate who was living in Montevideo. “Warren bought a number of things down there, but he carried this back in his lap,” Berger said as he brought forth a genuine copy of the book that had so captivated him twenty-five years earlier in a facsimile version. The Kelmscott Chaucer is a masterpiece of typography, ornamentation, and design that William Butler Yeats once declared to be “the most beautiful of all printed books.” William Morris produced 425 paper copies of the Chaucer in 1896, 379 of which were issued in quarter-linen binding and blue paper-covered boards, with linen spines and pasted labels. The remaining forty-six— bound in white pigskin, blind-stamped with a design drawn by Morris himself, and bound at the Doves Bindery—are the rarest of all; the Chaucer Warren Howell brought back from Uruguay was one of these. (When decorations or lettering are said to be blind-stamped this means that an impression has been made in the leather or cloth binding by a tool without the addition of gold or color.) “Go ahead,” Berger offered. “Feel it for yourself. It’s like ivory.”
Within three years, the Bergers’ Kelmscott Press collection was largely complete, yet their serious collecting of William Morris had just begun. “What followed from there was a natural development,” Berger said, pointing out that anyone who wants to appreciate the full measure of Morris must also take into account not only the man’s work as a finepress typographic designer, but his notable accomplishments as a writer, poet, translator, publisher, painter, weaver, illuminator, designer, businessman, embroiderer, and social activist. In 1892, Morris declined an opportunity to succeed Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as poet laureate; he was too busy doing other things. Politically, Morris was passionately committed to socialist causes and published a number of controversial tracts and pamphlets, most of which Berger has acquired. Moreover, Morris & Company (which from 1861 to 1875 was Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company) manufactured wallpaper, textiles, furniture, stained-glass, metalwork, tiles, and carpets, and produced patterns that have been in production for over a century.
“His work in the field of the applied arts inspired an entire generation of designers and architects; his concern with decorative honesty and truth to materials had a direct bearing on the principles of what was to be the Modern Movement,” Elizabeth Wilhide wrote in a monograph on Morris’s enormous influence, and stressed how he “transformed the whole status of decorative art” by challenging the “mass-produced mediocrity of the nineteenth century and re-establishing the value of handcrafted work.”
In an 1877 lecture, Morris said that everything manufactured by human hands
has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent. [The] one great office of decoration [is to] give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, [while nothing] can be a work of art which is not useful; that is to say, which does not minister to the body when well under command of the mind, or which does not amuse, soothe, or elevate the mind in a healthy state. What tons upon tons of unutterable rubbish pretending to be works of art in some degree would this maxim clear out of our London houses, if it were understood and acted upon!
A number of Morris collections are maintained in several American and British institutions, but most of them focus only on individual aspects of the complete work. “You must not forget that Helen and I are architects,” Berger emphasized. “So it wasn’t long before we wanted to document all the sequences that take place in the design process, from the first concept, to the preliminary development, to everything that goes on before the final stage. It’s so easy to look at a finished product and forget what went into creating it.”
In order to appreciate the creative phases of book production, Berger bought an Albion press and mastered the craft of hand-printing. “Morris inspired me to do good calligraphy. I am a very good calligrapher. And because he printed, I have to print. When you’ve tried it yourself, it becomes a marvel when you look at the real thing. You are able to see where all the pieces fit. You can grasp the full scope of the design process.”
As Berger spoke, the afternoon sun passed through five stained-glass panels that once graced the Unitarian church in Haywood, Lancashire, filling his living room with glorious beams of colored light. Five other figures from the same ensemble are in another room of the house, and a rose window that once surmounted the two rows—three angels with trumpets—is in a third. “I was buying some Morris ceramic tiles from an antiques dealer in London when the saleswoman asked if I might be interested in a Morris stained-glass window,” he said. Because the glass panels were too large for display, they had been gathering dust in a back storeroom for two years. Berger borrowed from the dealer a photograph that showed how the windows appeared in situ in the church, which had been condemned and demolished.
“The whole thing, taken together, was eleven feet wide by eighteen feet high, absolutely enormous,” Berger said. “When I showed the picture to my wife, I told her this was our latest acquisition. She thought I meant the photograph. ‘Not the picture,’ I told her. ‘We bought the entire window.’ ”
The stained-glass window is the largest individual item in the Berger collection, but was by no means the Bergers’ most significant acquisition. That distinction belongs to two crates, “each one the size of an automobile, each weighing about half a ton,” containing a vast jumble of watercolors, letters, files, notes, tiles, pots, books, drawings, hundreds of designs for wallpaper and tapestries, detailed dye books, instructions and formulas for printed fabrics, textile samples, and precise full-size drawings for stained-glass windows called cartoons. It was the archives of Morris & Company in London, bought en bloc by Berger in 1968.
The manner of the archives’ acquisition provides yet another example of what Berger means when he suggests that the collection was “willed into being.” David Magee, for five decades a prominent
San Francisco bookseller, routinely traveled through Britain to make what he called his “rounds” of reliable sources. While chatting one day in 1968 with the London bookseller Anthony Rota, he noticed a watercolor by Edward Burne-Jones propped against a wall that was part of a huge lot just purchased from the estate of Duncan Dearle, managing director of Morris & Company when it ceased operations in 1940. In his memoirs Magee recalled buying “the William Morris lot” on the spot knowing that a valued customer was about to be offered something “which he had never dreamed he might possess.” That “valued customer” was of course Sandy Berger.
When the crates arrived from England, Berger drove immediately from Berkeley to San Francisco for what would be three thrilling hours of discovery, oblivious to the “sacred dust” that layered the cache. At one point, Magee dropped some rolled-up cartoons of stained-glass window designs on the floor. “Now, watch out,” Berger scolded gently. “You may not realize it, but these don’t belong to you anymore.” Without making a formal offer or discussing terms, Berger had made clear he was buying the entire archive. Magee recalled that even though he had no misgivings about Berger’s “financial ability” to handle the purchase, what he “could not imagine” was how his friend planned to store such a formidable mass of material. Berger’s solution was succinct. “I just won’t be able to show everything at one time.”
During my visit, Berger was unable to contain his enthusiasm for the items he kept producing from the archive. “Feel the quality of that,” he said, handing over a hand-knotted sample of carpet. “Look,” he continued, “these are the early proofs of initials and ornaments from the original woodblocks of the Kelmscott Press. There were three sets of these proofs pulled when the press closed. The British Library has one, the Pierpont Morgan Library has another, this is the third. Over here, this is all wallpaper.” From wallpaper and textiles we moved to yet another storage area. “This is Morris’s own drawing,” he said, unrolling a full-size cartoon for a stained-glass window. “Talk about economy of line, look at what he achieved here,” he continued, bringing forth yet another. “This is the figure for a tapestry. We have seven hundred watercolor drawings for stained-glass, another hundred and fifty for textiles and carpets. One hundred and forty of these are figure studies drawn by Morris himself. I think the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has the next most; they have seven I know of.”
Though Berger admitted to overextending himself to obtain some material, his only regrets involve items he failed to buy when he had the opportunity. “I have a nice list of ‘should’ves,’ things I should have bought and didn’t.” In 1968, for example, he was offered a 1638 copy of the British botanist John Gerarde’s Herbal, the book that influenced many of Morris’s early floral designs. “It was three hundred dollars and I didn’t get it because in 1968 I was focusing only on Kelmscott Press items. Now that I’m deep into the decorative arts, I realize how nice it would be to have that book. I see it every once in a while in a catalogue, but now it goes for four thousand dollars. I don’t care to have it that much. But I ‘should’ve’ bought it for three hundred dollars when I had the chance.” Obviously, then, there are limits to what he will spend. “It depends on the item and whether or not we can afford it. I have never let myself get into debt. As soon as a book arrives, I write the check. I don’t order something if I can’t pay for it.”
The Bergers’ archive has cartoons for panels that are even larger than the stained-glass windows in their house. Three are exquisite designs for windows twenty-five feet high. “The only time we’ve seen them unrolled was when the museum in Monterey had an exhibition, and they got the fire department to bring in their ladders. The firemen climbed up and mounted them from the ceiling and hung them from the peak.”
Marjorie Wynne, formerly a rare-books librarian at Yale, explained in her 1987 Sol M. Malkin lecture at Columbia University the ultimate reason for collecting. “To use rare books and manuscripts is to justify the process of collecting and preserving them.” In the preface to a catalogue of a William Morris exhibition at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, Berger wrote of his “particular joy to see a growing shelf of master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, monographs, catalogues, and books produced by scholars” using his collection.
A close examination indicates just how indebted these scholars are to the Bergers. Norman Kelvin, a professor of English at the City College of New York and editor of a comprehensive edition of Morris’s letters, wrote how it is collectors like Berger “who locate and make accessible the material essential for scholarship.” William S. Peterson’s recent history of Morris and his “typographical adventure” of the 1890s, The Kelmscott Press, thanks the Bergers for assistance “in ways too numerous to describe,” while Charles Sewter, author of a two-volume reference work on the stained-glass windows produced by the William Morris Company, had to amend his book when he learned of material in the Berger collection. “I sent Sewter two cardboard cartons of photocopies of all seven hundred drawings in the archive, and all one hundred forty of the drapery studies,” Berger said. “He was totally unaware of this material, and he had to revise the book from the galleys. Can you imagine the scholarly disaster if this material had not been included?” Sewter’s book, The Stained Glass of William Morris, lists three full columns of credits to “S. L. Berger.”
The variety of these studies makes clear that the Bergers have great depth in all of Morris’s activities. “You can go to many institutions that might have more in any one of them, but I don’t know of any one place that will save you a lot of travel as we can,” Berger said. “And that brings me to the question of where I want this collection to end up. My hope is that it can be placed in an institution that will house it all in one place for the use of scholars, so that you can look at the drawing, then go see it in the illuminated page, or in the window, or in the drawing of the tapestry, and not send the drawings over to the art department and all the socialist pamphlets over to the history department and so on. It’s got to be kept in one place.”
Before any decision on the future of the collection is made, however, the Bergers intend to enjoy it to the fullest. An ongoing project is to photograph windows throughout the world that were produced by Morris & Company. “When I’m about eighty-eight, that’s going to be my Ph.D. dissertation, to compare the sketch designs with the actual windows that were executed,” Berger said. “A day doesn’t go by that William Morris doesn’t somehow command my full attention. He has made every day of my retirement a joy. Those books I snuck into the house twenty years ago? I’m not only cataloguing them in the computer, I’ve finally gotten around to reading them.”
In 1985, Sanford L. Berger was the eighteenth recipient of the Sir Thomas More Medal for book collecting, the only award of its kind given in the United States. It was the brainchild of a resourceful Jesuit priest who has been called the “penniless de Medici” of San Francisco for the creative methods he has devised to build a respectable collection of rare books and manuscripts.
The Reverend William J. Monihan, S.J., was named director of special collections at the Gleeson Library of the University of San Francisco in 1947. Over the next four decades, he acquired more than forty notable collections, including half a dozen from one of the great bibliophiles of the past half century, Norman H. Strouse, the former chairman of the board of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, who died in January 1993.
“I got the idea for the Sir Thomas More Medal when I was visiting Europe with the Grolier Club in 1967,” Father Monihan said. “I discovered that the Royal Library of Sweden gives such an award, and I was impressed by the concept. I even borrowed their motto, which translates ‘private book collecting—a public benefit.’ I came back and talked to our library associates and said, ‘Why can’t we do this?’”
He named the medal for Sir Thomas More, who was the focus of his first major acquisition; the collection now includes about a thousand items, foremost among them a volume of the martyr’s w
ritings annotated in the hand of John Donne. The first person Father Monihan wanted to receive the honor was Norman Strouse. “In 1968 Norman was approaching retirement. We had lunch together in New York, and he said, ‘I’d like to help your library.’ After we gave him the first medal he said to me, ‘When I move back out to California, I am going to help make your library great.’ And he has done exactly that. I can immediately name at least seven or eight important collections that are identified with his name, and not just here. There’s a marvelous Thomas Carlyle collection he gave to the University of California at Santa Cruz when they were just getting started. And the Bancroft Library over at Berkeley named a room for him, he has helped them so significantly.”
Though the Sir Thomas More Medal is sponsored by a university, all but two of the first twenty-five recipients—Frederick R. Goff in 1974, then chief of rare books at the Library of Congress, and Lawrence Clark Powell, former director of libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles—have been private collectors. Other recipients have included Wilmarth S. Lewis, Clifton Waller Barrett, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Mary Hyde Eccles, William H. Scheide, Otto Schäfer of West Germany, and Dr. Mitsuo Kodama of Japan, who represents yet another trend in collecting. The scholar’s Shakespeare and Shakespeareana collection of more than ten thousand items, now housed at Tokyo’s Meisei University Library, ranks second only to the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., and his Abraham Lincoln collection is the largest and most comprehensive outside the United States.
“I am a Jesuit, and I took a vow of poverty,” Father Monihan explained in our interview. “I have no interest at all in owning anything for myself. But I love books, and I collect them. The difference is that I collect them for an institution, not myself. Early on I knew that I could never have a strong library if I depended upon university funds. They would say, ‘We would love to help you, Will, but we just can’t do it.’ So when I became head of the library in 1947, I went outside. I went out to meet people. And I’ve been doing it ever since. I have created enthusiasm among friends to support us. Now we have an endowment fund of some size, and I’m always getting gifts. So what you are seeing here is largely from friends, with no university funds used at all. This is all outside money doing this.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 56