Father Monihan has a warm smile, silver hair, and a gentle demeanor. His blue eyes sparkle when he talks about books, and he is unshakably persuasive about his mission. The ability to get so much “outside help,” as he put it, has been his gift. “I love people and they love me,” he explained. “And that’s all that counts.” On May 9, 1993, the University of San Francisco expressed its gratitude to this kindly man who has “devoted his life to libraries and to books” by naming him the twenty-sixth recipient of the Sir Thomas More Medal.
Any literary tour of the West Coast must include visits to the Huntington Library, the Getty Museum, the William Andrews Clark Library, and the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Southern California, and certainly the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. If the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin were making such an excursion today, he would also surely stop at the Silverado Museum in Napa Valley, where the late Norman H. Strouse created a bibliographical oasis at the foot of Mount St. Helena. Set tastefully among vineyards in the state’s wine country, the museum is devoted entirely to the life and works of Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent his honeymoon in 1880 in an abandoned bunkhouse at the old Silverado Mine on the slope of that very mountain.
When he was a young man living in the state of Washington, Strouse acquired a copy of John Henry Nash’s fine-press edition of The Silverado Squatters, Stevenson’s account of his stay at the mine, and later visited the site. When Strouse retired in 1968, he and his wife moved to St. Helena and immediately established the Valima Foundation with the express purpose of creating a museum that would house his distinguished collection of Robert Louis Stevenson material. Before moving into permanent quarters adjacent to the St. Helena Public Library Center in 1979, the museum occupied space in a handsome old stone building downtown. Strouse’s initial gift of eight hundred items has grown over the years to more than eight thousand, many acquired directly from heirs and friends of the Stevenson family. Original letters, manuscripts, first and variant editions, sculptures, photographs, and memorabilia form the core of the collection, which is presented in a “jewel box” setting.
High spots include Stevenson’s own copy of his first book, An Inland Voyage, the copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses that he presented to his wife, manuscript notes for The Master of Ballantrae, and more than a hundred volumes from the author’s library on Samoa. Artifacts include Stevenson’s lead soldier collection, his working desk, and his wedding ring. Nineteenth-century paintings by such artists as Thomas Hill, H. R. Bloomer, and Virgil Williams, and sculptures by Saint-Gaudens and John Tweed—all with Stevenson associations—are on display as well.
Norman Strouse died in January 1993 after a long bout with Parkinson’s disease, and was unable to grant any interviews during the final years of his life. Ellen Shaffer, a nationally respected bookwoman for more than sixty years and curator of the Silverado Museum from the time it opened in 1969 until her retirement twenty-three years later, was delighted to talk about books and collecting. She was sixty-six years old when she left her job as rare-books librarian at the Free Library of Philadelphia for a new job in California, where she had begun her life among rare books several decades earlier. She recalled these experiences one morning in her office off the main floor of the Silverado Museum.
A native of Leadville, Colorado, Miss Shaffer moved to California in 1924 and got a job working for Ernest Dawson in Los Angeles. Norman Strouse, meanwhile, had spent a lot of time on the West Coast as a senior executive with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. “Norman and I got to know each other sometime around 1930,” Miss Shaffer said. “He was just getting started in advertising and I was working in Los Angeles. He has always haunted bookshops. I used to sell him books, though later it was mostly by mail. Then he finally got promoted over eighty vice presidents into the presidency of the biggest advertising agency in the world, and he moved to New York, where he lived for close to fifty years.”
Miss Shaffer went to work in Philadelphia in 1953 and began teaching a rare-books seminar at Columbia University in New York. “I would go up once a week in the fall semester, and I would take my students over to see Norman. This was wonderful because students could get to libraries and they could get to antiquarian shops, but they couldn’t get to the private collections unless somebody took them. So I used to take them in to see Norman, who always regretted never going to college and was always delighted to help students and universities in every way that he could.”
Strouse gave books and money to institutions all over the United States. “When I was rare-books librarian in Philadelphia, he gave us a wonderful collection of presidential letters. I had somebody come in here one time and say, ‘I’m sorry Mr. Strouse isn’t around, because I’d like to tell him how much I appreciate the collection on the Panama Canal that he gave to the Stanford Public Library.’ I knew him all these years, and that was the first I’d heard of that one.”
For all his generosity, Miss Shaffer said Strouse manifested “a sort of a ruthless quality” in his book collecting. “He was the ultimate browser in bookshops, he could tell you every book he ever had. He could tell you where he bought it, what he paid for it. But he always established a firm personal limit. He kept his inventory at a very specific figure, and if he saw something that he really wanted, then he would give something else away. But he never let his heart run away with his head. He figured that what he was giving was going to just the right place.”
Miss Shaffer was always a bibliophile, “even when I was growing up in Colorado. I used to go around hunting up these old books, and when I got home, I’d put them in a cupboard with a saucer of water and a sponge to combat the dryness, because at ten thousand feet you have a very dry atmosphere. I always cared for books.”
Among the many people she met at Dawson’s, Miss Shaffer had very warm memories of Estelle Doheny. “She was a wonderful person. I was in the Air Corps in the Philippines for two years during the war, and when I got out, I decided to use my G.I. Bill and go down to Mexico and study for a while. And so she gave a luncheon for me. And there was a lovely big card at each table in an envelope, a wonderful handkerchief in it, and inside my envelope was a check for one hundred dollars. And she said, very privately, ‘Each month that you’re in Mexico, you will get one of these checks, and I’ll pray for you too.’ That was the countess. She was a wonderful woman. And despite everything people said about her being an accumulator and not a collector, she knew her books. They sure found out how much she knew when the archbishop sold them off and got something like forty million dollars.”
Miss Shaffer retired as curator of the Silverado Museum in November 1992, and died fourteen months later at the age of ninety.
The issue at hand was the phrase “a gentle madness.” Dr. Haskell F. Norman, a San Francisco psychiatrist, wanted to know if we were talking about actual madness, or just a harmless hobby? He thought for a moment before framing his response with a question of his own:
“All right, why does one collect books?”
He paused once again, then continued at a measured pace.
“Assuming you have the means to collect, why would you collect books rather than something else? That’s the big question to begin with, I think, because if you’re wealthy enough, you can collect anything you want. People who collect books have a certain intellectual curiosity, I think, about books, period, and what books represent to them. The transition between collecting books as objects and collecting books for information is to differentiate, if you will, between work and play.”
Dr. Norman has dedicated his professional life to understanding the quirks of human emotion. His livelihood and reputation depend on how successfully he can gauge motivation, purpose, and passion. In addition to building a successful Bay Area practice over the past fort-five years, he has assembled a major collection of books in science, medicine, and psychiatry, and now he was being asked to diagnose his own fascination for rare books. “We take madness very seriously in my line
of work,” he joked, but his point had been made. “In the first place, you have to have an interest in acquisition, and that’s the psychological factor. Now, if it remains within certain bounds, just like any other part of your personality, if your personality has adapted in terms of society, that is considered reasonably normal. If it’s maladapted, then you can start talking about madness.”
With that, the conversation lightened up considerably because it was time to look at his books, which was the purpose of my visit to San Francisco that morning. We were meeting in the downtown offices of Dr. Norman’s son, Jeremy Norman, an antiquarian bookseller who was putting the finishing touches on a two-volume catalogue of his father’s collection, a project that had taken the better part of seven years to complete. Some of Dr. Norman’s most impressive possessions were there for our examination.
“Every collector wants to have at least one great book,” Dr. Norman said. “Here, I submit, is what any reasonable person would have to agree is a great book.” Lying flat on a nearby Bible stand was his copy of the physician and anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani corporis fabrica, printed at Basel in 1543, and bound in imperial purple silk velvet. Known commonly as the Fabrica, the landmark work provided the first detailed description of human anatomy and includes drawings of bones and the nervous system of such accuracy that Vesalius was accused by his enemies of body snatching for the evil purpose of dissection. A death sentence imposed upon the physician by the Inquisition was commuted, provided he make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; this atonement Vesalius undertook, but he died on the return journey in 1564. What makes Dr. Norman’s copy of this prize truly great is that it is the dedication copy presented by the author to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
“This book represents the beginning of the study of human anatomy in the Western world,” Dr. Norman said, now glowing with pride. “And if you can believe it, I found it offered for sale in a French dealer’s catalogue.” One reason the book was on the open market in 1963 is because the association between Vesalius and the Holy Roman emperor had not yet been determined. “A few people thought that because the plates are colored, it was an inferior copy. The fact is that this is the only copy, so far as we can determine, that has contemporary colored plates, and that is because it was intended for presentation.”
All other documented copies of the first edition have woodcut engravings, which are reproduced in black and white. “When woodcut books are colored in, they are usually very crudely done. The first tipoff was that these are not colored in any conventional sense; they were executed by a miniaturist and illuminated in silver and gold. Just look at what we’re talking about,” he said, and he opened the sixteenth-century folio to the title page, which pictures Vesalius performing an autopsy before an audience of horrified onlookers; it has the freshness and precision of a master painting.
Dr. Norman conducted extensive research on the history of the book before traveling to Paris to buy it. “I knew when I got there that Vesalius had delivered a copy to Charles V, that the copy had been bound in imperial purple velvet, and that it was hand-illuminated.” He also learned that the dedication copy did not remain in the emperor’s possession, that it had been presented as a gift to the French ambassador, Jacques Mesnae. Where it went subsequently had remained a mystery. “When I picked up the book, I was convinced I was holding in my hands the long-lost dedication copy of the Fabrica.”
By the time Dr. Norman acquired his first “great book,” he had been collecting actively for ten years. “It was at that point that I decided to concentrate on presentation copies and dedication copies,” he said. “Because they are so hard to find, I usually acquired a regular copy of what I was looking for, and when something more interesting came along, I would either sell off the inferior copy or trade it up for something else.” The search for association copies developed into an “important aspect” of his collection. “It adds an extra dimension to the experience. The books expose you to the minds of the great pioneers, but the associations give you a glimpse into their biography. Admittedly, a great deal of the pleasure comes with the knowledge that you have something unique.”
Dr. Norman’s copy of Robert Hooke’s 1665 folio, Micrographia, the first book devoted entirely to descriptions of microscopic observations, is the only known presentation copy extant of the first edition. His 1628 copy of William Harvey’s report on the circulation of the blood—the cornerstone of modern physiology—was once owned by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the founder of modern anthropology. A collection of John Locke’s essays, published posthumously for the first time in 1720, bears the bookplate of Sir Isaac Newton. An 1847 dissertation on stereochemistry by Louis Pasteur, which predates his work in microbiology, was a presentation copy to the scientist’s most intimate friend, Charles Chappuis. The first modern textbook on chemistry, a two-volume work by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier published in 1789, was presented by the author to Michel Adanson, a noted natural historian whose annotations appear throughout the work. Marie Curie’s doctoral dissertation on radioactivity, published in 1903, bears an inscription to Ernest Rutherford, who hypothesized the existence of the atomic nucleus. A first edition of Charles Darwin’s 1839 narrative account of several “surveying voyages” made on the Beagle was a gift to Dr. Andrew Smith, a British surgeon the author visited in South Africa.
Dr. Norman’s books on the history of psychiatry, his initial focus, are without equal in private hands. “That’s how it began,” he said. “When I started out in 1950 or so, I wasn’t really interested in first editions, I was interested in getting things that I could use, and at some point along the way I felt that since I was in training as a psychoanalyst, I should get a first edition of Freud’s Die Traumdeutung, which is The Interpretation of Dreams. You have to remember that I could still read German then. So I acquired a copy of that book, and it seemed like something that was interesting, then after I bought that, I felt maybe I should collect a few others. Once I was well on my way to getting all of Freud, the idea came that maybe I should collect a few of these other people, his colleagues, and the people who came before him.”
By then, Dr. Norman had accepted that he no longer was acquiring these materials because they helped him in his work. “When I started teaching psychoanalysis at the University of California, I rationalized that I was getting books I could use in my class. Of course I didn’t really need first editions, copies were perfectly adequate. But I had become interested in rarity, I was interested in price, I was interested in condition. My feeling was, well, this is kind of fun. Let’s see if I can collect more.”
The decision to transform a good collection into a major collection was occasioned by Jeremy Norman’s decision to become a professional bookseller. “It always concerned me that I had a collection of valuable books, and that there was nobody I could depend on to disperse them if anything happened to me. When my son first went to work for Warren Howell in 1964, I began to feel reassured. Once Jeremy was interested, I had more freedom to feel that it wouldn’t be lost. This was such an incentive because the books are an important asset to my family. I knew very well how collections frequently get inherited by people who don’t know what they are worth. This made it possible for me to continue collecting comfortably, because otherwise it wasn’t fair to my wife.”
With the support of his family, Dr. Norman’s enthusiasm quickened. “I had made some money in investments, and I felt it was time to get a great book,” he said. “The book I decided I really wanted to have was a first edition of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, and I came very close to getting the most important copy.” He had learned from a London bookseller that the copy inscribed to Andreas Goldschmidt on April 20, 1543, by Rheticus, the astronomer’s disciple who was responsible for the book’s publication, was available from another dealer, possibly for $12,000. “I said get it for me, but by then it was already gone. It had just been bought by Harrison Horblit.”
On a subsequent trip to New York, Dr. Norm
an met Horblit, a celebrated collector, and saw the great private collection that had inspired a major exhibition at the Grolier Club in 1958, “One Hundred Books Famous in the History of Science.” “That was a great thrill for me, to see that extraordinary collection of books that he had been building since the 1940s.” Horblit showed Dr. Norman the Copernicus that had almost been his, bound in blind-stamped contemporary pigskin, and many other superb titles, including Kepler’s Astronomia nova of 1609. “We became friends, and I became a regular visitor to his home in New York. Every time I saw him, he taught me something new about bibliography. He is also the reason why I have been so concerned about getting a catalogue of my own collection produced.”
The late Harrison D. Horblit—a New York carpet manufacturer who had given many wonderful things to several institutions over the years, Harvard University quite prominent among them—decided in 1974 to stop collecting and sell his library. Two elegant volumes detailing part of his library were issued by Sotheby’s under the title The Celebrated Library of Harrison D. Horblit, Esq., and encompassed the first two parts of what was expected to be an extended auction to take place in multiple sessions in London. Part 1 was held in June 1974, part 2 five months later. As in most major sales, the books were listed alphabetically by author; part 1 covered A through C, part 2 went from D to G, leaving nineteen letters to be catalogued and sold at later dates. For reasons never fully explained, the sales ended abruptly at the end of part 2, and no catalogues were issued for the remaining titles. Horblit gave some items to Harvard, and sold most of what remained to Hans P. Kraus.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 57