Allison Bartlett - The Man Who Loved Books Too Much - The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession

The earliest use of the term has been traced to an English book-sale catalog in November 1692. 4But it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that scholars attempted to define what makes a book rare, with bibliophile J. E. Berger making Monty Python-esque distinctions between “rarus” and “ rarior” and “rarissiumus.” 5 A book’s degree of rarity remains subjective, and the only qualities of “rare” that collectors and dealers seem to agree on is some combination of scarcity, importance, and condition. Taste and trends play roles as well, however. When a movie adaptation is released, whether Pride and Prejudice or Nancy Drew , first editions of the book often become temporarily hot property among collectors. While Dickens will almost certainly be a perennial choice, Dr. Seuss’s star has risen as the children who were raised on his books have become adults with the means to form their own collections. 6

Walking by a booth with an impressive selection of dust jacket art, I heard a dealer say to a passerby, “Don’t judge a book by its content!” I had read enough about book collectors before the fair to get the joke: Many collectors don’t actually read their books. At first, I was surprised, but having given it some thought, it’s not so shocking. After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books’ physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories—we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on.

For me, the most important book-as-object from my childhood is Charlotte’s Web , the first book I mail-ordered after joining a book club. I still remember my thrill at seeing the mailman show up with it at our front door on a sunny Saturday morning. It had a crisp paper jacket, unlike the plastic-covered library books I was used to, and the way the pages parted, I could tell I was the first to open it. For several days I lived in Wilbur’s world, and the only thing as sad as Charlotte’s death, maybe even sadder, was that I had come to the end of the book. I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of pages I let myself read each day in order to put off the inevitable end, my banishment from that world. I still do this. It doesn’t make sense, though, because the pleasure of that world does not really end for good. You can always start over on page one—and you can remember. Whenever I have spotted my old Charlotte’s Web (on my son’s shelf, then my daughter’s), I have recalled how it came to me. It’s a personal record of one chapter of my life, just as other chapters have other books I associate with them. The pattern continues; my daughter returned from camp last summer with her copy of Motherless Brooklyn in a state approaching ruin. She told me she’d dropped it into a creek, but couldn’t bear to leave it behind, even after she’d finished it. This book’s body is inextricably linked to her experience of reading it. I hope that she continues to hold on to it, because as long as she does, its wavy, expanded pages will remind her of the hot day she read it with her feet in the water—and of the fourteen-year-old she was at the time. A book is much more than a delivery vehicle for its contents, and from my perspective, this fair was a concentrated celebration of that fact.

AT THE REFRESHMENT STAND toward the back of the fair, I overheard one man say he had just seen Al Pacino, and someone else note that he had spotted one of the Antiques Roadshow experts. The appeal of that PBS show (your junk may be really, really valuable!) was also one of the appeals of the fair. Nothing looked like junk, but plenty of the modern first editions looked perfectly ordinary. Several times I wondered, Do I still have that book? Do my parents? Could it be a first edition?

As I continued to make my way through the fair, the dealers I talked to seemed more excited about the Roadshow man than about Pacino. Still, I took note of every dark-haired man walking by, hoping for a movie star. Pacino certainly would have blended into the crowd better than I, a woman. Most of the collectors were men, 7most well over forty. Many appeared to be scholars or aged hippies or lucky book lovers with inheritances burning holes in their pockets. One man’s red Porsche is one of these guys’ inscribed first-edition copies of Portnoy’s Complaint . When handling any of these books, they cradled them, half open, in both hands, so as not to split the spines or cause any other trauma—no rips or folds or coffee spills. They consulted guides and maps of the fair floor, squinted through spectacles across booths, and stooped to better run their eyes down the spines of books, trying to locate a copy of a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone , of which there were only five hundred printed ($30,000), for example, or the very rare first edition of The History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark ($139,000). Those with less extravagant means were probably hunting down more modest prizes, like a first edition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved ($125) or, more affordable yet, a first edition of John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich ($45). 8They also must have been roaming the aisles hoping to be surprised, because that’s any treasure hunter’s dream—in this case, to stumble upon a book whose scarcity or beauty or history or provenance is even more seductive than the story printed between its covers.

At a fair like this, it’s obvious that the allure of any book is in large part sensual. I watched collectors feast their eyes, their hands, their noses. An Englishman placed his coffee cup at a safe distance on the counter before taking a good whiff of a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , then fell into the rabbit hole of John Tenniel’s enchanting illustrations. Watching him, I assumed he simply liked the smell of old books, but later I learned that sniffing is also a practical precaution: mildew can ravage a book, and a good whiff can tell you if there’s any danger of its encroachment. 9As I roamed from booth to booth, book to book, I felt the sensory enticement myself—the feel of thick, rough-edged pages, the sharp beauty of type, the tightness of linen or pigskin covers, the papery smell.

In my pre-fair research, I learned that this fondness not only for rare books but also for endlessly acquiring them has been alive for twenty-five centuries. 10Around 400 B.C., Euripides was mocked for his appetite for books. 11A few hundred years later, Cicero noted that he was “saving up all my little income” to develop his collection. 12In the “golden age of collecting,” roughly 1870 to 1930, the world was teeming with fevered collectors. They were and are a determined breed, and their desire can swell from an innocent love of books, or bibliophilia, to an affliction far more rabid, bibliomania, a term coined by the Reverend Frognall Dibdin in 1809. 13An English bibliographer and avid collector, Dibdin noted that “what renders it particularly formidable is that it rages in all seasons of the year, and at all periods of human existence.” 14When the books, like those at the New York fair, have pasts—secret, scandalous, or sweet—the attraction is that much more robust. That they also hold history, poetry, science, and stories on their pages can seem almost secondary. The fair was abuzz with people fully in the grip of the spell they cast.