Will the Book Collector of Today Be the Donor of Tomorrow?

Special collections are a recent development in the history of the world. They are among the legacies of the capitalists of the last century, along with most of our orchestras, art museums and perhaps some of our cities. Over the years, they’ve flourished and multiplied with the growth of college and university budgets. Today, the special collection is a mature phenomenon. It is in danger of becoming an ossified phenomenon. Once, the future of the special collection was in the hands of the private collector. Today, it is in the hand of the institutional treasurer. The questions before us now is: Will that hand be a closed fist? Will we need to pry it open? Or can it be made to give of its own free will?

One answer to these questions depends on the psychology of the collector.

Collecting has been around since the beginning of time or at least human time. Is it instinctive or acquired? Rational or obsessive? No one knows. The word “mania” is often applied to collectors, and not always with affection.

Collectors are motivated by an obscure craving, harkening back to childhood. Walter Benjamin speaks of the “profound enchantment” of the collector, who seeks to lock “individual items within a magic circle.”

It’s a magic circle that is not open to everybody. There are rituals of entry that rival “The Magic Flute” especially in rare books. The novice needs mentors and guides if he or she is to navigate the flaming landscape. But that landscape is changing. Reliable guides are harder to find. The internet supplies information, not wisdom.

Well into the century past, book collecting was like politics: a gentleman’s game. It was a bastion of the wealthy male. Not for any sinister reasons. They were the only ones with the time and means to pursue it. Entry called for a leather armchair, tweed jacket and mahogany-paneled library.

That has changed. A visit to the Grolier Club will tell you that interest in rare books has undergone a swirling demographic sea change: Young and old, men and women. The magic circle becomes wider.

When I began collecting in the mid 1970’s, it was primarily a solitary activity, requiring an aggressive, proactive approach to knowledge. Written guides were few. No “Book Collecting for Dummies” existed. You were on your own. I was fortunate enough to have the advice of a few knowledgeable dealers—who guided me toward an introspective understanding of market dynamics.

Books were a quiet field then, periodically punctuated by well-hyped auctions or promoted by writers such as Edward A. Newton or earlier, Holbrook Jackson (no relation), a backwater of the high-powered art and antiques market. Since then, books have picked up the pace. Today, the book market is probably ahead of art and antiques, at least in the use of computers and the internet.

Back in the 70s, book auctions were a distant rumor--primarily for the trade. Today, they are the Grammys, the Oscars and the Golden Globes of the game. The big houses market like Hollywood super-agents. They find properties with cross-over appeal, and polish them to a high gleam. We’ve all had the experience of losing our heads and purse at auctions. Today, it threatens to become a way of life. Irrational exuberance isn’t confined to the stock market.

All eyes are on the “trophy book”. You don’t have to be elitist to see something vulgar and grasping in all this outlandish bidding for these books that arrive on a pile of press releases. The effect is like that of inflated star salaries of the movie business. A few big names soak up all the resources, and many other items starve.

Actually, starving is far too strong a word. A decade of prosperity has opened the field to thousands of people who might never have passed the browsing stage. The real problem is paucity of product; a condition not likely to reverse. As a result, new fields and subjects are opening up every day. Specialization has become broader and deeper. There are new theaters of value. Dealers seek a finer grain. Collectors see that it might be possible to achieve the nirvana of a small, yet complete collection.

No one is born with special interests. Ideally, we cast about the same way we look for a spouse or life partner. We survey the generality and let ourselves be drawn by the mysterious forces of affinity.

When it comes time to cast about, many of us begin in the antiquarian bookstore.

Robert Morely wrote of the “Haunted Bookshop”. You and I were the ones who haunted it. We took the measure of the field, and learned about books by touch, by feel, by comparative intuition. These were temples of initiation.

But the day of such bookstores has passed. Real estate and the cost of doing business have made them impractical. Books captivate through personal encounter. To meet a book for the first time at an auction has all the warmth of an arranged marriage.

Personal relations are at the heart of the book field. Mentors and advisors teach us the folk wisdom of the trade. The best relationships cannot be formed overnight. Valuable chains of acquaintance may begin at the bookshop level. There is something symbolically democratic about storefront access that we shall be sorry to lose.

In many ways, today’s beginning book collector is expected to begin with fully formed tastes. While there are many opportunities to start small at modest cost and to make modest mistakes, it is still difficult to grow rich in experience. Today, it helps to know somebody. But everybody knows that if you’re a nobody, you can’t meet anybody. So its not easy to get started.

You might meet somebody at a book fair. The book fair is the last place on earth where all the players in the rare book game come into one another’s physical presence. Many of us remain jaded and cynical about book fairs. But they still hold the possibility of surprise. They’re our equivalent of the Quatrocento masked ball. People trade identities. Dealers become buyers, buyers become sellers, and the unexpected crouches behind the tapestry.

Today, with the internet and the availability of material from a broad spectrum of dealers, the number of collectors has boomed. Correspondingly, the amount of important earlier material coming to market has rapidly diminished. This, in turn, will affect the quality of the next generation of collectors. A large supply of material brings increased knowledge, a more highly developed connoiseurship and refined appreciation. A shrinkage diminishes the collective knowledge pool, and the connoiseurship of collectors.

We all know the spectacular effects of the internet on all aspects of trading. Rare books and manuscripts are brought and sold at lightning speed. Whole libraries evaporate in seconds to buyers made knowing by instant access to comparative pricing and sellers who can tell at a glance what their competitors are asking, and adjust their prices accordingly.

Ten years ago, no one could have predicted what book collecting has become today.

So what does the future hold for collectors? For that matter, what does the future hold for the book?

The answer of this question contains the future of book collecting. For whatever happens to the book will have a decisive affect on the way we collect, what we collect, and how we pass items on for future generations.

Here in the year 2001, we are living in the heyday of the printed book. Today, there are more books being read by more people in more different walks of life then at any time in human history. More books have been printed in the past five years alone than were printed in all of the 17th and 18th centuries combined. Shops that specialize in new books groan with titles. Second-hand bookshops do a lively trade. Libraries are jammed with patrons, and overwhelmed with titles. Antiquarian booksellers try to satisfy the burgeoning pool of collectors with ever odder materials. Far from killing the book, the invention of the computer has been responsible for killing more trees than any event in human history, spawning mountains of handbooks, how-to books, users’ guides, repair manuals, and volumes of cybernetic philosophy. And the well-named Amazon.com has turned the United States Post Office and UPS into great rolling rivers of print products.

This was already the great age of the book -- even before Oprah got into the act.

Looking around us, the triumph of the printed word would seem to be complete. There was a time when you had to travel to Harvard Square to find a good newsstand. Today, the Amish in Holmes County, Ohio, live only a short carriage ride from a newsstand at Borders as good as any in America only 30 years ago.

Yet when anyone speaks of the future of the book, a certain nervousness creeps into the voice. This is particularly so when we are talking about the book as an object in space with six sides, two covers and a spine. There’s something in the air. Everyone can sense it. Vast changes are in store for the book and everything that’s associated with it. Something is waiting to be born. Only a few simple details remain to be ironed out. For instance: what it will look like, how it will be read, and how it will be sold?

Jason Epstein with whom Dan DiSimone and I recently spent some time, has written extensively about these issues and remarkably “has been repeatedly successful in anticipating the future” (Kirshbaum), He believes we are approaching the era of the instant printed books on demand.

We seem to be at that proverbial moment when the past has yet to die, and the future has yet to be born. Among our own symptoms we might include the e-book, Rocket Book, downloadable text, and other efforts to wipe out the sensual pleasure of reading, owning and collecting books. But what comes next?

I happen to own a page of Dickens’ manuscript of “The Pickwick Papers”—an icon. It’s of little interest to scholars, except as evidence that Dickens -- like Shakespeare and Mozart -- never “blotted a line”[Jonson]. But it may be the most emotionally precious item I own. By contrast, I recently saw pages of Joyce’s manuscript of “Ulysses” (the circe episode). Unlike Dickens’ smooth production, Joyce’s pages were almost black with additions, emendations and other rewriting. Just speaking as a reader, not a collector, the insight I gained from seeing those pages was, in its own way, priceless.

The end of the twentieth century may have seen the end of that kind of artifact. Tomorrow’s collector may not own or donate original manuscripts, because the original manuscript has more or less ceased to exist.

Today’s younger authors almost universally type their books into a word processor, and send them to their publishers in the form of an electronic file. Early drafts are deleted to make room on hard drives. Or a writer may simply work on a single draft, changing and correcting and leaving no trace of the creative struggle.

It appears that in the future, literature will cease to produce the unique paper artifact. The manuscript page, with its erasures, additions and tear stains will vanish. The vanguard of this trend is already with us in the form of e-mail, which has increased letter writing if you call that real letter writing, but eliminated the physical letter.

All that is solid will not melt into pixels, however. There is some resistance. It is being led by the children’s book. Among this set, there seems to be no lessening of interest in books with pages and pictures. This actually gives hope to the future. For don’t we begin to love the form of a book in early age? And aren’t the books we cherish as grownups simply elaborations of that same form? In this way, aren’t all books are essentially children’s books? Don’t we take a child’s pleasure in their shape and feel and tactile qualities? Isn’t this the same pleasure we take in fine private press editions? Sometimes we even like the story.

What stamps our character as children has remarkable staying power. For this reason alone, I believe in the persistence of the book.

Those who predict the disappearance of the book are in a strange position today. They’re like the climatologist who is asked about global warming in the midst of the blizzard of the century. The book may disappear and the ice caps may melt. But at the moment, we’re still digging out.

The difference between short-term phenomena and long-term change makes it hard to predict the future of the book. But what about the future of books collectors? Who will they be? What will they collect? Will they donate to special collections?

It is a fact that today’s class of collectors is a heterogeneous one. They may be men or women of any age, race or level of affluence. How knowledgeable are they? William S. Reese recently suggested that the most knowledgeable collectors are those over the age of 65. I would differ with him. Among the collectors I meet and those I am currently mentoring, the younger -- and I mean those from 30 to 60 -- are well-educated on the topic of the book and everything else or so they think. The affluent young are more likely to be from the professional or .com classes, and therefore to have extensive educations. They differ from earlier collectors, the top-hatted capitalist, the self-made man, for whom books signalized the possession of knowledge. For this type of collector, the possession of a library may have served both to himself and notice to the world, that he had “arrived ” in the world of culture. The younger collectors don’t have to prove themselves this way. At the same time, the affluent today less frequently constitute a “leisure class.” They do not have time to “play” at collecting. If they don’t study the topic themselves and learn it down to the ground, they rely on experts.

Book collecting offers a rare opportunity to those who are only modestly wealthy or of limited means. Unlike the art market, which is driven by the truly wealthy, the book market is a place where a moderate fortune can still compete.

So we are all out there collecting. Men and women. Young and old. Creating for ourselves shadow lives of books and print, passion and possession, pursuit and capture. Our collections themselves are not static things. They are born, they flourish, and ultimately, they travel out of our possession as we either die, or sell them or give them away.

It is this ultimate dispersion that concerns us today.

Will the book collector of today be the donor of tomorrow? In many ways, it is to be hoped not. As collectors die and their collections are sold or auctioned, their books go back into circulation. They return to nourish a new generation of collectors and collections.

But book collecting’s gain is a loss to those scholars and that posterity which justifiably wishes to see artifacts gathered and preserved in a unitary fashion, in a place where they are easily accessible and easy to keep track of.

A private collection that is arduously compiled and exhaustively complete is a collection at rest. Its final home should be an institution, where it can be preserved and consulted by future generations.

That is the special collection. The remarkable expansion of special collections over the past century at universities and public institutions has radically altered the pursuit of scholarship and knowledge. The unique and rare manuscripts and material that were once the private hoard of the church or wealthy collector are relatively accessible to academic investigators and the curious lay person. As special collections mature and morph into research institutions and electronic repositories, the need for preserving the past in its original form is more critical than ever.

Clearly, it is the right thing to give to special collections. But motives for doing the right thing are often mixed. Some donors give out of the goodness of their hearts. Others, for the tax advantage. The latter is not to be despised.

At the moment, the tax motive is very much in favor of special collections. A great deal of material is about to become available. Private collectors who started collecting in the 1960’s and 70’s or earlier were able to obtain important items at a very low cost, in today’s values. They will obtain a very good tax advantage based on the present fair market value of their holdings. Not so today’s beginning collectors, who are entering a market where prices and value are very much in line. They too will have to wait their time.

It is to the advantage of the collector who began much earlier to donate to special collections. Why sell to a dealer? A dealer will only give you about half the retail value of your collection (unless on consignment or private treaty). There is a significant advantage in going to auction, but mainly for trophy books and highly promoted items. Even with capital gains rates plus state income tax rate at a fairly reasonable level, donating or selling and donating, rather than selling the bulk of a collection is an attractive option.

Those who are beginning to collect today, however, are buying high. The tax advantage will be far less. What will happen to all these collections?

It’s always fashionable to be cynical, and the fashionably cynical view is that without artificial tax support, donation will die. This may be true. On the other hand, it is undeniable that the great age of American philanthropy took place in the early part of this past century, when great fortunes went virtually untaxed. And it might be added, that the authors of this philanthropy were that generation known to us as the “Robber Barons”. Popular history tells us that they were as cynical and cut-throat a crew of bloodthirsty pirates as ever sailed the bounding main. Yet the cultural infrastructure of museums, universities, libraries and orchestras we enjoy today, is largely a creation of their generosity.

It may be that, being greater sinners, they had more to atone for. But it is difficult to believe that today ’s gentler and better-educated generation of affluence will be any less likely to give.

But now, let’s turn the tables. Too often, discussions of philanthropy turn on an analyses of the donor and his or her responsibilities. As a collector and a donor to special collections, I’d like to address the other partner in this menage. The special collection. I’d like give my perspective on the future of special collections.

The past half century has seen the development of hundreds of special collections. Today, most of these are flourishing. But more recently formed collections are having identity problems. Most good stuff has been taken. By “good stuff”, I mean the high end or “canonized” areas of collecting. The major materials that have the ability to define a collection are coming off the market. Even if those materials were on the market, the newer collections couldn't afford them. There is no special collection equivalent of the Getty Museum, a new institution with an unlimited acquisition budget and carte blanche to buy. With shrinking budgets and a lack of outstanding material available, special collections are in a state of flux.

Other factors at work include the changing face of librarianship. Many of you know better than I that there are currently fewer venues for training librarians. Where training is available, the current emphasis is technology transfer and information education, rather than the traditional library school core subjects. Positions in special collections are being filled by younger people who may have greater comfort and familiarity with computers than books.

The ranks of librarians, like those of nurses and other formerly female-dominated professions, are not being replenished at the same rate as in the past. Women have more options, and can make better money elsewhere.

As time goes on, preservation will become more important. But special collections were founded mainly as research institutions. Preservation of materials continues to be of secondary importance.

Now and in the future, special collections will need to develop and expand their relationship with the donor. It is not enough to presume an alumnus will give simply because of some nostalgic college or teenage memories. Some universities are developing parent and community programs aimed at cultivating donors. One librarian in Florida learned Spanish for the specific purpose of reaching out to a large Hispanic community.

I've never performed or read of a scientific survey on the subject, but I suspect very few collectors are aware of the needs and goals of special collections. The world is full of people who would be quite happy to donate their collections, taxes be damned. But they have to be reminded that special collections are out there and that special collections people would love to make their acquaintance. You don't get anything if you don't ask for it.

If established collections don't move first, these collectors may establish new special collections. But are these really necessary? Perhaps for expanding active subjects like science, medicine and business. But for the rest, there's not enough money out there, and new collections will simply lead to diffusion and mediocrity. We need to build on what has already been started.

Our current special collections were created in a different climate, when universities and institutions had huge acquisition budgets, and played the 600-pound gorilla at auctions and with dealers. Today, that gorilla is a very quiet little marmoset. Too quiet.

When acquisition budgets shrank, most special collections slowed in developing and growing their collections. Now it is a real challenge, even for historically strong special collections to effectively persuade the library’s senior administration that they are central to the teaching and research goals of the parent institution. With only a few notable exceptions, many began to see themselves as caretakers rather than wise stewards.

As I've said, special collections may be able to rely on the tax-motivated giver today. But down the line, giving will be a matter of pure altruism. In the future, special collections will need to act like other successful non-profits. They need to assess their wants, survey the pool of potential donors, and target those individuals whose collections complement their own. They need to hone in on those collectors. Show them that somebody cares. That somebody loves and wants their collection, and is prepared to care for it in perpetuity. If not, the collector of today will not be the donor of tomorrow.