Why Collect?

"If I were the owner of the copy of Keats's Poems which Shelley had in his pocket when he was drowned, and which Trelawney threw upon the funeral pyre, I confess I should never read it...though I might keep it in a little shrine and burn incense to it." (Harry B. Smith).



Consider owning a great work of literature inscribed by its author--Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Joyce's Ulysses or Twain's Huckleberry Finn--or the first edition of a book so ground-breaking that it single-handedly changed the world--such as Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Newton's Principia Mathematica or Marx's Das Kapital. Or consider having the first edition of a book less monumental in scope but one which resonates in the lives of so many of us--Charlotte's Web, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye.



Collections of rare books are as individual as those who build them. Indeed, of all areas of collecting, book collecting is perhaps the most personal: no group of objects can better reflect one's ideas, interests and inspirations. The desire to collect those books that point to your life, that say best who and what you are, that show what has influenced you, what has inspired you, and what has moved you--this is the desire that motivates the rare book collector.



Why collect rare books? Because as you hold in your hands the first edition of any great book you hold something of its history, that moment when it was first presented to the world, new, original, without commentary or judgment. And in the book you hold you can appreciate all of the trials and tribulations that it may have survived, everything from intentional destruction through censorship and burnings, to the more mundane wear of years of handling and reading and even simple neglect.



When one collects rare books, one grows to appreciate the overwhelming odds against which so many of these first editions survived, compounded often by the small quantities of the copies printed and by the relative obscurity with which they were first greeted by the world. Only 614 copies of Robert Burns' first book of poetry, the Kilmarnock edition of 1786, were printed. Walt Whitman was hard-pressed to find financing for the first edition of 795 copies of Leaves of Grass. It is estimated that only 350 copies of the first edition of Wuthering Heights appeared. And although it is not known how many copies of Shakespeare's First Folio were printed, it could not have been many, as surviving copies number only in the hundreds, and it was only through the efforts of his fellow actors that the folio was even produced; it was published not for profit, but "only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare."



Ernest Hemingway once wrote of his craft as a writer that "the great thing is to last," and that is a phrase we have often used in trying to convey what is so important and compelling about rare books. It is often the stories behind the books which make them come to life, the often difficult and tortuous paths that first brought them into being and then eventually to the recognition that made them part of our culture and history, that made them last…



Milton, blind and politically outcast, labored years to produce his great epic poem Paradise Lost, for which he was paid only 20 pounds. The resounding failure of Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was highlighted by the return by the publisher of 700 copies of the first edition to the author, which prompted Thoreau to write, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Bankrupt and dying of throat cancer, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Memoirs at the prompting of Mark Twain in order to provide an income for his family, completing the book, which would become one of the best-selling books published in America, only a week before his death…



With every great first edition comes a story--the creative effort that propelled it into being, the practical logistics which brought it to print, the popular reaction which either brought it immediate fame or consigned it to obscurity--for a time. A rare book collector knows that story and appreciates all of the trials and errors, struggles and successes that brought the book into being. The pleasure of rare book collecting is not only that we can consider each book for its impact on the world and its impact on our own lives, but can appreciate, in holding that fragile, rare, extraordinary first edition copy, all of the random chances that created it, and, but for the greatest of luck, allowed it to survive.