Social media mavens would have us believe that print media is dead, killed off by the innovative disruption of onscreen newspapers, magazines, and ebooks. But it turns out that pockets of print and print lovers still exist. Part of print’s survival is psychological. In the case of books, body weight intimates that the pages within might contain something worth a reader’s time and effort. In the case of newspapers, newsprint that comes off on your hand conveys a sense that the information within is somehow “real.” However subliminal, the idea of authenticity is important: Lothar Muller recently theorized in White Magic: The Age of Paper that this kind of “heavy” media enables a civilization “to anchor itself.”
Some of us have been surrounded by books our whole lives. We line our walls with them, build stacks next to favorite chairs, and continually edit what we have to make room for new volumes. Book buying today is instantly accessible, and online buying has vastly changed our book-buying habits. Some of us still occasionally wander through Barnes & Noble, but even that surviving store—the only major chain bookstore left—has been forced to rethink its strategy about actually selling books. But beyond those of us who simply acquire books in print by “clicking,” there is a special category of true believers, an anointed clique of adventurers who are impassioned by book collecting. Eternally optimistic, they stalk their quarry, rain or shine, in flea markets, bookstalls, and second-hand shops, always hoping to flush out something rare and wonderful.
The search for the exhilarating “find” is the subject of Rare Books Uncovered. A dedicated booklover and editor of Fine Books & Collections, a quarterly publication for collectors, dealers, curators, and librarians, Rebecca Rego Barry has heard many stories about extraordinary rare book discoveries; she has also unearthed her own share of first editions lurking in churchyard book sales and flea market bins. As Nicholas A. Basbanes points out in his foreword, “Just like every angler with a fantastic fish story to share, every book collector has at least one great ‘find’ to talk about when kindred spirits gather.”
Here, Barry has interviewed 52 impassioned collectors and captured fascinating “yarns” aimed at making kindred collecting spirits boggle: A first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species found in an Oxfordshire bathroom sold for $185,551 in 2009; an early copy, circa 1300, of the Magna Carta found in the Kent County Council Archives sold for $15 million in 2014. But aside from visions of dancing dollar signs, book collectors like David Anthem told Barry that they also just explore to “have fun.” He spends his weekends trolling haunts in Philadelphia. His favorite moment came when he spotted a “rough-looking South Philly guy” setting up in a back alley near a flea market: Here he discovered a first edition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, paying under five dollars for it. Its current value is $25,000.
Chicago collector Joel Birenbaum’s prize moment came when he saw a 1979 Chicago Sun-Times ad for someone selling Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland with illustrations by Salvador Dali; the asking price was $175. It piqued his attention, and research showed that this was a limited edition of 2,500; he bought the book, and today this version can now be worth approximately $4,750 to $8,750, depending on condition. This acquisition also launched Birenbaum down his own rabbit’s-hole adventure: His Alice collection now numbers over 1,200 editions.
Kurt Zimmerman has a story worthy of the author he collected: He found a trove of Mark Twain books stored in wooden barrels in a San Diego garage. This amazing stash included Twain’s signed copies of his own books, such as More Tramps Abroad, as well as his personal copies of books such as Darwin’s journal from the voyage of the HMS Beagle—a copy that Twain not only wrote his name in, but his extensive marginalia as well. The barrelsful of Twain books turned out to be from Twain’s own library and had once been part of his daughter Clara Clemens’s estate. When Zimmerman auctioned this collection of 271 books in 1997, the Mark Twain House in Hartford bought it for $200,500.
Barry’s final story is about the novelist / bookseller Larry McMurtry, whom she designates “the spiritual dean of bibliophiles” and whose bookstore in Texas was long a pilgrimage site for collectors. In his memoir, McMurtry described how he had become entranced by reading and collecting books as a youth, and spent hours scouring charity and junk shops, with Goodwill and Trash and Treasure being his favorite haunts. He spent much of his life exploring a vast range of bookshops, thrift stores, junk shops, and auctions from Texas to California to Washington, D.C.
The collecting spirit was the narrative thread of McMurtry’s novel Cadillac Jack (1982), in which the protagonist explains that the fun of book collecting was almost never about the money: It was the actual thrill of the hunt that produced that “tickle of anticipation.” McMurtry expressed a similar sentiment in his memoirs, confessing “The fun now comes in happening on an important or exciting book that I have never owned or, perhaps, have never read. First one has to find such a book; then one has to recognize it for what it is.”
The thrill of the hunt has been somewhat blunted by websites such as alibris, which take the digging out of searching for rare books. Still, Rebecca Rego Barry’s advice for potential adventurers is to cheer them on. They may never find Shakespeare’s First Folio, but no one should be dissuaded from looking—”not for a Folio, per se, but maybe for a favored author’s first editions or an antique volume in good condition.” Within this world of kindred spirits, the hunt’s the thing.
Amy Henderson is a historian emerita at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
