I‘ve been a collector of odd volumes, the builder of a library, a stalwart of secondhand book shops, for as long as I can remember. Among my earliest memories are sitting–patiently, I like to think–on the floors of stores, long since gone, while my father perused the stock. By the time I could read, and had money to spend, I would climb into one of Washington’s buses and head to the old secondhand neighborhood of downtown–now largely subsumed by the Verizon Center–and browse.
Browse, that is, because my allowance was not designed to support a collecting habit. I can still remember the mingled excitement and frustration I felt, in early December 1963, when I found a first edition of The Great Gatsby for $10 at the old Benjamin Franklin Book Shop on Pennsylvania Avenue. Excitement for the obvious reason; frustration because, in those days, ten bucks was a princely sum–to me, in particular. I related the experience to my parents that evening, and a few weeks later on Christmas morning, my father (who was not prone to such gestures) made a present of the slender green volume to me.
Mentioning the Benjamin Franklin (at the corner where the Navy Memorial now stands) reminds me of the dozens of shops that survive now exclusively in my memory: Loudermilk’s, the premier antiquarian shop in Washington, the Estate Book Store, on H Street near the White House, old Mrs. Reifschneider’s lair at 19th and Sunderland Place, the Savile on P Street in Georgetown, the old Salvation Army shop near Union Station, now paved over by Interstate 295.
Like many collectors, I associate cities I know well–Richmond, London, Nashville, Nicosia, Baltimore, Oxford, Los Angeles, Berlin, Providence–with favorite shops, and other places almost exclusively with bookstores: Cincinnati, Düsseldorf, West Chester (Pa.), Schwerin, Menlo Park (Calif.). My late father-in-law, who taught medicine for a living and accumulated rich antiquarian volumes for pleasure, once warned me, only half-jokingly, that book-collecting “is a disease.” He was right, of course; and I have since concluded that the only cure, the only sure antidote to excess, is morbid obesity.
In my defense, I should explain that my collecting has been largely confined to certain subjects–18th-century English literature, the history of Virginia, King Edward II, beagling, Max Beerbohm, T.S. Eliot, modern British political history, psychoanalysis, the poet John Clare, William Faulkner, Piers Plowman, Wilhelmine Germany, biographies of Episcopal bishops, etc.–and that the content of the volumes is what matters, not their market value or gilded binding. (Indeed, to universal horror, I remove all dust jackets.) This cannot necessarily be said of most collectors. I have generally avoided the rarefied world of first editions and the like, and since there is a finite amount of space in my residence, I strive to discard volumes with the same alacrity that I acquire them. Still, my study now features rows of books two deep in the shelves, and vertical piles in odd corners of the room.
I mention all this as background to an epiphany I experienced a few weeks ago. I arose early on a Saturday morning and, as I have once a year for decades, drove with cash, checks, credit cards, and mounting anticipation to the annual Washington Antiquarian Book Fair, held in an unprepossessing hotel ballroom in Arlington, overlooking the Potomac River. The scene was almost exactly as it had been a year earlier: The familiar dealers were standing in their booths (smiling at me, as my wife likes to say, in cruel anticipation), and hundreds of customers in late middle age–mostly males with gray beards and checked woolen shirts, fugitives from coin shows–milled anxiously about the room.
Yet, as I stood perusing the goods, I felt a sudden, unaccustomed sense of detachment, and it hit me: After half-a-century of sustained acquisition, I may have reached the saturation point. Many of the titles were remembered from earlier shows. I felt some slight interest, but no great urgency, to purchase this and that. Or to put it another way, I may very well possess every (affordable) volume pertaining to Edward II, so for the time being there is nothing to add to my collection.
I would like to say that this yielded a feeling of accomplishment or sense of satisfaction; but what I felt, instead, was a curious uncertainty. What next? Do I now begin rearranging my library, oiling bindings, or compiling a catalogue? Shall I never again make a pilgrimage to Baldwin’s Book Barn? Or, as my alluring wife likes to ask, when I am called to the great antiquarian shop in the sky, what’s to be done with all these damn books?
PHILIP TERZIAN
