Books are friends in solitude, passports to worlds of beauty, knowledge and inspiration, and even anodynes to boredom and personal pain. In the lives of some people, they become as necessary as food, water, air and shelter.
For these reasons and a few others, book lovers tend to go overboard on accumulation. Collecting becomes an addiction, possession a passion.
Of course, books also can be an element of decoration or a commodity for investment. But what motivates the true collector, the one who falls in love with the objects of his desire and needs to have them as part of his life?
Stuart Brent, owner of the Michigan Avenue bookstore of the same name, sees books as a preventative against becoming ”a fabricated, synthetic person.
”Living in the city would not be fit for human life if one did not collect some books,” says Brent, who has been in the book business for 42 years.
Like many book lovers, he likes to keep his volumes nearby.
”Those books that I view as having a certain magic about them, I keep on my desk; so when I realize I need a shot in the arm to feel I`m a civilized person, I grab one of those books and start reading. As for the rest . . . they`re scattered all over the living room, kitchen and the study. I try to keep everything other than my working books in my study.”
”Book collecting is all about pursuing individual taste,” says Florence Shay, owner of the Titles Inc. bookshop at 1931 Sheridan Rd. in Highland Park. She also is chairwoman of the Chicago International Antiquarian Book Fair, May 25 to 27 at the Palmer House. ”It seems each person has their preference. You can pursue it at any level.
”Besides the content, you can collect because the book itself is a wonderful thing. It has fine binding, fine paper, fine printing, fine illustration and is printed by a small press which can devote the time to the handmade process to a book, and it can become special itself.”
”The people who do it seem to have grown up with a special feeling for books,” says Roger Carlson, proprietor of Bookman`s Alley, 1712 Sherman Ave., in Evanston. ”In most cases it must be the way people they respected dealt with books and treated them. That certainly was the way I was brought up.”
”It is not as if we need a new approach for this,” Brent says. ”The dream of purchasing books and reading books is like education: It never ends.”
Brent believes there is a strong return to a love of books and reading as a remedy to society`s ills.
Brent says that ”before World War II . . . books had a larger influence on our society. The themes, `what is beautiful,` `what is innocent,` `what is unknown,` those were the great themes. Today you`ve got different kinds of themes, and I don`t have to tell you what they are.”
He recently returned home from a vacation in a remote spot, he says, opened the newspaper and saw that ”one guy had shot his brains out, two guys committed rape. This is our reality. We all are in a madhouse. You have to read for truth and for decency, and you can`t be constantly manipulated as a person by these (contemporary) themes; you`ve got to humanize yourself. How does one humanize oneself except by reading and by collecting?”
Carlson caters to some of the area`s most avid collectors. His 8-year-old store is a place ”patterned in a way I thought would make a used-book shop more interesting and fun to come into,” he says. The place rambles like a labyrinth from room to room and into nooks and crannies. It is furnished like a traditional home with settees, tables, lamps.
”There are almost as many collectors, probably more, as I have classifications,” Carlson says. ”And I have more than a hundred
classifications in here. You might find someone who collects books on Swiss mountains written before 1920-not that I can serve anyone with an esoteric taste like that, but I`ll try to if I like them.
”I have several who come in several times a week, and these almost since I opened. They keep me jumping, looking for things they want. Mysteries are important to some; it is an important collectible.”
Shay sees the same thing. ”Mysteries and detectives are a new area,”
Shay says. ”They`ve always been collected, but there`s a larger interest in them now. They`ve leaped ahead. It used to be classic mystery writers, but they`re now collecting contemporary writers. Horror and science fiction is new. It ties in with movies and video; so the genre is something they`re more comfortable with.”
Many collectors are inspired to collect through their professions, such as Dr. Stanton A. Friedberg, the retired head of the ear, nose and throat department at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke`s Medical Center. He collected old medical books. ”They have to do with medical history, surgery and medicine. I inherited some of them from my father. I added to them.”
Friedberg`s has given away his books. ”I have donated my library to the Rush Medical Library and the Newberry Library,” he says.
Friedberg, who is president of the Caxton Club (named after an early British printer), says the organization was founded in 1895 by prominent Chicagoans such as George Armour, Edward E. Ayer, Martin Ryerson and John H. Rand to promote all arts pertaining to book production.
Membership averages 250. ”They are not exclusively collectors but booksellers, publishers, academicians,” he says.
”They always meet once a month during the winter on Wednesdays for exhibits and `exotic lectures` such as that given by Viscount David Eccles, on the board of trustees of London`s British Museum and British Library, on `Why Collect Books.` ”
Rhoda Clark is another whose collecting springs from her work. She both deals and collects. She is president of the 120-year-old Ernst Hertzberg and Sons Monastery Hill Bindery at 751 W. Belmont Ave. ”I`m a member of the Hertzberg family, and my great-grandfather started the business in 1868,” she says.
”I was a book collector long before this. I think I was collecting without knowing it since I was 6. I didn`t understand I was one till I was 18. I grew up in Barrington, and because the family was in this type of business, on Sundays they always had typographers, illuminators and illustrators at the house, and they became my mentors. I became interested in fine printing and press books.
”There are wonderful book collectors in Chicago. They`re a very well-educated, quiet group that doesn`t call or draw attention to itself. Some of them have very narrow interests, and some have totally catholic
interests,” she says.
She says that ”when people inherit books or don`t know what they have,” many book dealers in Chicago can help. ”They`re not quite in the antiquarian area I am, but they are delighted to come out and look at a collection and offer a price for it. The general tendency of the public is to look at a book they got from their grandmother dated 1840 that they think is worth a lot of money and have no idea how many books were printed of that kind at that time. ”For example, a collector might have a first edition of a Charles Dickens book in very bad condition. The covers are gone and detached, so we make a binding for it.
”Properly done, it is going to last, depending on the leather and the book binder, for a couple of hundred years. We`ve also done book restoration, and we`ve had some wonderful things pass through these portals.”
Clark personally buys from auctions or private collections.
”I specifically collect the book binding of Lorenz Schwartz,” she says. ”He was with the firm for a time,” she adds, showing a visitor one of Schwartz`s exquisite green and purple leather covers with Art Nouveau swirls in the design.
”My private collection is in my home library,” she says. ”Book collecting is sort of like a disease, and you just have to have things. It is just terrible. There`s a joke about someone who comes in to look at this superlative library. Later he`s asked, `What did you like best?` `The empty space on the shelf,` he replies. I don`t know if I told the joke right, but nobody ever has enough space.” –
