Even at 75, Ed Halpern is a man of energy and enthusiasm. And rough edges too.
Here is a man who dropped out of college more than half a century ago to dive into business — well, into an array of businesses, from garages to jewelry stores, from pillows to dance clubs. Yet, he also has found time with his wife, Dianne, to amass a 4,000-volume collection of rare and antiquarian books in their Sugar Grove home.
Other book collectors may treat their acquisitions with white cotton gloves. Not Ed. He sits down in a comfortable chair and reads many of them, even ones worth hundreds of dollars.
“If I want to read a novel by Dickens, I would prefer to read the one which is the most beautiful, that has the best illustrations,” he says. “Having bought it, I’m going to enjoy it.”
From her chair nearby, Dianne Halpern, 72, adds, “We’ve known a few collectors who won’t open their books. If they want to read the book, they go to the library.”
The couple’s living room is dominated by a 20-foot-long, 11-foot-tall bookcase that covers an entire wall and holds more than 1,000 of their most precious tomes. Ed is up on the ladder that he can roll along the entire length of the shelving, and he is grabbing, carefully, yet another book to show — this one, an elegant copy of “The Death of a Salesman,” signed by Arthur Miller.
The collection, which includes another 3,000 volumes on bookshelves in the basement, is large but not immense. Some other collectors in the Chicago area have as many as 20,000 volumes.
The Halperns gathered their library as a team, haunting book sales and book fairs together, trolling the Internet. But it’s Ed who takes the primary role in organizing the books, keeping track of how much they originally cost and what their present-day value is.
Consider the copy of “The Girl I Loved” by James Whitcomb Riley, illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy. Ed can look at a code of penciled numbers in the back of the 1910 book and see that he paid $20 for the book in 1992. And he can look at a slip of paper stuck in the front of the book that indicates it’s now worth as much as 20 times that.
Not that the Halperns are looking to sell off their books. They plan to pass along this collection to their two middle-age children. So why pay so much attention to past cost and present value?
“You have to remember both my parents are Depression babies and love bargains,” says the Halperns’ daughter, the Rev. Lindsey Halpern-Givens, pastor at the Faith Community United Church of Christ in the nearby community of Prairie Grove.
Obsessions are always a bit difficult for those on the outside to understand, whether they involve romance or food, fashion or sports. But the roots of Ed and Dianne Halpern’s book-collecting can probably be traced to those tight-money years when they were growing up during the 1930s and 1940s.
“After school, we didn’t have TV. We went to the library,” says Dianne. “Every Saturday, that’s what we did — that and go to the movies. When I was growing up, books were very much revered, maybe because it was World War II and we were short of entertainment. When you got a book, it was a big deal.”
Her father loved and accumulated books, and, when Dianne and Ed married in 1954 — shortly following a first date during which they realized they shared the same March 6 birthday — he passed on to the couple his complete sets of works by Charles Dickens and by Mark Twain. Now those books have been handed on to Lindsey.
Ed’s experience was different, growing up in that port of entry for generations of immigrants, the Albany Park neighborhood. He is the son of a Russian-born father and American mother; there were few books around the home, and he had little interest in sitting still to read.
Ambitious teen
Even as a teenager, he was a go-getter, singing popular songs in a jazz style in hotel ballrooms and cocktail lounges and even on the fledgling medium, television. He sang, too, in the Army, appearing in 1951 on the same stages as a rising young crooner, Vic Damone.
“That’s me with Vic Damone,” Ed says as he walks up the steps from the basement. The photo shows Ed belting out a tune while Damone, smiling, watches from the side.
Back from the military, he enrolled at the new University of Illinois campus at Navy Pier, but left after a year and a half. “I was too busy getting involved in business,” he says.
It started with the checkroom concession at the Sovereign Hotel on Granville Avenue near Lake Shore Drive that he expanded to include a clothes-cleaning service. Then he opened an infant and children’s store across the street. For a time, Ed operated four jewelry stores in the Loop. He ran weekend teen dance clubs in Libertyville and Waukegan and, for many years, was a pillow manufacturer. Today, he’s an officer in the Mundelein-based Circle Group Holdings Inc., headed by his son son, Gregory.
Along the way he ran for alderman in Chicago’s 49th Ward, coming in third in a field of six, and made an array of friends, ranging from Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil, considered by some the greatest con man in U.S. history, and the artist Ivan Albright, who used to park his car in one of Ed’s garages.
Sometime around 1970, on a whim, Ed tagged along with Dianne for a visit to the mammoth Brandeis University Book Sale. Dianne, an exercise instructor, was looking for fitness books. But when Ed saw the rare books available there, “a bell went off in my head.”
For Dianne, the couple’s collection is a throwback to the book-loving home in which she grew up. For Ed, there seems to be a mix of motivations.
There’s the thrill of the hunt, of course, as with any collector, and the joy of finding a volume that’s vastly undervalued.
Even more, it’s a way for Ed to catch up on the education he set aside to go into business. “I wanted to establish my own library, my own reference library,” he says. “If you have a well-rounded education through books, your life expands. You expand your horizon.”
Dianne jokes that she’ll walk into the living room to find Ed perched on the ladder, poring over a book. “You can get buried in a book,” he says. “You can lose yourself in a book.”
Given Ed’s self-taught approach to collecting and to education, it’s no surprise that the library he and Dianne have amassed is rather scattershot: a nice group of children’s books; Chicago books; miniatures; and, of course, the classics.
The feel and smell
For him, though. it’s more than the words inside the books. It’s the art of books — the illustrations, the bindings, the touch and texture, the papers, the typefaces, the feel, the smell. That’s what Ed finds so compelling.
He takes book after book from his shelves, and turns with delight to this image or that, hand-colored or richly printed. “This is beautiful,” he’ll say. Or: “God, that’s gorgeous!”
The heart of Ed and Dianne’s collection are 538 volumes published by the Limited Editions Club from 1929 to 1985, signed by the author or illustrator — all but 10 of the books produced during the run.
The volumes the Halperns are still seeking include “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, “Notre Dame de Paris” by Victor Hugo and “Towards a Reform of the Paper Currency” by W.A. Dwiggins, a leading American book designer in the first half of the 20th Century.
They want to complete the set “before we croak,” Dianne says with a laugh. But they’re not going to purchase an ugly volume just to say they have it. Ed won’t let them.
“I’ve seen a couple copies,” Ed says, “but they were so beat up I couldn’t bring myself to buy them.”
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preardon@tribune.com
