Collecting Literary Treasures
Source: Wall Street Journal
By: GORAN MIJUK
This is part of a very interesting article about book collecting in the Wall Street Journal. I suggest you follow the link I have supplied to read the entire article. Enjoy!
Collecting books is about passion, not words. "There is nothing at all like the frisson one gets opening a book catalog and paging through, looking for treasures," says Annette Campbell-White, a prominent book collector and venture capitalist from New Zealand.
When she sold part of her library, which included first editions such as James Joyce's "Ulysses" and Marcel Proust's "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" in 2007 at auction house Sotheby's in London for about £1.28 million, it was because she had lost interest in some of them. "I realized that I had a wonderful collection," says Ms. Campbell-White, who focused on books that were related to the list of 100 important modern novels picked by English critic Cyril Connolly in his 1965 work "The Modern Movement." "But a number of books and authors in my collection were there just because they belonged on the list. They were like cuckoos in the nest of my bookshelf. The collection had become valuable, but it didn't represent anymore where my tastes were evolving." A smaller library gave her a fresh opportunity to reignite her collecting drive and develop a more personal theme. When she recently bought a drawing by French artist Jean Cocteau of French author Raymond Radiguet, which was made when the two had a love affair in 1921, her passion was back. "And that's the thing—the idea of collecting drawings, portraits, even letters and inscribed books and manuscripts by authors I care about is deeply interesting to me."
Collecting books dates back to antiquity and is continuing to kindle hearts in our day even as we are witnessing the impact of the digital age on the centuries-old printing trade. Electronic publishing is crippling book prices, but provides collectors with a new channel to find their treasures more easily. The desire to obtain wisdom in paper form—which Italian writer and collector Umberto Eco calls "vegetable memory"—builds the noble root of bibliophilism. But for a collector, first and rare editions are valuable and significant because they put a work in its exact historical context, giving them a romantic meaning that goes beyond the words printed on the page. For many collectors, it is as if history is becoming alive and they are able to travel to the past.
Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 B.C.-322 B.C.) is considered one of the first bibliophiles to have amassed manuscripts and parchment roles to gather knowledge that would illuminate his own writing. His example inspired Roman intellectuals such as Cicero (106 B.C.-43 B.C.) and shined into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when Italian poet Petrarch (1304-74) embarked on a humanist quest to build a library of around 200 anthologies during his 70-year life.
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