I am forever fascinated by bibliophiles who go beyond focusing their
energy and resources on the collected works of one author to acquiring
as many different copies as they can of a single book, oftentimes to the
exclusion of pretty much everything else. In
A
Splendor of Letters
I wrote about a collection at the University of Virginia of 400 copies
of
Lucile,
a romantic novel in verse published between 1860 and 1927 in numerous
editions, many of them illustrated, and wildly popular in its day, but now virtually forgotten, and
the author, Owen Meredith (pseudonym of the poet and statesman Edward
Robert Bulwer), a mere footnote in literary history.
The collection had been assembled by Terry Belanger, recently
retired as the founding director of
Rare Book School at
UVA, as a teaching tool to study various formats used over the
years for a single book. I later learned of an even larger
Lucile
collection at the University of Iowa--almost three times as large, in
fact--assembled by Sid Huttner, director there of special collections,
and the subject of a dedicated web site known as the
Lucile Project. I had
the pleasure soon thereafter to meet with Huttner, and to see the
collection.
There are some fabulous single-book collections of other
titles, too, the late Jock Elliott's superb
Christmas Carol editions
coming immediately to mind, and a truly remarkable private collection of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I have had the privilege of
seeing on several occasions, but few collectors have the patience (and
dare I say the fortitude) to see such a commitment through to these
extremes. So it was
with uncommon interest that I received a Google news alert yesterday (my name
is mentioned parenthetically, thus the heads up) directing me to a piece
that had just run in the
Sacramento Bee about a collector whose library is brimming with 700
copies of Richard Henry Dana's 1840 novel,
Two Years Before the
Mast.
Six
paragraphs into the story, the reporter, Sam McManis, describes what he
saw when he walked into the library of Bill Ewald, a 67-year-old retired
firefighter:
At first,
it's just a handsome room: nearly 700 books on oak shelves and display
tables, and in cardboard boxes tucked in corners. You smell the
mustiness of antiquity. Your eyes catch the glint of gilt spines, the
sad fraying of aging cloth covers contrasting with shiny, happy
paperbacks.
Then it hits you. These are all the same book.
A proud Californian, Ewald tells McManis he chose to concentrate on
Two
Years Before the Mast because it is set during the years of the
great California gold rush, and because it is one of what veteran
collectors know as the
Zamorano
80--one
of the eighty books determined to be seminal to the history and culture
of the Golden State. (The book thief Stephen Blumberg was particularly
keen on acquiring all eighty, incidentally, going so far as
the steal the Zamorano Club's own collection of the books, which I wrote about in
Chapter 13 of
A Gentle Madness.)
Ewald
discusses at length his unusual passion in McManis's piece, and offers
some general insights on collecting. There is a sidebar
there, too, for beginners looking for pointers, though I have to say I
was a bit dismayed by the readers comments posted thus far. one
bemusedly calling such an obsession "freaky," several others fixated on
what is obviously a minor error on the part of a headline writer and not
the reporter, as anyone who has ever worked for a newspaper will
instantly recognize to be the case.
Anyway,
give this most entertaining article a look; very nicely done indee
