A defense of book collecting

Summer is the season for book lovers : reading lists full of promising debuts, time for breezy page-turners on the beach , fresh resolve to finish a doorstopper classic like War and Peace. Whatever literary delights await me, I know they will include my ritual reading of Ray Bradbury ’s Dandelion Wine, his celebration of the season that starts in the first paragraph:

“Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

But I don’t begin with those lines. First, I marvel at the brilliant British jacket design by Jeffrey Lies, a rural winter scene transfigured into summer by a bottle of golden liquid. Then I turn to the front free endpaper, which features an exuberantly hand-drawn dandelion in black Sharpie, along with an inscription: “This dandelion with love is for Alan! Ray Bradbury 4/24/09.”

And, although I make it beyond the first paragraph, I must admit I never finish Dandelion Wine. Not when I read it for the first time as a young boy, not when I read it last year, and, I expect, not this year either. It’s strange! I loved Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the cover on my paperback copy of The Illustrated Man needed to be taped on after too many rereadings. But somehow Dandelion Wine loses me in the middle.

Which is totally fine. You see, in addition to being an avid reader, I am also a collector. And as a collector, I understand that loving a book means more than loving the words it contains. Objects cannot be reduced to information. They are bound up with their material history. And the history of that Sharpied Dandelion Wine is what makes it so important to me, even if I’ve never managed to finish the story it tells.

One place to start the story behind my copy of Dandelion Wine is with the story of another book, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry. Like many old books, the contents are available for free online. Some sites provide informative scholarly introductions; others conveniently hyperlink each section. But to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t recommend A Defence of Poetry. Aside from a few lovely phrases, the essay is dated and somewhat pompous, and after I passed my doctoral exams I don’t think I ever reread the whole thing.

Nevertheless, that pompous essay is among the most precious books in my collection, and I take it off the shelf at least a few times each year. Like online versions, mine was free, a gift from the venerable bookman Doug Wilson, onetime apprentice to Joseph O’Gara, and the surviving owner of O’Gara and Wilson Antiquarian Booksellers, where he employed me for many years. Most importantly, Doug Wilson is the person who taught me that collectible books are not replaceable vehicles for content — like an e-reader — but rather unique sites of enchantment.

“Alan, I have something special for you,” he said one evening, hands flat on the giant oak checkout counter, a bit of bluish-gray paper peeking out from underneath them. Our last customer had just left with some serendipitous treasure, and I was counting the cash in the ornate antique register, ready to wind my scarf and leave the warm bookstore for the bitter cold of a Chicago winter night.

Doug removed his hands. Without reading the title, I knew immediately it was a Thomas Bird Mosher pamphlet, one of many from a recently purchased collection. Renegade publisher, design genius, friend of Robert Frost and other literary luminaries, Mosher rose to fame at the turn of the 20th century, eventually printing over 400 delicately gorgeous and affordable copies of his favorite poems and essays, usually without permission. His work was so exacting, his passion for books so earnest, that most authors didn’t mind. “A handsome pirate is always half pardoned,” wrote his first victim, George Meredith, who happily accepted Mosher’s offer of a gift copy.

“Didn’t you say you were reading this?” Doug asked, handing me "A Defence of Poetry." I nodded, took the book, and ran my index finger along the indentations of the ornate red and black design pressed into the coarse handmade paper that covered the cardstock binding. It was remarkably well preserved — I opened it to the title page: “Portland Maine, Thomas B Mosher, MDCCCCX” — for being over 100 years old.

“It’s yours,” Doug continued, “but on one condition.” I paged slowly through the tiny oblong masterpiece of printing, cradling the spine so it wouldn’t crack, spotting familiar passages. Poetry is indeed something divine. The greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue.

“You have to keep it with the note, always.”

A site of enchantment, made so by the bookman’s spell. I have never broken it. The note is with me now as I type this, neatly handwritten in faded black pen on a browned scrap of paper.

For Janet -
To take her mind
off the library and
filthy Slav Kids.

love
June + Gini

It hits hard every time. A lovingly printed essay about virtue and wisdom, thoughtfully gifted, with a surprise curse tucked inside. What the hell, June and Gini? How can such a nasty sentiment coexist with such excellent taste? Are we all just products of our culture, with sins beyond the reach of poets to transform? Does this note, in itself, disprove Shelley’s thesis that beauty and poetry lead us to goodness?

In auctions, “provenance” describes the history of an object, which can be a key factor in its sale price. Had June and Gini gifted the essay to “Big Bill” Thompson, their mayor of Chicago in 1915 and a noted anti-Slavic racist, it would be worth a good deal more. Well, worth a good deal more to someone, but not to me. The provenance of my book — gifted to Janet, left to her daughter, purchased by Doug, and regifted to me — may not have market value, but it transforms the book, makes it a sacred object. The form of the book (go ahead, judge the book by its cover!) does something similar. There is power in Mosher’s craft, like there is in the note.

So too with every book in my collection: each has a different provenance, a unique form, a distinct power of enchantment. I believe that all collecting stems from this fundamental principle, the recognition of books as enchanted objects. For some, the most legible version of enchantment is monetary value. In this sense, my later printing of Robert Frost’s North of Boston is the most magical book in my collection, because Frost has inscribed it with the most famous line of 20th century American poetry: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by.” (While Frost routinely wrote out lines and occasionally whole poems, he rarely did so with “The Road Not Taken,” and a full manuscript copy recently sold at auction for $35,000.)

But the monetary value is simply recognition of the magic contained in the object. Frost’s hand actually held the pen that made those letters on the page I am reading. Did he know he had written a poem for the ages? That pop stars would radically misread it, and teachers like me would try to set the record straight? Was he thinking about that as he wrote in the book that is on my desk right now?

In general I am an idiosyncratic collector, accumulating a motley mix of whatever I love, instead of focusing on a specific area like, say, 19th-century illustrated German children’s books, or high spots in the history of science. The closest I come to traditional collecting is my 100-plus Edward Gorey books, ranging from his classic alphabet of children dying gruesome deaths to rare editions like The Bug Book. I can’t get enough of this opera-loving, fur coat-wearing, oddball genius, the godfather of Goth and Tim Burton.

Like Mosher, Gorey was meticulous about book design, micromanaging everything from typography to dimension. Collectors love him because he understood books as enchanted objects, and produced an overwhelming number of limited signed editions — limitation of quantity and signatures being two easy ways to make enchantment legible.

But the most powerfully enchanted Gorey in my collection — heck, the most powerfully enchanted book in my collection — is a later, mass-market printing of Gorey’s masterpiece, The Epiplectic Bicycle, purposely misspelled. (I have a small collection of foreign translations to see how they deal with the nonsense word.) It is not signed by Gorey. It did not belong to anyone famous. The inscription reads, “To Alan, Your first Gorey — the start of our book collection together. Love, Paris.” Paris is my wife. She went abroad to study in London when we were in college and bought it for me there, which is why this particular copy is published by Bloomsbury.

Gorey was a collector himself. His Cape Cod house, now a museum, preserves his eclectic acquisitions: counters covered in river rocks, windowsills packed with old blue bottles, and, of course, an enormous book collection. Gorey knew enchanted objects, and I think he would forgive me if, were there a fire, I rescued my first Gorey over any of his other books — yes, even his incredibly awesome signed, limited, experimental interactive flipbook, Les Echanges Malandreux (mine is No. 268/500).

Doug Wilson was not an author, but he had a different way of enchanting books. A crucial feature of O’Gara and Wilson was our collection of ephemera, defined by the Ephemera Society of America as “vintage printed or written items which originally served some specific purpose and were not expected to be retained or preserved, but which are now cherished.”

Like many bookmen, Doug had an encyclopedic memory of his inventory, and when he purchased a book that fit perfectly with a piece of ephemera, he would “marry” them. A vintage Spam coupon goes into an old cookbook that features Spam. A theater ticket to Shakespeare’s Othello as a bookmark for a paperback copy. And, of course, if any of his employees happened to find ephemera in a book, no matter how seemingly insignificant, we were forbidden from removing it.

I have inherited Doug’s love of ephemera, as well as his penchant for placing it in books. My daughter’s handmade Father’s Day cards are scattered like magic seeds throughout my collection, as are notes I’ve received from grateful students. I rarely remember the spells I’ve cast, which is part of the magic. Just yesterday I pulled Maira Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness off the shelf and found I’d enchanted it years earlier with a $2 bill. (Jefferson! Who happens to be from Charlottesville, where I live now!)

And now we are back to Dandelion Wine, which all of this was meant to explain. Here’s how it happened: In 2008, I was browsing a used bookstore in Chicago and happened upon a curious title, Folk Wines, Cordials & Brandies, by M.A. Jagendorf. I flipped through it and was about to put it down when I found a folded sheet of paper. A handwritten recipe for dandelion wine!

Sold.

At home with the book and the recipe, I thought it might be time to revisit Dandelion Wine. It had been ages since I’d read it, and I looked online for a nice copy. To my surprise, the jacket for the British edition, in addition to being gorgeous, looked a great deal like the jacket for Folk Wines.

Sold again.

When my new old copy arrived from England, I had a crazy thought. What if I could find Ray Bradbury’s contact information online and tell him about the recipe and how it inspired me to revisit his book?

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The rest is history. I put Dandelion Wine, the recipe for said wine, and a large self-addressed stamped envelope into a package and sent it to Bradbury, who’d told me he would be delighted to see the recipe and sign it. Back came the signed book, along with some Bradbury ephemera. No recipe — he kept it. That’s fine. All powerful spells require a little bit of sacrifice.

So even if you don’t consider yourself a book collector, I’d like to suggest another item for your summer reading list. Print out this essay, or maybe just a page from it. Use it as a bookmark for whatever you happen to read in the next few months, and then leave it there. That’s all it takes for you to become an enchanter, and I promise that someone, someday, will be thankful for the spell you cast.

Alan Levinovitz is a professor at James Madison University, who specializes in the intersection of philosophy, religion, and science. His most recent book is Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science .