The foremost concern of the rare book marketplace
today, and I believe for some years to come, is that of supply.
For any market to survive and prosper, it must have ample
merchandise. Rare books have become scarce. The trade is driven
by the economics of scarcity, and the appearance of any cache of
nice books collected in earlier, fatter days provokes an
expensive scramble to get a piece of the diminishing pie. The
existence of this state of affairs is due largely to the role
institutions have played in the rare book world since World War
II, and whether or when it changes will depend largely on what
happens to rare book and manuscript libraries in the future. We
are already in a period of great change, which I think will
significantly redistribute the rare book resources of the United
States.
First, let me quickly review the antiquarian rare book market of
the last half century. At the end of World War II there was an
extraordinary glut of material available. A long depression,
followed by a destructive war which turned the continent - and
libraries - of Europe upside down, threw a seemingly
inexhaustible stream of books and manuscripts into the market.
Many of them flowed to the United States, whose purchasing power
reigned supreme. The primary beneficiaries were American
institutional collections, which entered on a quarter century of
wholesale acquisition, in some cases with governmental subsidy.
Library buying dominated the marketplace. Institutions also
benefited from government policy indirectly, since the tax laws
made gifts of appreciated assets very favorable to donors.
Privately formed collections were far more likely to be absorbed
into libraries than return to the market.
he wholesale buying by the libraries drew the trade like flies to
honey. Acquisition funds were the primary lure, but there were
other attributes of the institutional business which made it
appealing. They were democratic: addresses were easy to obtain,
contacts were easy to make, and the snobbery which often made it
difficult to compete against old established firms in the private
market was seldom a factor. They were knowledgeable: the
librarians were often well versed book people who did not require
long explanations but shared an enthusiasm for the material with
the dealers. Nor was the expense of an open shop necessary, since
a dealer could more effectively sell to an institution through
catalogues. The libraries almost had to buy. Budgets were in
place and had to be spent. They didn't argue and bargain. The
institutional market of these years was a major factor in
altering the very nature of the trade. Issuing catalogues and
writing letters while maintaining a smaller stock, the specialist
bookseller could operate with much lower overhead than a
generalist maintaining a walk-in store. When I entered the rare
book world twenty years ago, one would still hear of some real
grand slams - entire catalogues purchased by institutions in a
hurry. Not surprisingly, many booksellers abandoned the multiple
problems of an open shop, and most newcomers to the trade
(including myself) never even thought of one as part of the
business.
In the mid-1970s, radical changes took place in the rare book
market. Most importantly, this is when the scales tipped from a
buyer's to a seller's market, as the absorption of material by
the institutions ended the glut and radically shrank the
available pool of books and manuscripts in private hands. At the
same time, much of the governmental funding of retrospective
acquisitions ended, and rising energy prices and inflation caused
the cost of maintaining existing facilities to skyrocket. A
series of tax decisions, from the Nixon papers case to the 1986
tax bill, sharply reduced the attractiveness of institutional
donation by authors and collectors. Since 1975, the role of
institutions as forces in the rare book market has declined
precipitously, with one supremely important exception: now they
have most of the books and manuscripts, and the private buyers -
the dealers and collectors - are fighting over the scraps. All
parties - institutions, dealers and collectors, are locked in an
ever-tightening spiral of less material and higher prices.
Let us step back for a moment and ask a fundamental question:
What do the parties concerned, both public and private, want all
this stuff for? What are the motivations for amassing collections
of books and manuscripts? I would submit that there are two
underlying themes: the accessibility of text and the preservation
of icons. At one end of the spectrum are the electronic images on
my computer screen or the paperback I take to the beach; on the
other end is the Gutenberg Bible. Most books and manuscripts are
some combination of text and icon, appealing to us in both an
intellectual and a physical sense. Indeed, most of us would agree
that the physical aspects of the book relate directly to our
perception of the text.
Until fairly recently, there was little divergence between these
two ideas. In the period when many of the great rare book
libraries in this country were founded, preservation of the icon
and availability of the text went hand in hand. Successive waves
of mechanical reproduction have increasingly separated the two,
and all of us assume that this trend will accelerate
exponentially. We can foresee a time when technology will store
all of the words of the world in a box.
These trends, I think, will have very little effect on private
collectors in the coming decades. Private book collecting is
almost wholly concerned with the preservation of icons. I don't
mean by this that book collectors are not well read or familiar
with the subjects they collect, or even that they don't read
their rare books; in fact, over my career as a dealer, I've been
surprised by how many of them do. However, if text were the
primary consideration, most collectors could obtain access to it
easily and comparatively inexpensively these days. Their real
pursuit is the icon. The premium attached to such factors as
condition and association copies makes this clear. Of course,
such sub-categories as press books or bindings are wholly
concerned with the physical qualities of the object. The monetary
value of such an icon as a Washington letter is unharmed by
repeated publication, in a market that only private collectors
can now afford. Indeed, the most reprinted political utterance of
the United States, the Declaration of Independence, is among the
most expensive of printed icons.
Antiquarian booksellers are equally committed to the iconic
significance of the material they sell. If all institutional
participation ceased, the booksellers would survive, although
their ways of doing business would change sharply. Then material
would simply circulate between private collector and dealer or
auction house, and back again, much as books did up to the
mid-nineteenth century before the advent of major institutional
buying. Take, as an example, stamps or coins, where there are no
troubling problems of text, and little institutional
participation - icons all the way. A lively market flourishes in
what is, in effect, a zero-sum game: the material circulates in
and out of private collections, and the dealers and auction
houses are the middle man. The antiquarian book world would not
be substantially different from this model if we removed
institutions from the picture.
Libraries have vastly more complex issues to resolve than do
collectors and dealers. To a degree, most have already grappled
with the question of preserving the icon versus availability of
text, either consciously or unconsciously. Much of this, so far,
is essentially passive decision-making - "We won't spend
money on manuscripts that are already published," for
example. Sometimes it has been surprisingly cavalier. I know of a
number of institutions which have microfilmed runs of newspapers
and discarded the originals. Bad paper may make this inevitable
after the 1870s or so, but often these runs were much earlier.
Hard to shelve and cumbersome to use, they don't seem to stir
totemic emotion in the hearts of many librarians. The same people
who would bridle at the thought of filming and deaccessioning a
book had no problem shipping out the newspapers, although it
seems to me that their value as text and object are every bit as
good. Don't worry, they've gone where they are loved, by
newspaper collectors, a quite distinct group of iconophiles.
The newspaper issue demonstrates an area where many institutions
have settled an important issue: icon versus text, based on
prejudice against a particular medium and not on a wholly
rational policy. The dichotomy will be thrust forward more and
more as technology rolls on in the coming years, and special
collections will have to define what mixture of the two they aim
to fulfill. Some institutions may have the luxury of both
retaining the icon and adding the technology. For many, though,
economics as much as scholarship will demand the question be
answered, and the ultimate determination in many cases won't be
made by rare book curators. Filming and digital storage may begin
to cut closer to home than newspapers.
All of this leads to the question of the financial health of the
institutions. Almost without exception, the universities of the
United States are in declining financial condition. The same is
true, or worse, for most private institutional libraries. Costs
of keeping the doors open, much less adding new material to
library collections, have sky-rocketed far beyond inflation. How
will this affect the marketplace?
First, we have already seen and continue to see institutions
deciding to get out of the business of maintaining special
collections of books and manuscripts because they feel they can
no longer afford it. The dispersal of part of the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society rare book collection or the special
collections of the Franklin Institute, to name but two, put large
blocks of specialized material back in the marketplace. In the
latter case, important parts of the collection were absorbed by
other Philadelphia area libraries, but much was widely scattered
in what I have to say was a model of how not to sell off a
library. Private institutions will remain particularly
vulnerable; but, as we see whole state university systems
threatened with fiscal collapse, I predict we will see the
draconian elimination of special collections from some university
libraries. Here new information technology may serve as a pretext
for administrators to declare their icons obsolete. What seemed
an object of pride and expansion in the 1960s will look like a
bankable asset in leaner times. Whatever the logic, the books
will return to the marketplace.
Less apocalyptically and more widely, institutions will
increasingly define their areas of collecting rare books and
manuscripts and dispose of "out-of-scope" material.
Interlibrary cooperation and division of spheres of
responsibility are already major factors in library buying, and
they will become more and more important ones in deaccessioning,
especially if the only way to fund acquisitions in a field of
strength is to get out of a field of weakness. These decisions
can be easy - a state historical society sells its Middle Eastern
travel books - or very painful, such as the Rylands Library's
deaccession of several years ago; but economics will make them
inevitable, and the market will reward them handsomely.
Institutions have long deaccessioned duplicates, and this has
been a steady source of supply in the market in the last decade.
The real question here is how one defines a duplicate. Does the
Humanities Research Center really need all of those copies of
Ulysses or The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or would they be doing
textual scholarship a grave disservice to let even one of them
go? Do multiple presentation copies of the same book have a place
in an institutional library, or are they superfluous? Are binding
variants important enough to scholars to keep two copies of a
modern rarity if the text is the same? These are all questions
over which thinking people can disagree, especially if the
generated funds are used to buy material not in a collection.
The final area of deaccessioning will come from libraries who
decide that text is paramount, and that the icons count for
little or nothing except a storage problem. From there it is an
easy step to film, copy, scan, and send the originals out the
door, even materials at the heart of libraries' holdings. Without
passing judgment on this radical approach, I can tell you it has
been done, and it will be done. Often these libraries have
ignored the market value of their fallen icons in disposing of
them. Once again, don't worry - the marketplace is an efficient
mechanism for preserving discarded rarities. But it is ironic
when valuable material is almost thrown away in the name of
economy.
I predict that over the next quarter century libraries will be
net sellers of books and manuscripts. There will be fewer
institutional buyers - indeed, fewer institutions - and those
that are active will buy more narrowly and selectively. The same
selection will take place within libraries as they rearrange
their printed and manuscript assets. Some will refine their
collections based on a well thought out, coordinated program; but
many more, probably, will review their holdings less carefully
and under duress.
How will these institutional changes affect the rare book trade?
If the behavior of institutions played a major role in shaping
the book business of today, what will happen in the future? The
number of antiquarian booksellers - or at least people calling
themselves antiquarian booksellers - has grown markedly in the
last several decades. At the same time, there has been a decline
in the old-fashioned urban, generalist, walk-in bookstore with a
broad range of rare books. I believe this shift to
catalogue-issuing specialists is due in part to the dominance of
the institutional market in its heyday. Obviously, other factors
have played a part: the decline of inner cities, rising urban
rents, the expense of employees, and the like. It is
unquestionably easier and cheaper to set oneself up as an
antiquarian bookseller with a mail order operation. The problem
is finding customers. Unlike institutions, there are few good
directories of private book buyers.
Catalogues can be a perfectly effective way to sell books to
private customers. After all, we live in a society that has
embraced mail order shopping to an unprecedented degree. If the
reader is motivated and interested and has the money to spend,
the bookseller is in clover. Institutional buyers were often all
three, and that made life easy. Now, they often lack the
essential third ingredient. Private buyers require cultivation,
and it is hard to plant the seed out of the blue.
This is where the loss of the old-fashioned bookstore has greatly
hurt the trade and the world of book collecting. A person with a
general, vague interest in books could visit at will, browse,
dabble, and perhaps buy a less expensive item. Many collectors
were uninterested in progressing further; but if they were, they
could see both a range of material, be drawn to an area of
specialization, and receive some guidance in the arcane lingo of
the book world. From this formula, many collectors flourished. A
store like John Howell Books in San Francisco created numerous
collectors who, once started, were happy to buy from catalogues.
Cultivating customers can be wearisome work for booksellers, who
often find in librarians individuals who share their knowledge
and enthusiasm for books and manuscripts. Private collectors may
be excited and well versed, too, but they often require
explanations and cajoling that no librarian would need. In short,
the bookseller must work harder to be a convincing salesman.
I fear book people are often not good missionaries for what they
believe in. Virtually any other area of collecting will entice
the customer in a variety of ways, and cause them to go out and
look for more. The book trade has more often waited for
interested people to come to them and hoped they have some money.
Those enterprising entrepreneurs in the trade who have taken the
opposite tack of finding people with money and convincing them to
buy books are often regarded with scorn tinged with envy by their
colleagues. But more private buyers are the trade's best hope for
the coming decades, and they are less likely to occur
spontaneously than in the days when books were plentiful and
cheap and there were more open shops. The trade needs to
proselytize. So, perhaps, do the institutions, because more
private collectors may be the best hope for their continued
growth, if they seek to pursue it along traditional collecting
lines. The passage of great private collections into public ones
is the basis of some of our largest rare book and manuscript
libraries. Universities in particular have strong traditions of
collections built by alumni gifts, but where is Yale's next Edwin
Beinecke, or Harvard's next Philip Hofer, or a donor to many
institutions like Elizabeth Ball?
Earlier in this century, both Yale and Harvard had popular
professors actively proclaiming the value and interest of rare
books and manuscripts and their connection to scholarship.
Chauncey Brewster Tinker at Yale and George Parker Winship at
Harvard planted the spark of interest in numerous undergraduates.
In time, some of them made a lot of money and some of them became
book collectors. The results are evident. Our host institution is
a direct result, and similar connections have enriched numerous
libraries. How many undergraduate courses today expose students
directly to the treasures of special collections? We can have as
many receptions for our Friends groups as we like, and they
should be cultivated, but it is on the undergraduate level that
enthusiasms of a lifetime can be born, even if they are decades
in coming to fruition. Private collectors don't necessarily wait
until death to present their collections, either, and in this
sense, may offer institutions their best chance to participate in
the present marketplace. I think of a collector like Jenkins
Garrett at the University of Texas at Arlington, who has been
both a donor and an angel to special collections there, or
Lawrence Witten's contributions as godfather of the Yale Historic
Sound Recordings collection or, again, Philip Hofer's long career
here.
I believe that in the coming decades institutions will be net
suppliers of books to the marketplace. This may come about
through decisions based on technology or library cooperation, or
it may be the result of financial necessity. Whatever the case,
libraries that choose to deaccession will do better to plan their
actions to take best advantage of the marketplace.
Ultimately, a healthy marketplace is a good thing for the entire
rare book world, providing liquidity of supply necessary for
buying and selling by private individuals and institutions. As
I've suggested, institutions have a vested interest in
maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the private collecting
community. Markets need supply and circulation, and ultimately
the refining and definition of library holdings may work to the
benefit of all.
We are at the end of an extraordinary half century of growth and
expansion in the world economy, and especially that of the United
States. During that time, the libraries of this country have
acquired a significant portion of the books and manuscripts that
are the icons of the cultures of the world, particularly of the
West. In the life of some of these objects, fifty years is a
short time, and it may be arrogant to suppose that they are fated
to remain where they are in perpetuity. Some will certainly
travel again by economic necessity and because of intellectual
fashion, but hopefully by rational design as well.