Art Mavens Turning to Rare Books

With a divining rod instinct for investment, art collectors are eyeing books the way a Forty-Niner would have ogled a flash of gold in a pan of dirt.

Consider the book bash that began at Sotheby’s in New York Tuesday night--the start of a five-part, one-year sale of the library of H. Bradley Martin, one of the finest private libraries in the country.

The star of Round 1, which ended Thursday and featured ornithological books, was a huge, pristine double elephant folio of Audubon’s “The Birds of America,” a work the auction house’s assistant director of rare books and manuscripts, Jay Dillon, calls “an icon of American art.” In competition rivaling the art world’s alacrity, an anonymous telephone bidder nailed down the five-volume set for nearly $4 million, beating out six contenders.

‘Astonishing’ Prices

Thus, the Audubon folio became one of the world’s most expensive books. (The French “Les Liliacees,” with hand-painted watercolor flowers by Pierre Joseph Redoute, presented to the Empress Josephine, went for $5.5 million in 1985, and one of two volumes of the Gutenberg Bible sold two years ago in the auction of the Estelle Doheny estate for $5.3 million.)

Even some of the less valuable bird books got double their estimates, a few reaching six figures.

“Astonishing!” booksellers gasped at the prices, though the whole kit and caboodle--the entire 10,000-volume Bradley Martin collection of American, English and French literature and manuscripts--is estimated to be worth $30 million, not even the price of one show-stopping Impressionist painting.

The prices mirror a predictable shift in recent years.

“More and more art collectors are coming to see that book prices are reasonable and less subject to volatility,” Dillon says. “Visual collectors are getting more bookish. We’ll see that as the Bradley Martin sales go on.”

The auction house excitedly compares the collection of Martin, an heir to the Phipps steel fortune who died last year at 82, to the collections of J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington. Michael Ginsberg, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Assn. of America, says in anticipation of sales to come, “There’re going to be so many wonderful things that it’s going to boggle the book collector’s mind.”

Among the future treasures: a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, estimated at $400,000-$600,000; George Washington’s copy of “The Federalist,” with his signature and notes by James Madison ($400,000-$600,000 estimate), the rarest of rarities, a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” ($150,000-$200,000); Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” ($80,000-$120,000); Marcel Proust’s “A Cote de Chez Swann,” inscribed by the author to Anatole France ($40,000-$60,000); a famous letter from Herman Melville to Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne denying the presence of symbolism in “Moby Dick” ($50,000-$70,000); and a letter from Charles Dickens to Edgar Allan Poe ($100,000).

Subtle Danger Signals

However, some book world denizens see subtle danger signals in sales such as the Martin and Doheny libraries, fearing the great collections will be broken up and go into private hands rather than to institutions. Meanwhile, booksellers worry about greater competition.

Says Ginsberg: “Now families realize that if you put collections up for auction, the prices often go right off the wall.”

The clout of Sotheby’s coup clearly eclipsed the market for the time being.

Mary Ann Mitchell of H.P. Kraus of New York, noted for its valuable books, allows that there’s “a lot of curiosity” about the sales, though, she says, “they’ve created a lot of hype.” And one bookseller, miffed at being required to wear white gloves to handle the bird books during Tuesday’s viewing session, said, “Booksellers have clean hands.”

The sale also led bibliophiles to reflect on the worth of rare books and the invasion of investors into their domain.

Hard on Institutions

“It makes life difficult for other people,” Daniel Woodward, who heads the Huntington Library, notes of the high prices. “It’s an expensive game to play. It’s hard for institutions to keep up.”

Like others, he’s surprised at the skyrocketing Audubon prices--nearly three times the $1.4 million brought by a set at Sotheby’s London house in 1984, and 10 times a 1977 sale at $396,000.

He’s also chagrined at a major reason for the escalation. Dealers are breaking up the Audubon volumes and selling individual plates more profitably as art to be mounted on the wall, often justifying the practice by arguing that the books already had been damaged.

Retorts the soft-spoken librarian, “How would you feel about breaking a Shakespeare folio into individual leaves?”

Still, booksellers agree that, if books with fine illustrations have always been big sellers, buyers are becoming more visual.

Pictures Desirable

Comments James Cummins, a top dealer in colorplate books, “Anything with a picture in it is now desirable.”

“The high price of paintings has moved collectors to books,” says Lou Weinstein, proprietor of Los Angeles’ Heritage Book Shop. For $50,000 to $100,000, “you can’t get anything” in the art market, he points out. “But when collectors step into our world they’re buying the top end and they feel better about their acquisitions.”

Granted, he adds, “most people in the book business have nothing to do with a collection like the Bradley Martin library.” Still, an investor’s mentality is edging in.

“Everybody wants the obvious books,” says Ralph Sipper of Joseph the Provider/Books of Santa Barbara, who deals in contemporary collecting. First editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes,” worth about $50,000 with the dust jacket, Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” are among the hottest titles, while Ernest Hemingway is the most collected author and horror fiction writer Stephen King has achieved cult status. First editions by Raymond Carver and Larry McMurtry already are collectibles, with McMurtry’s best-selling “Lonesome Dove” going for $250, and “Horseman, Pass By” tickling $1,000.

The dust jacket is another key to wealth, Sipper says. “The Great Gatsby” with its jacket on is worth around $10,000 versus $300 without.

Also, an author’s first book, usually issued in small editions, is often more valuable than his or her most noted work. As Weinstein points out, John Steinbeck’s first book, “Cup of Gold,” brought out in 750 copies in 1929, is worth $5,000 to $6,000, while his masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath”(1939), issued in 25,000 copies, fetches between $300 and $400.

It is such particulars that distinguish book from art collecting, experts say.

“Art’s the most obvious thing for people to collect. You look at it once and understand it,” Weinstein claims. “To collect books requires much more sophistication.”

Indeed, it is the inveterate book lover who brings excitement to the field. The nobly obsessed, Weinstein says, will collect the complete works of an author, go on to gather all the biographies of the writer and then replicate the library that the beloved possessed, even searching out the same editions.

A Grand Library

This, acquaintances say, was the sort of devoted collector Bradley Martin was. A picture in the auction catalogue shows his library with its wood paneling, fireplace and overstuffed leather chairs; a gentleman of leisure, Martin reputedly read every book he collected.

Now the sale of his works will affect other book lovers, according to Weinstein, either driving prices up or, with such a plethora of great books suddenly available, making them less expensive for a time.

But salting away rare books like shares of stock isn’t the point for anyone concerned about preserving the printed word.

When prospective clients ask Weinstein about books and dollars, he says, he tells them: “If I knew what’s going to double in two years, would I sell it to you?”

Adds the Huntington’s Woodward, for whom the intrinsic value of books is inalterable, “The book doesn’t mean anything until you read it.”