Splendidly Speaking Volumes : CONFESSIONS OF A LITERARY ARCHAEOLOGIST <i> By Carlton Lake</i> z <i> (New Directions: $21.95; 204 pp.) </i>

Here is a tale to delight not only collectors of books and manuscripts but collectors of all breeds; for Carlton Lake communicates throughout this lively record the delights of the chase, the driving compulsion that keeps the hunter on the trail, and the final triumph of capture and possession.

That he has been in pursuit of primary documents relating to a seminal force in modern Western literature--the work of the leading experimental French writers of the 19th and early 20th Centuries--adds its own significance. But even to a reader without any particular knowledge of the works of Baudelaire, Cocteau, Eluard or Toulouse-Lautrec--to name the more famous figures--Lake’s keen pleasure in the quest itself comes through and will echo in the depths of any true collector’s being.

Lake opens with an account of his youthful interest during the middle 1930s in the work of Baudelaire and his lucky acquisition in Bologna of a copy of “Les Paradis Artificiels” that he immediately recognized as having come from the Russian Imperial Library at Tsarskoye Selo. We share his suspense and his suppressed joy as he takes it from the back room up to the bookseller and is quoted a price half of what he had anticipated. The further adventures of this volume, discreetly involving Lake’s entanglement “with a young woman from Cambridge” who took it with her when she married her piano teacher “whom she saw as the twentieth-century Chopin” are too long to summarize here, but they lead to a dramatically happy ending.

As Lake moves from first editions to manuscripts, he gives the reader an unobtrusive education not only in collecting--particularly in France with its special system of classification of documents and their auction--but also in the lives and letters of his subjects. With the Toulouse-Lautrec papers that he acquires, he is able to trace in detail the artist’s youth and the close relationship between his mother and the son whom she always wrote of as “Henry.”

Another fascinating account is made up of the emotional development and personal involvements of Marie Laurencin, drawn largely from the journals of Henri-Pierre Roche, author of the cult novel “Jules et Jim” that Francois Truffaut was to make into one of his most successful films. Equally engrossing are details concerning Eluard, Cocteau and Valery. Lake writes of all these complexities in a familiar, altogether non-condescending style that somehow convinces the reader that he has in fact been aware of much of this entirely fresh information, even though he knows perfectly well that he is reading about it here for the first time.

Along the way, we learn the names of the leading French dealers and their ways--what Larry McMurtry calls “book-trade intrigue”--as well as the eccentricities of individual heirs and the values they put on their possessions. Lake almost succeeds in making the reader his partner, but not quite, or if the reader is Lake’s partner, he is a slightly jealous and envious one.

Lake is modest in the extreme, but after he has crossed to his apartment in Paris more than once for long stays and returned several times to his house in Massachusetts, which is becoming uncomfortably crowded with his acquisitions (not to mention “a large safe at the Morgan bank in the Place Vendome” and “a room-sized walk-in vault at a Boston bank”)--well, one realizes that there are, after all, levels and levels of collecting.

At the same time, an amusing subtext makes a late entry in this absorbing account, as one after another of Lake’s collections moves to Austin, Tex., and this self-labeled “Eastern snob”--habitue of the Right and Left Banks,not to mention his personal one--begins to feel the attractions of the Lone Star State. In the end, the collectiuons they exert such persuasive power that Lake has now become executive curator of the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, where he can still enjoy his finds even as he introduces them to others.

Reading this book is the next best thing to making a personal pilgrimage to Austin.