Bibliomanes of the World, Unite!

Not long ago we went to a three-day symposium named “Celebrating American Collectors of Rare Books and Manuscripts.”

Though one speaker called the subject, apparently without irony, “an obscure corner of American life,” the meeting featured an elegant dinner in the inner court of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, and it recalled such unobscure collectors as J. Pierpont Morgan of New York, Henry E. Huntington of San Marino, Henry Walters of Baltimore and Walter Loomis Newberry of Chicago.

The 230 men and women present were all collectors, booksellers and librarians of private and public libraries. Except us.

“Are you a collector?” we were asked almost at once. Well, we have a lot of books, several thousand, we said, but we aren’t, we said, thinking of Huntington and Morgan and the other nabobs, exactly a collector. “You are an accumulator,” we were told, firmly.

Put in our place, we set out to learn what we could about this world in which people compete fiercely to obtain and then to show off the rare and the beautiful.

What explains bibliomania? Many of those present were obviously in the grip of an addiction that can be very expensive. Someone quoted the British connoisseur Kenneth Clark as saying that collectors of books and art are either enumerators by birth--or the child on the beach who wants the shiniest pebble for himself.

Some of the questions discussed were practical. Should you wear white cotton gloves when handling rare books? Only if your hands are dirty.

At the last event, a nice lunch on a terrace at UCLA, our table companion asked us if we were a collector. Only an accumulator, we said, then added wistfully that it would be nice to have a page of a medieval manuscript--preferably illuminated.

Her eyes brightened. She was in fact a dealer in medieval manuscripts. In New York. She gave us her card. Now our wife is afraid to let us go to New York.

The symposium, paid for by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Ahmanson Foundation, was one of a number of events in the city in honor of the 75th birthday of Franklin D. Murphy, a large figure in the world of rare books, former chancellor of UCLA and chairman emeritus of Times Mirror, the parent company of The Times.

We once observed to Murphy that he was a walking interlocking directorate. “That’s how I get things done,” he said. He is currently chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art and chairman of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and has held directorships and other leadership positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Ahmanson Foundation.

Getting things done in the world of books has meant for Murphy among other things building with librarian Robert Vosper the UCLA Research Library into its present world renown. Nicholas J. Barker, the deputy keeper of the British Library, recalled in a tribute that Murphy believed “that the quality and character of the library is probably the single most important factor in a university that aspires to distinction.”