Fans Refuse to Desert Lawrence of Arabia : Convention: The legendary World War I hero still proves to be a powerful draw on the 60th anniversary of his death.

To know Lawrence of Arabia is to never stop trying to know him. People collect the books he wrote and the books he read, his uniforms, his medals, and then the uniforms and medals of his comrades in war.

The 1922 Oxford edition of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” Lawrence’s memoir of his World War I military exploits in the Middle East that made him a legend, is rarer than a Gutenberg Bible--and just as glass-enclosed.

In fact, one of only six remaining editions in the world lay open under glass in the back of Friends’ Hall in the Huntington Library, where 60 experts and enthusiasts on the great Thomas Edward Lawrence--T.E. Lawrence, as he preferred--gathered Friday and Saturday to discuss the nature of Lawrence’s fame.

The timing wasn’t accidental: Friday was the 60th anniversary of his death as the result of a motorcycle accident in England.

A conference on Lawrence is no Star Trek convention. No one comes kitted out in Arab headdress and desert costume. This is a more suit-and-tie, skirts-and-pumps international crowd of people who work as government bureaucrats, diplomats, art teachers and scholars. A former curator of Lawrence’s tiny cottage in Dorset, England, was among those who came to share their fascination for one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic personalities.

The man who fought in the British army alongside the Arabs in their battle against the Turks and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel was 46 when he supposedly swerved his motorcycle to avoid two boys on bikes and tumbled head-first over his own bike.

A brilliant military strategist who brought the notion of guerrilla warfare to the desert, he later spurned his war honors, disillusioned at the way the British had treated the Arabs in the postwar days. The never-married Lawrence died leaving a tortured and compelling legacy.

For some, the fascination starts with the classic 1962 movie starring Peter O’Toole.

“My parents took me to see the movie when I was 11,” said 42-year-old Joe Berton, a junior high school art teacher from Oak Park, Ill., who casts in metal elaborate miniatures of Lawrence and his other soldier compatriots. “I loved the costumes and the camels and the glamour of the desert.”

Kathi McGraw, 43, who came to the convention from Arlington, Va., keeps a French poster of the movie behind her desk at the Department of Defense. “It’s one of my prized possessions,” she said. “It says ‘Lawrence d’Arabie.’ ”

But others don’t like the movie.

“I think it was overdramatized,” shrugged Jacob Rosen, a 47-year-old official at the Israeli Embassy in Jordan, who became intrigued by Lawrence while living in England 20 years ago. Today, Rosen owns about 380 Lawrence-related books and has become something of an expert on those written in Arabic languages.

“He felt there was no contradiction between the Arab nationalist movement and the Zionist movement,” Rosen said. “Now, myself being stationed in the newly opened embassy in Amman, I feel I am continuing his work.”

Rosen was one of the few people speaking at the conference--sponsored by the Huntington Library and Whittier College--who was not a professional scholar. USC Prof. Leo Braudy, author of the 1986 book “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History,” opened the meeting Friday morning.

But for the audience, Lawrence is an avocation. Their homes and their minds are steeped in the stuff of Lawrence.

Berton spent seven years finally convincing another collector to sell him a set of war medals earned by a military comrade of Lawrence. And he owns several books that once belonged to Lawrence.

“My nightmare would be all my books put out at a $1-a-book garage sale after I’m gone,” he said with a chuckle. “But it would probably make some of the guys in this room happy.”

Part of the appeal is the ever-changing interpretation of this multifaceted character: military strategist, archeological scholar, translator, speed boat designer. . . .

“And we are talking about one man, yes?” Rosen noted.

The friends of Lawrence enthusiasts occasionally think them a little weird; their spouses cope. Berton’s wife, Gloria Groom, curator of European painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, is generally understanding of her husband’s need to do obscure research for his miniatures because it parallels her own intense professional work. But even she has her limits.

“She got upset when I took her to the restored film and every 15 seconds I pointed out new [footage],” said Berton, laughing. “She didn’t understand what the excitement was.”

But fans demur that they are not odd obsessives. “I am normal,” Rosen said. “I have a wife, I have children, I have a mortgage, I have a cat. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I think what I do is very civilized.”