CLOSE-UP : No, He Won’t Loan You One

Step into Tom Andrews’ Altadena home and you can see why local rare-book sellers call him one of Southern California’s most passionate bibliophiles. Here, in a large oak bookcase in his entry hall, are nearly 500 novels, first editions by Amy Tan, Isabel Allende, Harriet Doerr, Ethan Canin, Julia Alvarez, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Kingsolver and Walter Mosley, among others. They’ re alphabetized and carefully encased in plastic covers. Not a binding is broken, not a page dogeared. These are his showcase books, a fraction of the 3,000 pristine hardbacks he’s accumulated during the past 30 years.

Other collections may be larger or more valuable; none were assembled with greater aficion. “In books there is a beauty in the text and the illustration and the binding and the choice of type and paper,” says Andrews, executive director of the Historical Society of Southern California and president of the Zamorano Club, L.A.’s elite book collectors’ group. “ A paperback is fine, but it means something special to hold a book that the printers, editors and writers held when it first came off the press, when they presented it to the world.”

Every day, he reads something from his collection, which focuses on contemporary fiction, baseball books, rare Southern California historical works and, during the past decade, fiction by women, particularly “the more complex world” of non-white women. “ They are also pertinent to life in Los Angeles because of its ethnic mix and Asian Pacific thrust. This caldron of emotions and contrasting cultures,” he says, “makes for excellent fiction.”

Though he’ s spent as much as $400--for “Malibu,” a 1958 history by W.W. Robinson and Lawrence Clark Powell--he takes special p ride in buying books by first-time writers, after carefully studying catalogues and book reviews. He paid about $20 for the first printing of Amy Tan’s first book, “The Joy Luck Club”; it’s now worth roughly $300.

Andrews won’t say how much he spends on books. If his wife, Evelyn, found out, he says, “I’d be shot on the spot.”