An Obsession to Get It in Writing

It all comes down to touch. David and Marsha Karpeles sift through their collection of yellowing documents and think about the people who first handled them and about the faded but still vibrant words they wrote.

There’s Pope Lucius III as he gave instructions to his knights on the eve of the Third Crusade. Thomas Jefferson as he gave voice to a young nation’s dreams for itself. Abraham Lincoln as he ended legal slavery in the midst of the Civil War.

These are touchstones of history, the pedigrees of nations and movements. And the Karpeleses own them. The couple say they have amassed more than a million pages, which they store in a climate-controlled vault in nearby Santa Barbara and showcase in a network of small museums they have established in cities around the country.

The collection, believed to be the nation’s largest private holding of historical documents, can be dazzling for anyone interested in the arcana that has made the modern world what it is. That includes the Karpeleses.

Marsha’s eyes dance as she talks about the tangible links between abstract ideas and real events. “It’s a large collection of really tantalizing scraps of history and some wonderful archives,” she says, curled up in a period chair near an unlit fireplace in the couple’s spacious Montecito home.

David, 65, is the driving force behind the collection. He does most of the couple’s research and scours auction and dealer catalogs for items that strike his fancy, then uses agents to do the bidding and make the purchases. A former math professor, he made his fortune first through real estate speculation in Santa Barbara, then investing. For a time in the 1980s, when the price of rare documents was relatively low, he dominated document auctions around the country under a buying philosophy of paying just a little more than the other bidder, no matter the item. He’s since slowed his pace a bit, but his fervor for the material remains.

Today, the collection’s sheer size sets it apart. Most private document collections are small and focused, usually limited to specific areas of interest or expertise, says John Rhodehamel, Norris Foundation Curator of Early American Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. The Karpeleses, though, cast a wide net, hauling in riches and more rudimentary material of interest mostly to scholars.

“Sometimes private collectors or dealers will buy a big collection and go through and pick out the high points ... and sell the rest,” Rhodehamel says. “But Karpeles is buying whole research collections.”

Nearly all the of the pieces are bought at auctions, such as at Christie’s or Sotheby’s in New York, or through rare manuscript dealers. The couple can spend tens of thousand of dollars in a few telephone calls but won’t detail how much they’ve spent over the years or how much specific documents cost. “When you mention price, that’s all anyone thinks about, and that’s not why we’re here,” Marsha, 61, says.

The Karpeleses see themselves as caretakers of these artifacts and believe they have a responsibility to share. They allow scholars access to the papers, and their museums host traveling displays of the documents, an ever-changing parade of history that traverses science and literature, politics and crime.

The museums are tucked away in cities that David calls “culturally starved”--Santa Barbara; Tacoma, Wash.; Buffalo and Newburgh, N.Y.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Duluth, Minn.; Charleston, S.C.; and Wichita, Kan.--places that lack the resources of New York or Los Angeles. He likes to tell of the time he took his Bill of Rights on a national tour in 1989, drawing thousands of people in small cities. At the time, the Karpeleses had a museum overlooking Manhattan’s Central Park. When the Bill of Rights was there, few people showed up. “Nobody would come in,” David says. “It dawned on me that in New York you can see anything you want, whenever you want, so why go to this museum?”

David closed the Manhattan site and began opening museums in places he felt the material would be appreciated and where he found interesting buildings, such as old churches. The Santa Barbara museum, the chain’s flagship because it’s so close to the couple’s home, is in a turn-of-the-century house and one-time mortuary in the center of the city.

The couple have also created “mini-museums”--about 200 display cases in public schools around the country, most of them near to the couple’s seven main museums. Each of those cases contains a high-quality reproduction of one of the documents from the Karpeles’ collection.

One of the impediments to amassing such a sizable collection--beyond the purchase prices--is what to do with the material. Storage alone can be expensive, and cataloging and managing the collection takes him about 20 hours a week, David says. He keeps track of documents on 3-by-5 cards, like an old card catalog, and decides what will be exhibited where, based mainly on whatever historical event strikes his fancy as he browses through a book of history timelines.

All of the exhibitions change every 90 days and follow an ironclad rule: Never more than 25 items at once. David says people don’t remember details from larger exhibitions.

“If I go to a museum where there are 100 things, I can’t look at every one of them,” he says. “My idea is that if people really want to learn, they can only absorb so much.”

Most of the documents on display are originals, although David occasionally shows reproductions of some of his exceedingly rare or delicate pieces that are susceptible to light and pollution damage. For the same reason, none of the documents is hanging on the walls of the couple’s home, a quiet estate rimmed by tall pines and other trees that give the grounds a Northern California feel.

“We just don’t think it’s good for the documents to be hanging in the light,” Marsha says, her voice soft and gentle and tinted by the accents of her native Minnesota. “It is a trust we have, and we are charged with preserving these.”

To finance all this work, the couple have bypassed the usual nonprofit foundation route. They have about 40 employees scattered among the museums and support the whole operation themselves. Admission is free, and none of the museums has a gift shop. “We just don’t want to have anybody feel they have to bring their wallet when they come,” he says.

David, a native of Santa Barbara, grew up near Duluth, where his parents moved in the early days of World War II because they thought the frozen upper Midwest would be safer than the Pacific coast. He talks of his past with a dry directness, a mathematician’s precision; his stories move quickly but are packed with detail, and there’s a touch of the moralist to him. During the course of an afternoon’s conversation, he emphasized his personal conviction that today’s youths lack the curiosity of his generation, which he remembers as being consumed by the desire to learn new things.

“Kids don’t have any sense of purpose,” David says. “I like the feeling of those days when I was young and everybody was into everything.”

David caught the collecting bug as a child, using stamps to learn world geography and coins to explore history. As an adult, his collecting passion expanded to include art, and during a visit with his wife and young children to Pasadena’s Huntington Library in the mid-’70s, his appetite for documents was whetted.

The family had gone to see Thomas Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” when David chanced on a display of some of the library’s vast document collection. One paper was a pass, signed by Abraham Lincoln, giving his bodyguard the night off while he spent the evening at Ford’s Theater.

The revelation surged through him as a jolt of adrenaline: Government agencies such as the National Archives don’t have a lock on key documents of the past. “I looked at catalogs from Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and that’s what started it,” David says.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew the other bidders did, so if they were willing to bid on something, it must be worthwhile,” he says. “Word got out that some crazy guy was out there buying everything up.”

He pursued a nonacademic game plan by buying any document he stumbled across connected to a historical event that a fifth-grade student would recognize. But as he bought document after document, he quickly began breaking his own rule and acquired such items as the Olive Branch Petition, a last-ditch overture by American colonists to settle their grievances with the King of England, and a Beethoven transcription of Handel’s “Messiah.”

“Actually,” he says, laughing, “we don’t follow the ‘fifth-grade rule’ that closely.”

David’s first major purchase, in 1978, was something a fifth-grader would recognize: A copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. He paid $45,000 for the document, which he acquired from a California dealer. It’s one of the few prices the couple is willing to divulge.

He has also bought a draft of the United States’ Bill of Rights from another dealer and won at auction the agreement between U.S. and French negotiators on the sale of Louisiana, which in those days stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Rockies and north to near what is now Canada.

But the collection also includes manuscripts from poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Roget’s original personal thesaurus, letters from Che Guevara and the handwritten draft of the constitution of the Confederate States of America. There are speeches by Adolf Hitler, letters from the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and a page from the Gutenberg press, the first printing machine to use movable type.

And on it goes, a rich man’s hobby run wild.

“Dave is as passionate and as intense as anyone I have ever seen,” says author Nicholas Basbanes, whose book, “A Gentle Madness” (Holt; 1995), on avid collectors included a section on Karpeles. “This guy’s got a killer instinct. You can see it in his eyes--he looks like Michael Jordan or Larry Bird. If he wants something, he’ll go after it.” And he’ll usually get it.

He has made mistakes, to be sure. He once bought a copy of handwritten essays, only to find out later that while the documents were written by hand, the writing wasn’t by whom he thought. The truth came out only when a visiting scholar read through the manuscript and found the writer’s signature in the text, something Karpeles had overlooked.

He has since become more careful in selecting documents, picking up tips from other collectors, dealers and scouring of books and articles on manuscripts and collecting. “I’ve learned it little by little,” he says.

Since the early ‘90s, his pace of acquisition has slowed somewhat, due in part to the sky-high prices some documents have pulled in. Two years ago, television producer Norman Lear and a partner paid $8 million for an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. And David passed up the chance to spend $700,000 for the proclamation announcing the Louisiana Purchase.

But he hasn’t stopped buying. Recently he bought an 18th century summary of reports from missionaries--including Father Junipero Serra--about their difficulties in finding Monterey Bay. Days earlier, he’d acquired a set of 1879 designs by Boston scientist George Carey that are believed to be the earliest descriptions of one of foundations of television.

The question that has been bubbling lightly in the rarefied world of document collectors remains, what is the future of the collection, since both Karpeleses are in their 60s? “One thing I’ve found is that [collectors’] gentle madness may be innate, but it’s not hereditary,” says Basbanes, who just published a new work on book culture, called “Patience and Fortitude” (HarperCollins). “So what happens to this stuff? You see in some cases where the guy is dead one week and the stuff is consigned to Christie’s the following week.”

The Karpeleses insist that their collection will survive them. David won’t offer many details, but says the couple have established a trust fund that upon their death will receive half of their estate; the remainder will be divided among their four adult children.

In the meantime, he says, the couple will just keep buying documents and paying the bills. “It’s very expensive,” Karpeles says, sighing, then smiles. “If we didn’t do this, we’d be rich.”