A Literary Treasure Island

Every spring at a tiny jewel of a library in the West Adams neighborhood, book people--not just readers, but the sort who collect octavos, who can date the vellum on which they are printed and identify the chemical contents of the ink used in the text--gather for an exercise in unbridled bibliomania.

Some come in tweed and white linen, others sport jeans and tattoos winding up the arm. They are college professors and high school graduates, antiquarian booksellers and avid readers, all drawn to the oak paneled library of a 1926 mansion built by philanthropist William Andrews Clark. The copper baron bequeathed his library to UCLA in 1934, with the caveat that no book from its collection ever be sold.

The visitors are charmed by the library, an inner-city treasure largely unknown to Angelenos but famous throughout the scholarly world for its collection of English literature and history of the 17th and 18th centuries. They are participating in what might be considered the most unusual book auction in the city--one in which the buyers can neither take home (nor, sometimes, even touch because of glass cases) their purchases. Instead, once they have sponsored a book for between $100 and $60,000, their names are engraved on a brass plaque that will sit beneath the book forever.

They paid $25 for admission to the event, sipped champagne and playfully judged books only by their covers. Some spend hundreds, others spend thousands, “buying” books whose titles tweaked their sense of humor or whose authors have touched a spot in the soul.

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Antiquarian book dealer Howard Rootenberg and his wife, Joan, “adopted” “The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugial Love, After Which Follow the Pleasures of Insanity Concerning Scortatory Love.” “My wife likes the first part of the title, but I like the fact that I have absolutely no idea what ‘scortatory’ means,” Rootenberg said. He looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and, as it turns out, “scortatory” means pertaining to lewdness or fornication. “Scortation: means fornication and scortator, obsolete meaning is to associate with prostitutes,” he said. “Hmm, I guess we may actually have to try to read this one.”

Book dealer Bennett Gilbert sponsored an edition of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” in Czech. “He was so horribly screwed by society and he was so innocent in a way, in his life you see a grace and sense of humor in the way he lived his life,” Gilbert said. As Wilde wrote, “There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely--or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” The Clark has a significant Wilde collection, and the author’s devotees attended in numbers.

Martin M. Cooper, chairman of the event, resisted everything but temptation when it came to a Hebrew version of Oscar Wilde’s “The Selfish Giant,” published in Palestine in 1945. “I love Oscar Wilde because he was not afraid to express ideas that were not politically correct. And he could say something in two words that takes everybody else 10 pages to say.”

Forty-five books were up for “adoption,” ranging in scope and genre from actress Gloria Stuart’s “Remembering Casablanca,” published in 1994, to two manuscripts with notes by that master of scortatory matters, the Marquis de Sade. The manuscripts were published shortly before his death in 1814.

Also up for “sale” were an 1860 cookbook for bachelors, a 1662 pamphlet on the use of the sundial and a 1703 treatise on that sticky moral question: “A Serious Inquiry Into That Weighty Case of Conscience, Whether a Man May Lawfully Marry His Deceased Wife’s Sister.” In total, the event raised $35,875 for the library.

Eclectic Mixture of Architectural Styles

The star of the day, however, was the library itself, originally part of the Clark family’s estate on Cimarron Street in West Adams and now home to four Shakespeare folios, important editions of Chaucer, Ben Jonson, Byron and Charles Dickens. The library is an eclectic meshing of architectural styles, combining Italian Baroque and 18th century French and English elements.

“I love the Clark. It’s a gem, an oasis,” said Caron Broidy, one of the event’s organizers, “We must find a way to show everyone else how wonderful it is.” Why the Clark is not better known as a cultural resource was a theme repeated throughout the day. Elegant does not mean elitist, and the reading rooms, concert series and lectures on 17th and 18th century arts and culture are open to everyone. The library is open Monday through Friday until 4:45 p.m., and books and materials from the collections can be used inside the building but do not circulate.

“Why doesn’t anybody know about it in L.A.?” Peter Reill, director of the Clark and of UCLA’s Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies asks the assembled group. “It is open to any one of you, no letters of recommendation are needed, everyone is welcome to come in.”

During the afternoon program, actor-director Frank Dwyer, actress Marjorie Lord and Robert Osborne, a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, joined together for a reading of 18th century literary highs and lows. They performed a reading that wove together the seduction of Samuel Richardson’s hapless “Clarissa,” and French tourist phrases for 18th century English boys: “I never smelled better in my life,” and “That pyramid of sweetmeats is beautifully raised.”

After hearing just a few paragraphs of “The Persian Heroine,” a play that has endured in persistent obscurity since its one (and only?) performance in 1819, actor Michael Lerner was convinced that indeed it was the worst play ever and “bought” it.

“It’s so terrible, I had to sponsor it,” he said, laughing.

If some were perplexed about why more people do not visit the Clark, none confessed to worrying about the fate of books in general.

“The book was probably the greatest technological achievement of its time and it is still a wonder,” Reill said. “A CD has a 15-year shelf life. A book? Six or seven hundred. At least.”