Keeper of the trove

“I want to show you something,” says Victoria Steele, who heads UCLA’s Department of Special Collections. This is her favorite phrase. The soul of discretion, her second favorite phrase is, less endearingly, “Off the record.”

Steele beckons over her shoulder, already receding down a long corridor. Scarves flutter. She wears pale, tasteful colors. She is very thin, pale, blond and neat. Outwardly, at least, she is not a woman given to extremes or unruly passions. She is one of those people who orients her guest; at a social event she will introduce people and discretely inform both parties where the other works.

In the catacombs of UCLA’s Special Collections she will lead a bedazzled visitor gently past Byron’s sword, Jack Benny’s pipe, Virginia Woolf’s personal proof of “Mrs. Dalloway” (with changes marked in her signature purple ink), the miscellaneous ephemera of Isaac Newton, 13th century Italian manuscripts, books that disappear when you flip them, board games from the 1500s and imaginary maps. It is not unusual for her guests to weep at certain objects. Some people call her Beatrice, after Dante’s ethereal guide.

Steele, whose taste has molded Special Collections for the last six years, is fascinated by the costumes of Italian prostitutes, old passports, children’s books and board games. As manager of the elite arm of the UCLA Library, guardian of the jewel in the crown of the fifth-largest institutional collection in the U.S. (in terms of number of volumes and budget), she has a certain amount of latitude to indulge these tastes.

Housed in the Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections is a world unto itself. Leave the white glare of security checks and exhausted students trudging under heavy backpacks. Go down the stairs and enter the world of Oriental rugs, Barcelona chairs, Japanese silk prints and hushed voices. On the right as you enter is the Bradford A. Booth Memorial Room (Booth was chairman of the English department in the ‘60s). The Booth room contains the magnificently bound Sadler collection of British literature. A small Picasso, “Homage a Gertrude,” comes, like everything in Special Collections, with a story: Stein had the painting nailed above her bed; four small holes in the corners remain.

Special Collections, established in 1948, holds 330,000 rare books, over 30 million manuscripts and millions of photos. It is best known for its Southern California collections, including the papers of Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Anais Nin, Carolyn See, Carey McWilliams, Richard Neutra, Paul Monette, Norman Cousins, Quincy Jones and Susan Sontag, to name a few. It is also well-known for its international collections of Japanese American relocation papers, Modernist architecture, rare children’s books, early Italian printing and, adds Steele, a “great Antarctica collection.” The annual budget of $2 million places it behind the big spenders including the University of Texas at Austin (“The people I’m chasing,” says Steele) but above some other top collections in the country, such as those at the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Columbia.

Steele has big plans: She wants more Southern California material, more literary collections, more artists’ books (such as the fantastic creations of San Francisco bookmaker Julie Chen), more landscape architecture (such as the recently acquired papers of Ruth Shellhorn) and more 19th century British literature. The collection organizes ongoing exhibitions from the archives: this month, manuscripts and ephemera from the Carey McWilliams collection.

Steele has her eye on Joni Mitchell’s papers. Mitchell is also being courted by McGill University in her native Canada, which gave her an honorary degree. But Steele says Mitchell’s papers would be right at home among the world-famous history of music collections. Steele also admits to a hankering for Steve Martin’s papers, though his recent donation of $1 million to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens might make that transaction a little tougher to negotiate.

Indeed, her most immediate competitor in town is the Huntington’s collection, with more than 4.5 million manuscripts, 375,000 rare books (including over 5,000 incunabula, books printed before the 1500s) and around 500,000 photos, though in these rarefied heights, the word “competitor” is rarely used. The Huntington Library, run by David S. Zeidberg, has a staff of 56 and a budget of around $3 million. They are well known for their 10,000-square-foot preservation lab, and their emphasis on conservation. (The Getty Special Collections are not technically a competitor, explains Steele, because their collections are more “art-focused.”)

While Christopher Isherwood’s papers, to Steele’s chagrin, went to the Huntington in 1998, Sontag’s papers, including her library of 25,000 volumes, went to UCLA in 2002. “The Huntington offers a lot of atmosphere and prestige,” says Steele, but UCLA offers “a rich academic context. You can,” she says with obvious pride, “study everything here.”

It’s a small world. Zeidberg used to sit in Steele’s office at UCLA. His predecessor, Susan Allen, went on to the Getty. “We all tend to work together,” Zeidberg says of the major players from Southern California. “Our idea is, ‘Let’s make the city strong.’ ” Steele agrees: “If I know a colleague was interested in a particular object, I’d call before bidding. It’s stupid to have institutions bidding against each other, driving up prices. If it were just a bidding war most of these things would go to auction houses.”

Of course competitions among institutional collectors do exist. “Texas always has the big bucks,” says Steele, who was considering Norman Mailer’s papers, which ended up being bought by the University of Texas at Austin for $2.5 million. Sometimes, as in the case of the $1.1-million Sontag papers, it’s just a question of finding a path to get to someone. “I got to her before anyone else,” says Steele, revealing just a hint of cutthroat competition beneath the smooth exterior.

It used to be as simple as writing a letter, but now, she says, it’s important to have a personal relationship. “People now understand that everyone is interested in everything. In the past, people would not know how to fence their objects. Now they have EBay and the ability to figure out, with very little effort, exactly how much their things are worth.”

And it’s not just getting the books, as Steele points out repeatedly, which is the “sexy” part of her job. It’s cataloging and storing the materials as well. On this particular morning, for example, 60 boxes filled with artifacts, clothing and manuscripts having to do with Korean independence showed up on the loading dock. Steele will now try to find a student to process the collection.

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Wide-ranging skills

ON a fresh spring day, industrious and devoted fellows and graduate students are hard at work in the archives cataloging L.A. Times photo negatives. A scholar doing her dissertation on the powerful and prestigious Roman family the Orsinis processes materials from the collection of Italian manuscripts, 538 boxes dated 1300 to 1929, purchased in the 1960s. The collection sat for 40 years before Steele was able to get a grant to hire someone to catalog it.

Most of the materials are stored in a building kept at 60 to 65 degrees on the western edge of the campus. Each of the two floors is the size of a football field. Documents are stored in archival, acid-free boxes, creating microclimates for special objects. Everything needs to be cataloged, for which you need people who speak Arabic, Persian, Turkish -- all kinds of languages. Steele explains to a visitor the difference between vellum and sheepskin -- she points out the hair follicles on a 13th century manuscript on Justinian law printed on vellum.

Rarely has a human being been so prepared for a job. Steele grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from El Camino High School and then UCLA. She went on to earn two master’s degrees, in librarianship from UCLA and communication from USC. Her first job in rare books was at UCLA’s Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana, which specializes in Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance. “The world of rare books opened to me.”

In 1979, she decided to go to library school at UCLA, one of the best in the country, which specializes in rare books. She was hired to run the Belt and was then recruited to run the Special Collections for UCLA’s Biomedical Library. (It was in the Arts Library that her husband, poet Tim Steele, then a lecturer in the English department, made up a reference and asked Steele to look it up for him. He asked her out while in the stacks.) In 1988, Steele was recruited to head USC’s Thomas Cooper Library’s Special Collections, which she did for 11 years. Later, she earned a PhD in art history from USC, with a dissertation on an early-20th century fashion designer, Lady Duff Gordon.

Library collectors such as Steele rely on catalogs, dealers, auctions, calls from the public (there’s a joke among rare book collectors that goes: “I have an old Bible ...” “It’s usually from 1911,” says Steele).

Then there’s a strange sixth sense, a voice that tells Steele, primarily, what not to pursue. When she finds something she wants, Special Collections will decide what it is willing to pay and sometimes hire someone to bid on it. Anonymity can be extremely important: If Steele had shown up, for example, last summer in Geneva, at an auction of Aldines, everyone would have known that UCLA was in town.

“It also helps,” she admits, “to have someone less emotional about the objects do the bidding. They actually stop where you tell them to. It can be very disappointing,” she says, remembering a recent auction in Los Angeles for a Salvador Dali drawing of eyes. “I actually got to my number and stopped,” she says, her voice full of regret.

Steele recently found a donor for the $1-million resplendent collection of Isadora Duncan books, manuscripts and art, a collection close to her own interests in costume and dance. Shortly after the purchase, the donor died, which made Steele feel not happy, of course, but relieved to have closed the deal. Human beings, after all, have a limited shelf life. But their books, as any wild-eyed collector will tell you, live on.