Book Collecting and Book Collections

For me it started with Jack London's Before Adam. It was a gift my soon-to-be-wife gave to me for Christmas. I had always loved books, always enjoyed reading Jack London (the beginnings of my writing career was due, in part, to reading and re-reading London's short story "To Build a Fire") and so she was thoughtful enough to get me a first edition at Powell's in Portland.

It was then I became obsessed with collecting first editions. I would buy most anything that was a first edition - Anne Tyler, Richard Bach, Michael Crichton, Garrison Keillor - but I was soon overwhelmed. There are just too many first editions to collect. It's impossible to collect them all and, being young and poor, I couldn't afford them even if I could. I had to focus.

That's what I've done. I always keep my eye out for Jack London books, as well as John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men is my all-time favorite book, with To Kill a Mockingbird, A Confederacy of Dunces and Catcher in the Rye all coming up close behind), T.C. Boyle (my favorite current novelist), and Annie Dillard (due to my wife's utter devotion to Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Of course, I'm not going to let a good book slip by if I can afford it. I've got some Hemingway firsts, Robert Service, Sherman Alexie, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, the list goes on and on.

Which brings me to a story I read in The New Yorker. There's a fabulous profile of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin. It "contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair." Repositories such as this makes me swoon. It has 48 Gutenberg Bibles, the corrected proofs of Ulysses, a Kerouac notebook from his On the Road days. In essence, for a bibliophile like me, it's Heaven.

The story can be found here:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/11/070611fa_fact_max

Luckily, near where I live, is the Karpeles Manuscript Library. It's nothing to shake a stick at, this one. In fact, the Karpeles Library is the world's largest private holding of important original manuscripts and documents. Amongst its treasures - The original draft of the Bill of Rights, the original manuscript of "The Wedding March," and Einstein's description of his "Theory of Relativity." It's got over a million documents. Me and my young daughter visited recently to look at their holdings of Disney pieces, including original drawings of "Snow White," architectural sketches of Disneyland, and Walt Disney's will.

The Karpeles website can be found here:
http://www.rain.org/~karpeles/

I could go on and on about book collecting but I'll stop here with a couple of more thoughts. Why is it so special to me, these first editions I display in my living room? I really couldn't say other than the fact that it's a piece, each book, a distilled crystallized piece of history that I can hold in my hands. I can turn the pages. I can smell it. It's tactile, this history, and I am, in some small way, a keeper of that history. It's an honor.