A New Chapter in Rare Book Collecting

Book dealing was once, as Graham Greene told me, a 'treasure hunt'. But the internet has made it all about pots of gold.

From a story in the Guardian...

A few years later I was sitting with Graham Greene over lunch at Chez Felix in the marina in Antibes having just bought some manuscripts from him, swapping stories about scouting and collecting rare books. He paused, and took an abstemious sip of the indifferent local white wine.

"You know, Rick," he said, "I really envy your life … If I hadn't been a novelist I would have been a rare book dealer. You're always on a treasure hunt."

And that, of course, is exactly right. The world of dealing and collecting, of museums and curators, of connoisseurship and scholarship, rests, like so much essential human activity, on an underlying and animating archetype. For schoolteachers, it is passing on the wisdom of the tribe to the young; for lawyers, insuring that justice and representation are widely available; for doctors, that all are entitled to health care. And for a serious dealer or collector? That the treasure hunt must go on: there are buried, unlocated, misunderstood, misrepresented objects of every kind which are of value both commercial and cultural, and are essential to our understanding of ourselves. It is our job to find, to understand and to preserve them.

That conversation with Greene took place in 1989, which doesn't seem all that long ago, but things have now changed so radically in the rare book world – dragged along limply in the wake of the IT revolution – that, today, neither integer of Greene's description pertains as it used to.