On the virtues of owning books…

A very good friend, and one who’s opinion, writing and general state of being I greatly respect, has recently posted a blog entry which calls into question my previous construct of her. She writes:

“I made a decision sometime in college to try hard not to be a person who accumulates books... ...There is no virtue in owning books. Repeat after me. There is no virtue in owning books. It is hard for me to remember sometimes, but there is really no virtue in owning books. Nope.”

Now I am, of course, kidding about having to reevaluate my opinion of her...she *is* brilliant and witty and generally fun to be around and/or read...though clearly misguided on this issue. I believe she may have lost the proverbial forest for the trees. So to I find myself pondering the nature of forest and her dark mantra, “There is no virtue in owning books.”

On one point, I think she is right: there is no (or little) value in an “accumulation of books.” There is, however, tremendous value in a collection of books. The collection does not need to be large, or valuable or contain “unique” items...it simply needs to be significant to the person who is building the collection.

I work with a woman who is building a suffrage collection. She has a fair amount of the major items one would expect to find but what makes the collection wonderful in her eyes (and in mine) are the items that are not “direct” suffrage material, but tangentially related in one way or another. For example, an item I found which she added without hesitation was a lovely, early copy of Maeterlinck’s, Life of the Bee. It is of the right period, but certainly not related to the suffrage movement, *except* that in the margin at the end of the chapter, “The Massacre Of The Males,” the first owner and a well known Maine judge wrote, “...When the suffrugettes get on top our life will be that of the honey bee - I have no doubt about it.” Suddenly, it is a brilliant addition to her collection.

I am working with another client who called one morning asking me what it would take to build a collection of the first editions of the Scribner’s Illustrated Classics series. This is, if you are unfamiliar with it, a great set of juvenilia. The series includes itles like Kidnapped, 20 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Scottish Chiefs and each books was illustrated by artists like N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish and Will James. They were all books that he had read and remembered fondly from his youth and he has had a great time building this small collection. He has had such fun with it that he is now looking at broadening the collection to included other artists/publishers from that era of illustrated juvenilia. It is a lovely and very fun collection...and great reads to boot.

I work with some clients who are building significant, valuable collections and acquire books with an eye toward long term returns on the investment. In these cases, the books bring both personal pleasure (they could clearly be investing in bonds/art/jewelry) and an eventual return. I work with others who are building collections that span “insignificant” to major items with the expressed desire to build something where, with a hat tip to Plato, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In these cases, it is planned that the collections end up institutionalized at some point in the future. For that matter, many of the volumes in the Huntington or the Morgan would not exist any longer, where it not for the obsessive collecting of just those two men?

My point is this, there is great virtue in owning books, both personal and, perhaps, societal. I suggest that the mantra of, “There is no virtue in owning books” is extremely misguided. I offer, as an alternative, the following:

A private library is the most significant thing most of us will ever create.